In her diary, the modernist writer Virginia Woolf once described herself as ‘the only woman in England free to write what I like’.1 This freedom was largely owing to the fact that Woolf was also her own publisher: Having co-founded the Hogarth Press with her husband Leonard in 1917, Woolf was able to put her own works into print without needing to court the tastes of commercial publishers. Yet, the Hogarth Press did not always remain an independent "small press". Over the course of the 1920s and 30s, Hogarth grew into a sizeable commercial operation with a permanent staff of employees and global business connections. In 1946, the press was sold to the publishing house Chatto & Windus and today "Hogarth" is an imprint owned by Penguin Random House, one of the largest publishing conglomerates in the world.
This course examines these two faces of the Hogarth Press, as a modernist "small press" and a commercial publishing business, to explore what role these different types of publishing venture have played and continue to play in the networks of literary production. By analysing the processes of selection, production and marketing at the Hogarth Press throughout its history, we will explore questions such as: What role did "small presses" play in providing an alternative to the commercial publishing sphere of the early twentieth century? How is the cultural meaning of a book shaped by its material format and manner of distribution? What are the mechanisms by which authors like Virginia Woolf become themselves transformed into a cultural commodity?
Using the Hogarth Press as a case study, this course provides students with an introduction to the stratified publishing landscape of twentieth and twenty-first-century Britain. In addition, students will learn how to use digital archives such as the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP) to find and analyse original archival sources relating to the Hogarth Press.
For students who wish to acquaint themselves with the history and publishing practices of the press ahead of the course, Claire Battershill’s chapter in Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry (2019) is recommended as a concise introductory account.
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[1] Entry for 22 September 1925, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1980), 3:43. |
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