Classics in English, English Classics: National Identity and World Literature in J. M. Dent’s Everyman’s Library, 1906–1956

Thesis

This thesis offers a reassessment of the canonising history and democratic legacy of the London-based publisher J. M. Dent and Sons, focusing on their influential mass-market series, Everyman’s Library (1906–1956). Drawing on largely unpublished archival materials, this study uses the Everyman series as a way of addressing the establishment of national and world literary canons and the evolving notion of the ‘classic’ throughout the twentieth century. There are six chapters that span the fields of classical reception, book and intellectual history, world literature and modernist/middlebrow studies. Everyman emerges from this investigation as a more dynamic institution than previously assumed, one which successfully navigated tensions that are said to define the Anglophone ‘canon wars’: elite versus mass cultures, national versus world literatures, antiquity versus modernity.

Chapter 1 explores the cultural milieu of J. M. Dent (1849–1926) and his role as a mediator of ‘high’ art in fin-de-siècle England. Chapter 2 recounts the foundation of Everyman’s Library, surveying title selection and book production at the Temple Press, Dent’s book factory in Letchworth, and uncovering the hybridisation of aesthetics and politics practised by local workers (c.1906–1910). Chapters 3 and 4 retrace the publisher’s attempts to bring the ‘classic’ in dialogue with colonial modernity, examining the conspicuous presence of translations in the Everyman canon and the circulation of Dent’s editions worldwide (c.1911–1938). Chapter 5 further articulates the negotiation between ‘classic’ and modern literature by considering the factors which determined the selection of more contemporaneous authors in the series from 1935 and Everyman’s interactions with living writers represented in Dent’s general catalogue. Chapter 6 returns to canon formation via ‘great books’ by focusing on the transatlantic collaboration between Dent’s firm and American educator Mortimer Adler, as they joined forces in the 1940s to bridge the gap between ‘highbrow’ and ‘middlebrow’ reading.

Authors: Domeneghini, C

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-eywwq71nb
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: middlebrow culture; book history; publishing; canon formation; Everyman's Library; literary value; the canon; circulation; the classic; book series; Joseph Malaby Dent; modernism; Hugh Railton Dent; reception; world literature; Ernest Percival Rhys
• Subjects: Classical reception; Intellectual history; Literature--History and criticism; Cultural studies; English; Book history