Remaking Nineteenth-Century Novels for the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Remaking Nineteenth-Century British Novels for the Twentieth Century is an account of how the twentieth-century common reader was gestured at, marketed to, and reinvented by the reprinted nineteenth-century novel. It reveals how nineteenth-century literary legacy was established and kept alive through illustrated editions, the publishers who commissioned them, the engravers who illustrated them, and the consumers who read them. This is a readerly, consumer-driven history of the nineteenth-century novel, with roots in book history, reception history, and canon theory. In particular, it focuses on three case studies: a 1929 edition of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native with engravings by Clare Leighton, a 1943 edition of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre with woodblocks by Fritz Eichenberg, and a complete set of Jane Austen’s novels illustrated from 1957 to 1975 by Joan Hassall.