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

A rich history of the nineteenth-century novel as it was re-imagined for everyday readers by extraordinary twentieth-century illustrators.

Rosalind Parry (Author)

9781009272049, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 30 March 2023

215 pages
23.5 x 15.5 x 1.9 cm, 0.505 kg

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.

Introduction
1. Clare Leighton & Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native
2: Rockwell Kent & Herman Melville's Moby Dick
3: Fritz Eichenberg & Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre
4: Joan Hassall & The Complete Novels of Jane Austen
Coda: The Home Library.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Prints & printmaking [AFH]