'THE CHATTO LIST': PUBLISHING LITERARY CRITICISM IN MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITAIN

• Published in: The Review of English studies 2012-09, Vol.63 (261), p.634-663
• Main Author: COLLINI, STEFAN
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: American literature; Book publishing; British literature; Criticism; Critics; English literature; History; Literary criticism; Literary critics; Literature; Periodicals; Publishing industry; Scholarly publishing; Universities
• ISSN: 0034-6551; 1471-6968
• DOI: 10.1093/res/hgr122

The standard accounts of the professionalization of English studies during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century rest on several, largely unexplored, assumptions about the changing character of publishing in these years. Those accounts propose, broadly speaking, that the world of the Victorian men of letters, addressing a non-specialist public through books and periodicals that were part of a common educated culture, was superseded by the world of the professionalized literary academic, addressing fellow specialists through presses and journals whose readership was confined to universities. Drawing principally upon the archives of Chatto and Windus (and, secondarily, of Penguin Books), this article challenges these accounts by considering in detail the publishing histories of six critics: William Empson, Basil Willey, F.R. Leavis, L.C. Knights, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart. Literary criticism enjoyed a particular cultural vogue in the period from 1930 to 1960, and the patterns of publishing in the cases of these critics reveal a complex story of diverse and overlapping reading publics.