ALTERNATIVE PUBLISHING: ITS ROLE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LITERATURE AS SEEN IN THE PUBLISHING HISTORIES OF T. S. ELIOT'S 'THE WASTE LAND,' VIRGINIA WOOLF'S 'JACOB'S ROOM,' JAMES JOYCE'S 'ULYSSES,' ANAIS NIN'S 'WINTER OF ARTIFICE' AND 'UNDER A GLASS BELL,' AND VLADIMIR NABOKOV'S 'LOLITA'.

摘要

Alternative publishing has been especially vital to the development of literature in the twentieth century. While the dominant publishing houses have emphasized the salability of books, many writers of serious literature (because their work has been more experimental and less accessible to the ordinary reader) have had to develop alternative ways to reach an audience.;T. S. Eliot developed his experimental poem The Waste Land through little magazines and small presses to which he was recommended by his friends. Virginia Woolf was a commercially-published novelist in the traditional mode until her acquisition of her own press enabled her to develop her unique experimental style, one which had a great influence on modern literature, beginning with Jacob's Room. The freedom that James Joyce's alternative publisher Sylvia Beach allowed him to rewrite his novel Ulysses in the proof stage led to a great deal of experimentation with the text which would not have been possible had a commercial publisher first brought out the book. Anais Nin's surrealistic fiction had been judged unsuited to the needs of scores of commercial publishers during the heyday of proleterian writing until she finally printed the works herself in two beautifully illustrated volumes, Winter of Artifice and Under A Glass Bell. Partly because of its unusual emphasis on literary puzzles and games, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita went begging for publication to a Paris "dirty book" house; the resulting notoriety helped popularize Nabokovian fiction among the critics and scholars, influencing the direction of contemporary literature.