Breaking new ground in the study of British literary culture during an important, transitional period, this new work by Mary Ann Gillies focuses on the professional literary agent whose emergence in Britain around 1880 coincided with, and accelerated, the transformation of both publishing and authorship. Like other recent studies in book and print culture, The Professional Literary Agent in Britain, 1880-1920 starts from the central premise that the business of authorship is inextricably linked with the aesthetics of literary praxis. Rather than provide a broad overview of the period, however, Gillies focuses on a specific figure, the professional literary agent. She then traces the influence of two prominent agents - A. P. Watt (generally acknowledged as the first professional literary agent) and J. B. Pinker (the leading figure in the second wave of agents) - focusing on their respective relationships with two key clients. The case studies not only provide insight into the business dynamics of the literary world at this time, but also illustrate the shifting definition of literature itself during the period.

The ranks of English women writers rose steeply in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, contributing to the era’s revolutionary social movements as well as to transforming literary genres in prose and poetry. The phenomena of ‘the new’ — ‘New Women’, ‘New Unionism’, ‘New Imperialism’, ‘New Ethics’, ‘New Critics’, ‘New Journalism’, ‘New Man’ — are this moment’s touchstones. This book tracks the period's new social phenomena and unfolds its distinctively modern modes of writing. It provides expert introductions amid new insights into women’s writing throughout the United Kingdom and around the globe.

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.

This book explores the business practices of the British publishing industry from 1843-1900, discussing the role of creative businesses in society and the close relationship between culture and business in a historical context. Marrisa Joseph develops a strong cultural, social and historical discussion around the developments in copyright law, gender and literary culture from a management perspective; analysing how individuals formed professional associations and contract law to instigate new processes. Drawing on institutional theory and analysing primary and archival sources, this book traces how the practices of literary businesses developed, reproduced and later legitimised. By offering a close analysis of some of publishing’s most influential businesses, it provides an insight into the decision-making processes that shaped an industry and brings to the fore the ‘institutional story’ surrounding literary business and their practices, many of which can still be seen today.

By way of a case study of one of the oldest French book agencies, Agence Hoffman, this book analyzes the role played by French literary agents in the importation of US fiction and literature into France in the years following World War II. It sheds light on the material conditions of the circulation of texts across the Atlantic between 1944 and 1955, exploring the fine mechanisms of agents’ negotiations which allowed texts, and ideas, to cross borders. While providing comparative insights into the history of publishing in France and in the United States in the immediate aftermath of the war, this book aims at foregrounding the role of the book agent, an all-too often neglected intermediary in the field of book history. Grounded in archival work conducted both in France and the United States, this study is based on previously unexamined correspondence. Considering the concept of mediation as central in the field of print culture, this book addresses the dearth of scholarship on literary agents on both sides of the Atlantic, and intersects with the current scholarship on transatlantic, internationalm and transnational cultural and trade networks, as evidenced by the recently emerged field of sociology of translation in Europe.

Connects British and American literature to a changing media landscape in an era of innovation.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the publishing industries in Britain and the United States underwent dramatic expansions and reorganization that brought about an increased traffic in books and periodicals around the world. Focusing on adventure fiction published from 1899 to 1919, Patrick Scott Belk looks at authors such as Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, Conan Doyle, and John Buchan to explore how writers of popular fiction engaged with foreign markets and readers through periodical publishing. Belk argues that popular fiction, particularly the adventure genre, developed in ways that directly correlate with authors’ experiences, and shows that popular genres of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries emerged as one way of marketing their literary works to expanding audiences of readers worldwide. Despite an over-determined print space altered by the rise of new kinds of consumers and transformations of accepted habits of reading, publishing, and writing, the changes in British and American publishing at the turn of the twentieth century inspired an exciting new period of literary invention and experimentation in the adventure genre, and the greater part of that invention and experimentation was happening in the magazines. ​