The Impact of Distribution and Reading Patterns on the Novel in Britain, 1880-1940

从1880年到1940年，英国小说的制作和发行发生了巨大的变化。1880年，大多数新小说仍以三厚册的形式出版，通过诸如穆迪流通图书馆这样的渠道，向有限的中上层读者开放。更成功的小说后来以一卷本的重印版本出现，但这些仍然超出了绝大多数潜在读者的能力。六十年后，普通小说比维多利亚时代的“笨重怪物”要短得多，公共图书馆、廉价的订阅图书馆、读书俱乐部和新的大众市场平装书几乎让每个人都能读到小说。在这个项目中，我们并不关注大众识字的广泛社会学影响，而是关注它对小说写作和阅读的具体影响。小说家和他们的出版商如何应对小说市场和读者群的变化？特别地，我们将详细研究两种效应。一方面，有人声称新的市场条件导致了新的审查形式，而另一方面，小说家开始被视为（正确或错误地）根据读者中不同的文化和教育水平来调整他们的作品。1880年后，每一代新一代小说家中的领军人物都开始为他们的艺术争取新的自由，打破了维多利亚时代拘谨和沉默的界限，回应了对道德和性解放的普遍渴望。但图书馆和其他媒体对冒犯公共道德持谨慎态度，出版商的销售依赖于它们；这导致了在一些众所周知的案件中审查的威胁或现实，尽管其程度尚不清楚。对小说创作的第二个强烈影响是，当时流行的“高雅”、“中等”和“低俗”读者的概念，每个人都需要和要求不同的作品。毫无疑问，一些小说家和出版商感到有压力要符合这些期望，但这种情况有多普遍呢？文学评论家和文化历史学家笼统地提到了这些发展，但具体的文献证据仅限于少数几个例子。近年来，传统意义上的文学史越来越受到“书籍史”的影响，“书籍史”是研究文本生产和接受的物质条件的学科。十九世纪文学史尤其受益于这一发展。尽管出版商和发行商的档案中保存了丰富的材料，但人们对1880年后发行和阅读模式的影响的关注要少得多。我们的目的是利用这些材料，对在英国小说史上最具革命性的时期之一起作用的物质因素进行新的描述。这项研究的一个主要成果将是为牛津英语小说史的相关卷做出贡献，这是一部多卷的文学史合作作品，将由牛津大学出版社出版，由帕特里克·帕林德（Patrick Parrinder）担任总编辑，他也是本项目的首席研究员。

Huge changes took place in the production and distribution of fiction in Britain between 1880 and 1940. In 1880, most new novels were still published in three thick volumes which found their way to a limited upper- and middle-class reading public through such outlets as Mudie's Circulating Library. The more successful novels later appeared in one-volume reprint editions, but these were still beyond the means of the great majority of potential readers. Sixty years later, the average novel was very much shorter than the 'baggy monsters' of the Victorian period, and public libraries, cheap subscription libraries, book clubs, and the new mass-market paperbacks had brought novel-reading within the reach of almost everyone.In this project we are not concerned with the broad sociological effects of mass literacy, but rather with its specific impacts on the writing and reading of fiction. How did novelists and their publishers respond to changes in the marketing and readership of fiction? In particular, two kinds of effect will be investigated in detail. On the one hand, it has been alleged that the new market conditions resulted in new forms of censorship, while, on the other hand, novelists came to be seen (rightly or wrongly) as tailoring their work according to different perceived levels of culture and education among the reading public.After 1880, leading figures in each new generation of novelists set out to claim new freedoms for their art, beating back the boundaries of Victorian prudery and reticence and responding to a widespread desire for moral and sexual liberation. But libraries and other outlets were wary of offending public morality, and publishers depended upon them for sales; this led to the threat or actuality of censorship in some well-known cases, although its extent is unclear. A second strong influence on the writing of fiction was the prevailing conception of different classes of 'highbrow', 'middlebrow', and 'lowbrow' readers, each of whom required and demanded a different product. There is no doubt that some novelists and publishers felt under pressure to conform to these expectations, but how widespread was this? Literary critics and cultural historians have referred to these developments in broad, general terms, but specific documentary evidence has been confined to a few instances.In recent years, literary history as traditionally defined has been increasingly influenced by 'book history', the study of the material conditions of the production and reception of texts. The history of nineteenth-century literature especially has benefited from this development. Much less attention has been given to the impact of distribution and reading patterns after 1880, in spite of the rich material preserved in publishers' and distributors' archives. Our aim is to draw on this material to produce a new account of the material factors at work in one of the most revolutionary periods in the history of English fiction. One major outcome of the research will be a contribution to the relevant volume of the Oxford History of the Novel in English, a multi-volume, collaborative work of literary history to be published by Oxford University Press under the general editorship of Patrick Parrinder, who is also Principal Investigator in the present project.