Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880–1950

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Dean Baldwin

The History of the Book

The short story was a commercial phenomenon which took off in the late nineteenth century and lasted through to the rise of television and film. Baldwin uses a wide variety of sources to show how economic factors helped to dictate how and what a wide variety of authors wrote. These conditions actually helped to disseminate the fiction of nearly all the major and minor writers of the period, from Hardy and Conrad to H E Bates and V S Pritchett. He argues that contrary to Modernists’ claims that financial demands of middlebrow magazines prevented the genre developing, they actually helped to improve authors’ writing, particularly the work of Henry James and D H Lawrence.

Readership

History of the Book, Literature and Cultural Studies

Contents

1 Economics and the Flowering of the British Short Story
2 The Business of Authorship
3 How Much Money Does an Author Need?
4 Publishing Conditions in England, 1880–1950
5 Authors’ Careers: The Development of the Short Story in Britain, 1880–1914
6 Vitality and Variety of the British Short Story, 1915–1950
7 Short Stories and the Magazines
8 Magazines’ Restraints on Art in the Service of Commerce
9 Short Stories in Book Form
10 Sales of Short Story Collections and Novels
11 First Editions, Limited Editions and Manuscripts
12 The British Short Story and Its Reviewers
13 Art and Commerce in the British Short Story

Related titles

• British Literature of World War I
• British Socialist Fiction, 1884–1914
• The Business of the Novel: Economics, Aesthetics and the Case of Middlemarch
• Comedy and the Feminine Middlebrow Novel: Elizabeth von Arnim and Elizabeth Taylor
• Readings on Audience and Textual Materiality
• The Collected Short Stories of George Moore: Gender and Genre
• William Clark Russell and the Victorian Nautical Novel: Gender, Genre and the Marketplace
• Writing the Self: Henry James and America

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