MRRG Meeting With Illusha Nokhrin - Thursday March 31st

The Modernist Reading & Research Group (MRRG) will meet this Thursday, March 31st, in JHB 719 from 2-4PM. We will be discussing a short paper by Illusha Nokhrin, "A highbrow Woolf in lowbrow clothing? The ‘battle of the brows’ and the dust-jackets of The Voyage Out and Night and Day." Please contact Illusha for a copy of the paper at illya.nokhrin@mail.utoronto.ca. The abstract to Illusha's paper is copied below. All are welcome! Dan & Illusha A highbrow Woolf in lowbrow clothing? The ‘battle of the brows’ and the dust-jackets of The Voyage Out and Night and Day Often neglected, damaged, or simply discarded, dust-jackets are rarely seen as an integral part of an author's ‘text’. Yet, as recent studies have demonstrated, dust-jackets can have a significant impact on how a work and its author are perceived by readers. Indeed, dust-jackets can position a text as a 'highbrow' work of art or as a 'lowbrow' piece of entertainment, let us know its heritage, and reveal or obfuscate the author’s background. ‎Using Virginia Woolf's first two novels as a case study, I examine how publishers on both sides of the Atlantic used dust-jackets in order to respond to and manage Woolf's growing reputation as a literary and cultural figure from the 1920s to the 1940s. Whether they sought to use austere wrappers to mark Woolf as a ‘serious’ literary author, catch the reader’s eye with appealing illustrations, or capitalize on Woolf’s growing renown order to advertise other titles, I argue that Woolf’s publishers used dust-jackets in order to participate in ongoing cultural debates about the categories of ‘lowbrow’, ‘middlebrow’, and ‘highbrow’ on both sides of the Atlantic