3 - Print: Anaïs Nin’s Embodied Encounters with Print Technology

Summary

The modernist period witnessed an explosion of print technologies in terms of the variety of venues for publication, the vast circulation figures and the quantity of print forums. Faye Hammill and Mark Hussey provide a useful history of the burgeoning field in Modernism’s Print Cultures and begin by explaining how this print expansion was enabled by technological innovations (2016: 15–16). Critical conversations about the intersections between modernist literature and the print marketplace have developed as a major discourse in the ‘new modernist studies’. Building on the important work of Jerome McGann’s Black Riders (1993), Jayne E. Marek’s Women Editing Modernism (1995) and George Bornstein’s Material Modernism (2001), scholarship has grown, especially in periodical studies focused on modernist little magazines and in work on Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press (see Brooker and Thacker 2009, Keyser 2010, Green 2017, Marcus 1996, McTaggart 2010, Southworth 2010, Battershill 2019a, 2019b, Willson 2009, Staveley 2009, 2018). Extending the field beyond modernist little magazines and the Hogarth Press, Lise Jaillant’s Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry (2019) collects research analysing a large range of publishers and their roles in modernist print cultures. The theoretical approaches deployed within modernist print culture studies have become more central to the larger field, thanks to ambitious work by Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier in their edited collection Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940 and in Ardis’s special issue of Modernism/modernity (September 2012). These collections of scholarship speak to recent moves in the field away from more narrow divisions between disciplines and toward ‘convergences of periodical studies, book history, media history, and material culture studies that are enriching our understanding of modernism’s complex relationship to the media ecologies of modernity’ (Ardis 2012: v). This scholarship demonstrates how modernist print culture studies have embraced ‘the transnational turn’ in modernist studies and have expanded to consider global dimensions of modernist print cultures and to attend to intersections of race, gender and empire in the modernist print public sphere.

Despite this growing field of scholarship on modernist print culture, there has been less work focused on the ‘technology’ of modernist print and on how that technology required, mediated and transformed modernist bodies. More work needs to be done, particularly in connecting modernist print cultures to the rich fields of African American print culture studies and to theories of embodiment that incorporate intersections of race, gender, ability and class.