Sprecher
Beschreibung
This paper investigates how literary agents operated in the gendered and bureaucratic infrastructures, shaping the production of modernist texts and interwar literary culture. By examining the archives of major publishers such as Chatto & Windus, the Hogarth Press, and Duckworth, it focuses on marginalia such as handwritten annotations and literary agents’ commentary that crowd the margins of correspondence, readers’ reports, and internal notes. This paper argues that these notes form a gendered and bureaucratic paratext: a set of material inscriptions through which modernist literature was not only administered but materially produced.
By re-reading this administrative detritus as an aesthetic field, the chapter redefines and extends the concept of ‘modernist marginalia’ from authors to the wider body of administrative interlocutors they worked with, especially literary agents. These notes reflect the negotiations between routine clerical procedure and creative decision-making – the moment when the publisher’s office becomes a workshop of modernist form. A letter initialled or redirected; an entry overwritten in a new hand; a note cross-referencing a work or an author: such traces reveal the bureaucratic temporality of repetitions that contributed to and harmonised with the modernist aesthetics of revision.
As a case study, I examine Nancy Pearn, manager of the Magazine Department at Curtis Brown, whose correspondence and negotiating practices exemplify the institutional dimension of bureaucratic modernism: her letters to the authors she represents and publishers she works with combine affective negotiation with clerical precision, demonstrating the hidden labour of literary facilitators who underwrote the rational organisation of the modernist publishing landscape. Through close reading of these seemingly mundane marginalia and document systems, this chapter argues that bureaucratic textuality shared interwar literary culture’s preoccupation with process and fragmentation.
Speaker bio
Buxi Duan is an Academic Coach at Buckinghamshire New University and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Reading. Before his current roles, he completed a PhD in English Literature and held a one-year postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Birmingham. His research interests include modernist studies, archival research, book and publishing culture, and textual scholarship. His recent essays have appeared in Feminist Modernist Studies, English Studies, Notes and Queries, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, and English: Journal of the English Association.