“Germany asks: is it OK to laugh at Hitler?”

Within imagological approaches, paratexts can provide insights into how the Other of translated literature is presented to a new target audience. So, within a transnational context, such as Germany and Britain’s shared experience of the Second World War, can the source and target-culture paratexts invoke the same images? Through a case study of Er ist wieder da, a novel that satirises Germany’s relationship with its National Socialist past, and the British publication of the English translation Look Who’s Back, this article finds that while the novel’s humour is reframed by the British publisher, the novel’s controversial position within Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung discourse remains intrinsic to the paratexts published in the British press. As such, this article demonstrates the transnational relevance of individual national characteristics to the paratextual framing of translated literature, the value of paratexts as objects of imagological study, and the methodological benefits of distinguishing between production- and reception-side paratexts.

Marketing Love: Romance Publishers Mills & Boon and Harlequin Enterprises, 1930–1990

When Harlequin Enterprises acquired British publisher Mills & Boon in 1972, the merged firm became the world’s dominant publisher of popular romance novels. Little is known, however, about the role that innovative marketing strategies played in the growth of these two romance publishing companies, especially their use of product sampling, direct mail, product standardization, and what was known at Mills & Boon as the “personal touch.” Through research in the Mills & Boon company archive at the University of Reading, the Grescoe Archive at the University of Calgary, as well as an analysis of company histories, trade publications, interviews, and marketing techniques, this study reveals how Harlequin and Mills & Boon took a different approach to product promotion than traditional publishers. Their innovation was to incorporate consumer goods marketing strategies, familiar to other industries, that disrupted and redefined standard practices of book publishers.

Anthology-Making

This chapter focuses on poetry anthologies published in the 1950s and 1960s. Robert Conquest's 1956 Macmillan anthology New Lines was responsible for consolidating the arguments and personnel of the Movement in the public mind. This was achieved through his clear taste and agenda, New Lines' limited personnel of just nine poets, and the generous selections from the poets' work it contained. Another anthology published in the same year was G. S. Fraser's Poetry Now, where no less than 74 poets are represented. The contents list reveals that Fraser was acquainted with the work of many poets from all sides of the poetry world, while the introduction reveals him to be well informed on recent poetic trends. Penguin, the biggest British publisher at that time, also drew up a scheme for new poetry anthologies: a new edition of Kenneth Allott's Contemporary Verse; Poetry since the War, a book suggested by [C. B.] Cox and [A. E.] Dyson of the Critical Quarterly; and An Anthology of Twentieth Century Lyrics with an emphasis on the Georgian style and its inheritors to be edited by one John Smith.

Dissemination

This chapter surveys the early dissemination of the nouveau roman in Britain, beginning around 1957. First, the nouveau roman’s main British publisher, Calder & Boyars, is introduced, with consideration of that publisher’s broader activities and ideals; particular attention is paid to its transnational contexts. There is mention too of the nouveau roman’s other British publishers, including Faber and Jonathan Cape. Then the different publishing formats used by Calder & Boyars for the nouveau roman are discussed, with analysis of visual presentation. The chapter then turns to the ways in which Calder & Boyars mediated the nouveau roman in promotional copy and in the search for new audiences; reference here is made to modernism, Existentialism, the notion of the literary ‘classic’, detective fiction, pulp fiction, cinema, theatre, television, and radio. The chapter concludes with two case studies that typify the nouveau roman’s complex status for British readers, first looking at Samuel Beckett’s relation to the nouveau roman, and then narrating Calder & Boyars’s ‘French Week’, in which the publisher organized a British speaking tour for Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Nathalie Sarraute.

Macro Carter / Micro Carter (1983–1999)

In the 1980s Carter began to produce two distinct streams of music: large-scale works extending the techniques of the previous decade, and miniatures that forecast the style of his later compositions, big and small. Expanding on the two voice substructure of Night Fantasies, the large scale works of this decade systematically explore contrapuntal designs with three, four, or five components. While the early short works present similar designs in miniature, later ones take on a more informal, improvisatory character. With a change from an American to a British publisher, most commissions now came from the UK or Europe, and in 1988 Carter sold his papers to the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel.

From Impact to Legacy: Interpreting Critical Writing on Le Corbusier from the 1920s to the Present

As a major figure of international modernism, Le Corbusier’s work has been subject to extensive critique and review both during his lifetime and since, to the extent that he has become the world’s most studied 20th century architect. While numerous attempts have been made to assess Le Corbusier’s works and ideas in their meaning and influence, little attention has been given to understanding the phenomena of critical writing and research that continues to surround the architect. Drawing upon research by the authors in preparing a 4-volume anthology of writings on Le Corbusier’s work for a major British publisher in 2016, the paper will trace critical reaction to the architect’s practice through a survey investigation of research and writing produced mainly in English from the 1920s to the present. The paper will give a chronological account of the issues, ideas and approaches that have emerged in critical writings on Le Corbusier and his architecture, reporting on the historiographic questions that have presented themselves in undertaking such a large-scale survey work. Reviewing the work of well-known critics the survey has also sought out lesser-known voices whose presence reflects Le Corbusier’s impact around the world, providing new interpretations through fresh perspectives on his work. Keywords: Architectural criticism; Architectural historiography; 20th century architecture, Le Corbusier. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/LC2015.2015.712

John Ogilby, Post-Roads, and the “Unmapped Savanna of Dumb Shades”: Maps and Mapping in Kenneth Slessor’s Poetic Sequence The Atlas, Part Two

Written by the acclaimed Australian poet Kenneth Slessor, “Post-roads” is the second poem of his sequence The Atlas and of his collection Cuckooz Contrey (1932), in which it debuted. Like the other four Atlas poems, “Post-roads” begins with a quote from a prominent seventeenth-century map-maker; in this case, John Ogilby (1600–1676)—the celebrated British publisher, surveyor, and cartographer. Slessor not only transformed Ogilby’s work (and portrait) into poetic images, but made Ogilby’s “tireless ghost” the central character of his poem. This article, part of the first full-scale examination of Slessor’s ambitious but poorly understood sequence, begins by reproducing the poem and tracing the poem’s development in Slessor’s poetry notebook. To reconstruct his creative process, it details the poet’s debt to the ephemeral catalogue of atlases and maps in which he discovered his title, epigraph, central character, and a possible source for the colorfully named coaches and carriages that conveyed passengers not only throughout London and Britain beginning in the early seventeenth century, but also throughout Australia from around 1800 to 1920. After comparing poet and cartographer, we consider the poem’s relationship to two of Ogilby’s atlases: the monumental Britannia (1675) and the posthumous, if far more accessible Traveller’s Guide (1699, 1712). Both reveal how Ogilby—even from the grave—helped passengers like the poem’s “yawning Fares” trace their routes. Finally, after offering reasons for Slessor’s choice of “Guildford” out of all the place-names along the roads through England and Wales, and proposing literary inspirations for “Post-roads,” the paper returns to Slessor’s hero/artist.

Correction

A review of J.V. Field, Kepler's Geometrical Cosmology, published in March 1989 p. 124, inadvertently gave the bibliographic information for the North American publisher whilst omitting that for the British publisher, who supplied the review copy. Outside North America the book is published by Athlone of London, ISBN 0–485–11284–1.

And for my next trick…

Thesauruses, or if you are more classically inclined thesauri, appear to be in vogue. In ET12 (Oct 87), we reviewed the latest Longman revision of Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, which the company had first published in 1852. Then, in ET14 (Apr 88) we drew attention to the rather surprising facsimile reproduction by Bloomsbury of the original 1852 Roget. Now, it is both relevant and important to highlight some developments on the part of a third British publisher, Collins, who have brought out not one but two new wordbooks:• The COLLINS School Thesaurus, ISBN 0-00-313318-4, £5.95: This is actually an Australian work, first published by Jacaranda Press in 1986 under the copyright of Macquarie University, New South Wales, and edited by Linsay Knight. The blurb claims ‘over 940 word groups, each consisting of words and phrases with closely related meanings’. The keyword in each group is explained, after which its associate words take their turn, as shown in the group for the verb fall reproduced below. The school thesaurus is a concise and powerful tool, lucidly organized and complemented by an easy-to-use index.• The COLLINS Dictionary and Thesaurus in One Volume, 0-00-433186-9, £11.95; Collins already had a concise version of their standard dictionary of English, and a companion thesaurus. The trick here has been to combine them, so that the thesaurus section runs along the bottom of each page, in time with the alphabetic columns. The blurb says: ‘Here for the first time in one handy volume the reader is offered a general-purpose Dictionary and a Thesaurus in dictionary form’. And the blurb is right, as far as we know. Collins claim 71,000 dictionary references and 250,000 thesaurus ‘synonyms’. We already have on our shelves the volumes before they were unified, and have concluded that the unification is to be preferred. (See sample page.)