The Art of the Reprint : Nineteenth-Century Novels in Twentieth-Century Editions

The Art of the Reprint is a vivid and engaging history of the nineteenth-century novel as it was re-imagined for everyday readers by four extraordinary twentieth-century illustrators. It focuses especially on four reprints: a 1929 edition of Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native (1878) with engravings by Clare Leighton, a 1930 edition of Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851) with images by Rockwell Kent, a 1943 edition of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) with woodblocks by Fritz Eichenberg, and a complete set of Jane Austen's novels (1786-1817) illustrated from 1957 to 1974 by Joan Hassall. Taken together, these reprints are indicative of a legacy crafted from historical distance, through personal, political, and artistic circumstance, and for a new century. With biographical, archival, and art- and literary-historical sources as well as close readings of images and texts, this is a richly illustrated account of how artists reinvent canons for the general reader. A genuinely original work, The Art of the Reprint establishes the reprint as a vital area of study. In tightly curated encounters between extraordinary twentieth-century artists and beloved nineteenth-century novels, Clare Leighton travels to Dorset to minutely observe Thomas Hardy's landscape for a 1929 The Return of the Native (1878); Rockwell Kent channels his many sea journeys into a 1930 Moby Dick (1851); Fritz Eichenberg transposes the churn and isolation of fleeing Nazi Germany onto Expressionistic engravings for Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847); and Joan Hassall elucidates a bright social world at miniature scale for a 1975 set of The Complete Novels of Jane Austen (1787-1817). Mediators between text and book and author and reader, these artists interpreted these novels and then illustrated their interpretations, stunningly and strangely, in wood, ink, and paper, for everyday readers. "The Art of the Reprint is a vivid and engaging history of the nineteenth-century novel as it was re-imagined for everyday readers by extraordinary twentieth-century illustrators. With biographical, archival, and art- and literary-historical sources, this is a richly-illustrated account of how artists reinvent canons for the general reader"-- Provided by publisher