Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures and Tables
- Introduction: ‘Good Taste in Reading’
- 1 H. G. Wells, Science and Sex in the Modern Library, 1917–31
- 2 ‘The Modern Library is Something Magnificent’: Sherwood Anderson and the Canon of American Literature
- 3 Blurring the Boundaries: Detective Fiction and Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the Modern Library
- 4 Woolf in the Modern Library: Bridging the Gap between Professional and Common Readers
- 5 Canonical in the 1930s: Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop in the Modern Library Series
- 6 ‘If it's Like Any Introduction You Ever Read, I'll Eat the Jacket’: Faulkner's Sanctuary, the Modern Library and the Literary Canon
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
5 - Canonical in the 1930s: Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop in the Modern Library Series
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures and Tables
- Introduction: ‘Good Taste in Reading’
- 1 H. G. Wells, Science and Sex in the Modern Library, 1917–31
- 2 ‘The Modern Library is Something Magnificent’: Sherwood Anderson and the Canon of American Literature
- 3 Blurring the Boundaries: Detective Fiction and Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the Modern Library
- 4 Woolf in the Modern Library: Bridging the Gap between Professional and Common Readers
- 5 Canonical in the 1930s: Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop in the Modern Library Series
- 6 ‘If it's Like Any Introduction You Ever Read, I'll Eat the Jacket’: Faulkner's Sanctuary, the Modern Library and the Literary Canon
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
In 1931, three years after the publication of Mrs Dalloway, the Modern Library reprinted Willa Cather's bestseller, Death Comes for the Archbishop. For Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, this was a victory after years of unsuccessful attempts to include Cather titles in their series. However, Archbishop stayed only five years in the Modern Library. At Cather's insistence, Alfred Knopf, the original publisher, refused to renew the contract, and Cerf and Klopfer had to drop the novel from their list. While Sharon O'Brien has argued that ‘Willa Cather possessed canonical status during the 1920s only to lose it in the 1930s’, this chapter contends that some of Cather's works became canonical in the early 1930s – when these texts were included in cheap series of reprints such as the Modern Library and Houghton Mifflin's Riverside Library, and marketed to a large audience of students and their professors. As John Guillory puts it, ‘canonicity is a function of the reproduction of a work over time, and the market for such reproduction is the school’. The canonicity of Archbishop and other Cather titles was indeed the product of the education system (the principal canon maker for Guillory) but also of reprint series, which made these titles easily available to the school market. At the time when the study of American literature was being institutionalized in universities, many instructors selected the inexpensive editions of Cather titles for classroom use.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary CanonThe Modern Library Series, 1917–1955, pp. 103 - 122Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014