Book review of: Cheap Modernism: Expanding Markets, Publishers’ Series and the Avant-Garde

For scholars of modernism interested in the archives, the potential scope for research and inquiry has never been greater. No longer restrained to an author’s papers, researchers have a vast range of archives at their fingertips, aided by the rise of the study of periodicals and other print cultures and digitization initiatives such as the Modernist Journals Project and the Modernist Archives Publishing Project. Yet, as Lise Jaillant points out in Cheap Modernism: Expanding Markets, Publishers’ Series and the Avant-Garde, there is still a tendency amongst scholars to focus on “modernism’s first emergence”: that is, the small press first edition, the original printing in a little magazine. Jaillant’s study, however, presents us with a compelling reason to look beyond these “firsts.”