Evi Heinz

This Research is part of the project “Boundaries of Cosmopolis”, Funded by the Einstein Foundation.

THe Berlin-Based Periodical Der Querschnitt was a magazine of art and Culture that cultivated a deliberately cosmopolitan identity. Focussing on the period from 1924 to 1933, My Project Examines how Der Querschnitt expressed its literary cosmopolitanism in relation to two key sites of urban modernity, Berlin and London, through the publication and criticism of contemporary English literature.

By investigating the literary and critical processes of cultural transmission in the context of their material manifestations (touching on questions of translation, marketing, copyright, licensing, etc.), this project ultimately seeks to explore how, in Der Querschnitt, the concept of the literary cosmopolis – understood both as a set of texts and as a network of actors and places – is simultaneously asserted and undermined.

The modernist small press has traditionally been characterised as a small-scale publishing venture with a focus on the craft of printing and providing a space for avant-garde experimentation beyond the commercial publishing world. However, as recent research on Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press (Helen Southworth, 2010; Nicola Wilson, 2012; Claire Battershill, 2018) has shown, this narrow definition cannot fully encompass the various aesthetic and economic strategies pursued by modernist small press publishers, nor the different literary marketplaces with which they engaged.

This research project looks at the Hogarth Press alongside some hitherto less critically investigated small presses – Harriet Shaw Weaver’s Egoist Press and John Rodker’s ovid Press – and explores their diverse artistic and business practices by re-contextualising the modernist small press within the wider creative and economic networks of the contemporary publishing landscape.

Using archival records to recover the frequently hidden and unexpected material interrelations between these publishers and the wider literary marketplace, this project seeks to provide an account of London’s modernist small presses as a network which was closely enmeshed in other aspects of the contemporary book world, including fine print, the trade in erotica and political activism.

Dismissed as a ‘minor’ associate of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis for much of the twentieth century, the Anglo-Jewish writer, translator and publisher John Rodker is still one of literary modernism’s great neglected figures.

I have been Researching Rodker’s Work and LIfe since my doctoral Thesis (‘John Rodker (1894-1955) and Modernist Material Culture: Theatre, Translation, Publishing, BirkBeck, University of London, 2018) and I Continue to be captivated by his multifaceted contributions to modernist culture.

I’m always keen to hear from other Researchers interested in Rodker’s work, so pleaes feel free to contact me.