Copyright by Aaron Shanohn Zacks 2012 The Dissertation Committee for Aaron Shanohn Zacks Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Publishing Short Stories: British Modernist Fiction and the Literary Marketplace Committee: Michael Winship, Supervisor Mia Carter Alan Friedman Wayne Lesser Ira Nadel Publishing Short Stories: British Modernist Fiction and the Literary Marketplace by Aaron Shanohn Zacks, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2012 Acknowledgements I would not have completed this project without the professional and personal support of many people. Michael Winship proved a challenging and supportive Director who knew when to push, when to lay off, and, in my weaker moments, when all I needed was a little encouragement. A compliment from Michael means a great deal, and I will always remember mine. I have truly enjoyed sharing this experience with him and hope we will stay in touch. I am thankful to Alan Friedman and Mia Carter, who offered valuable comments on drafts of the dissertation as well as work I produced throughout my time in graduate school. I owe special thanks to Wayne Lesser, who supported me in a variety of ways in his role as Graduate Adviser and stepped in as a member of my committee to ensure that I could defend in Summer 2012. My debt to Ira Nadel goes back farther than to the rest of my committee, as he advised me when I was applying to graduate schools in 2002. He also engaged me as a research assistant during his work on Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller (UT Press, 2010). This was an incredibly valuable experience for me early in my graduate career that encouraged me to pursue my interests in literary biography, book history, and working with primary materials. I would also like to thank my committee as a whole for the questions and guidance I received at my defense, which helped me improve this dissertation immensely over the last month. Also at The University of Texas at Austin I would like to acknowledge James Loehlin, Brian Bremen, Trish Roberts-Miller, Coleman Hutchison, Martin Kevorkian, iv Allen MacDuffie, and Matt Cohen for the examples they have set, for me and the rest of our community, for how to be a serious scholar and an interesting person at the same time. Many thanks as well to Patricia Schaub in the Graduate English office. John Stape has been a great friend and research partner over the last several years as we have worked together on the Cambridge Edition of Joseph Conrad’s Victory (1915). John’s unending belief in my abilities encouraged me through difficult parts of this process. I look forward to many more brunches al fresco . I would also like to acknowledge the teachers and professors who encouraged my interest in literature during high school and undergraduate studies: Dougal Fraser, Robin Baker, and Daryl Wakeham at St. George’s School and Chandan Reddy and Hazard Adams at The University of Washington. There are far too many friends—in Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, New York City, and Austin—for me to acknowledge here, but I would be remiss if I did not mention (in no particular order) Jeremy Dean, David Roberts, Molly Hardy, Justin Tremel, Noah Mass, Teya Mali, Doug Freeman, Nick Chandler, Jodi Relyea, Matt R King, Stephanie Stickney, Jeff Abergel, Tyler Mabry, and Stan and BJ Friedman. Over the last five years, Alanna Bitzel’s love has come with much needed expertise in writing. (You’re editing this right now, aren’t you!) We have a long way to go, you and me, so let’s get moving. Family? Yes, I have one. An awesome one. In Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, Massachusetts, and beyond—thank you for all your support and encouragement. My parents, Ted and Linda Zacks, should be receiving this doctorate along with me for all the support they have provided me over the years. I will never be able to thank you enough, but I hope this is a decent start. v Publishing Short Stories: British Modernist Fiction and the Literary Marketplace Aaron Shanohn Zacks, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2012 Supervisor: Michael Winship The short story was the most profitable literary form for most fiction-writers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries because it was quick to write, relative to novels, marketable to a wide variety of periodicals, and able to be re-sold, in groups, for book collections. While the majority of writers composed short fiction within conventional modes and genres and published collections rarely exhibiting more than a superficial coherence of setting or character, modernist authors found in the form’s brevity helpful restrictions on their stylistic and narrative experiments, and, in the short story collection, an opportunity to create book-length works exhibiting new, modern kinds of coherence. This dissertation examines four modernists' experiences writing short stories and publishing them in periodicals and books: Henry James in The Yellow Bo ok and Terminations (Heinemann, 1895); Joseph Conrad in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories (Blackwood, 1902); James Joyce in The Irish Homestead and Dubliners (Grant Richards, 1914); and Virginia Woolf in Monday or Tuesday (Hogarth, 1921). For these writers, the production of short fiction within the literary marketplace had definite and important consequences on their texts as well as the formation of their mature authorial identities. (With the exception of James, I focus on the early, most impressionable periods of the writers’ careers.) In bucking the commercial trend of miscellaneous collections, the unified book of stories came to represent, for such artists, something of a bibliographic rebellion, which, because of its inherent formal fragmentation, proved a compelling and fruitful site for their exploration of modernist themes and styles. The conclusion explores some of the consequences of these experiences on the writers’ subsequent, longer texts—Lord Jim, Ulysses , and Jacob's Room —arguing that such so-called “novels” can be understood better if studied within the literary and professional contexts created by their authors’ engagements with the short story. The same is true of the “short story cycle,” “sequence,” and “composite,” as strongly-coherent books of stories have been termed variously by scholars. This dissertation, particularly its introduction, sets out to provide historical, material background for scholarship on this too-long neglected literary genre. vi Table of Contents Abbreviations .....…………………………………………………………………... viii Introduction The Short Story Collection in Late-Nineteenth-Century Britain …….. 1 Chapter 1 Henry James's “second chance” in Terminations …………………… 26 Chapter 2 Joseph Conrad, William Blackwood, and the Unrealized Marlow Trilogy ……………………………………………………... 56 Chapter 3 The Case of Dubliners : Dublin Publishing and the Short Story Collection …………………………………………. 100 Chapter 4 Virginia Woolf's Monday or Tuesday : Discarding the “ill-fitting vestments” of “Modern Novels” ……..... 134 Conclusion Exploring the Book: The Role of the Short Story Collection in the Development of British Literary Modernism ………………. 163 Appendix A Catalogue of Short Story Collections Published in Britain, 1870-1899 …………………………………… 176 References ……………………………………………………………............... 389 Vita ……………………………………………………………………... 414 vii Abbreviations CFS The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf CH Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage CL Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad , 9 vols. CT The Complete Tales of Henry James D Dubliners DV The Diary of Virginia Woolf , 4 vols. HJL Henry James Letters , 4 vols. JL The Letters of James Joyce , 3 vols. JR Jacob's Room L The Letters of Virginia Woolf , 6 vols. LJ Lord Jim, A Tale LL Henry James: A Life in Letters ND Night and Day U Ulysses Y Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Tales viii Introduction: The Short Story Collection in Late-Nineteenth-Century Britain In the 2010s, First World countries are experiencing a shift in entertainment delivery, from scheduled, network, and cable television programming to on-demand content streamed over the Internet. The reasons for this shift are many and interrelated with technological, economic, and cultural factors: for example, the spread of high-speed Internet through rural regions, the cost-savings of dropping the cable subscription and paying only for an Internet connection, the relative cheapness of web-based services like Netflix and Hulu Plus, and the steady trend toward personalization in our culture that is making on-demand delivery a more popular way of viewing “television” shows and movies. In the 1890s, Britain experienced a comparable shift in the primary publishing format for new fiction, from the expensive, bulky, and industry-devised three-decker format that dominated the Victorian era to the more affordable, portable, and less prescriptive single-volume book that soon became the norm. Richard Altick describes this transition as marking “the ultimate victory of the cheap-book movement” (316). The three-decker had been priced out of the reach of all but the wealthiest citizens, and so the rise of the single-volume novel helped democratize the marketplace for literature, a consequence of the Industrial Revolution that, in many ways, signaled the modernization of the book industry. Margaret D. Stetz has argued that this shift to the single-volume format also 1 “made possible...the book of short stories as a rival to the novel” (“Publishing” 127-28). 1 The short story collection was not a new genre in the 1890s, but, I will argue, it was in this era that the short story collection became codified as a conventional genre in the modernizing publishing industry. The rise of this genre was inextricably linked to the growth of the periodical marketplace in the nineteenth century, which strongly contributed to the democratizing of reading and writing and developed in British readers a taste for the short story, which had achieved popularity in the United States several decades earlier.