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Monographs

*If you'd like to know more, abstracts and PDFs can be found on my Academia.edu webpage*


Monographs:


Reviews:
  • Modern British History: "Literary Rebels is a fascinating insight into the long-running creative/critical debates in University English Literature departments and an in-depth examination of the cultural history of creative writing and its institutionalization (or otherwise) in a transatlantic perspective."
     
  • Modern Philology: "A compelling post-45 cultural history; grounded in rich historical research.... What Literary Rebels ultimately exposes—and this may be its most lasting legacy—is the increasing privatization of the humanities and of creative writing in particular, as neoliberal capitalism proves remarkably adept, continuously, at incorporating into itself even the most "outside" of literary rebellions."
  • American Literary History: "Jaillant expands the frame within which we can understand the rise of creative writing-from a somewhat parochial American story to a broader Anglo-American cultural phenomenon."
  • Literature & History: "Jaillant's research into British creative writing programmes explores new territory."
  • English: Journal of the English Association: "Literary Rebels is, in the end, a book about desire: the contradictory desires of successful creative writers, the utopian ones of programme founders, the frustrated ones of aspiring novelists with day jobs."
  • Women: A Cultural Review: "Literary Rebels asks intriguing questions and presents extensive research, including a meticulous and impressive works cited section, to point subsequent scholars toward avenues of further exploration of the history of creative writers in Anglo-American universities."
  • ariel: A Review of International English Literature: "a series of fascinating case studies divided into two main sections, one focussing on American writers and one on British writers. . . . Jaillant’s 'transatlantic' focus illuminates key figures and provides valuable ways to re-evaluate them."
(2) Cheap Modernism: Expanding Markets, Publishers' Series and the Avant-Garde (Edinburgh UP, 2017). “Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture.”

Endorsement: "This book is notable for Jaillant’s deft use of a distinctive range of archives to throw new light on the relationship between the writers of the Modernist canon – Eliot, Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis – and the reprint publishers who introduced them to a wider European readership than the small coteries that greeted them on first publication. These reprint editions, neglected by many previous scholars, were not only in some cases rewritten by the authors but also placed the works in a new context of popular and genre fiction." Prof. Alistair McCleery, Scottish Centre for the Book.

Reviews:
  • Los Angeles Review of Books: “Remarkable” – Cheap Modernism “illustrates an exemplary methodology for future study of what we might call serial culture.”
  • Times Literary Supplement: "Embedded in broader histories of technological advancement in book production, education reform, copyright law and burgeoning academic markets, Jaillant's study makes a significant contribution to the continuing work of de-ghettoizing literary modernism."
  • Clio: “In engaging and informative fashion, Jaillant unearths a number of fascinating stories in which publishers and authors collaborated to expand modernist writing beyond its first readers and to set the stage for the larger cultural diffusion of the movement.”
  • Literature & History: "Intriguing, elegantly argued and thoroughly researched study: definitely one to recommend for purchase by your university library."
  • The Year's Work in English Studies: "Jaillant . . . continues to break ground in the fields of modernist book history and early twentieth-century print culture . . . a lucid and compelling treatment of a little-discussed feature of modernist publishing."
  • Times Higher Education: “Extensive archival work” – “Cheap Modernism is a book of facts and figures” for scholars “interested in analysis of context as well as content: how material culture and economics affected the style and substance of a text, and how it affected the reception and canonisation of modernist writers.”
  • James Joyce Quarterly: “Cheap Modernism is an accessible and valuable resource, providing thorough details and useful statistics.”
  • Woolf Studies Annual:  “Brilliant” – “Cheap Modernism is a valuable resource to scholars and students of Woolf and of modernism more broadly.”
  • Forum for Modern Language Studies. “Scholars of Modernism will find Jaillant’s volume, in confronting academic prejudices against mass editions and presenting data collected from a range of literary and publishing archives, both an inspiring and a stimulating read.”
  • Journal of Modern Literature. “An appealing ‘voyage of the mind,’ promising new ways of seeing the world of modernist studies and book history and introducing new archival materials about these interwar series and their publishers.”
  • Papers on Language and Literature. “Cheap Modernism will be of interest not only to modernist scholars working in the archive but also to those researching book history and literary cultures.”
(3) Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon – The Modern Library Series, 1917-1955 (Routledge, 2014). Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace series.

Reviews:
  • Modernism/ Modernity: "Consistently insightful, surprising, and concise, Jaillant’s book makes an important contribution to both modernist and middlebrow studies."
  • The Year’s Work in English Studies: “Jaillant’s study . . . offers a fresh perspective on the high/low debate told from the vantage point of one of the century’s leading publishers."
  • Clio: “Jaillant has made a valuable contribution to both the history of the book and our understanding of the literary canon.”
  • SHARP News: "The case studies in Modernism, Middlebrow, and the Literary Canon provide an excellent addition to a course on book history and modernism."
  • Woolf Studies Annual: "Jaillant’s study offers a detailed and carefully drawn study of the Modern Library’s version of Woolf and her contemporaries."
  • American Literary History: "an important new contribution . . . part of the more conscientiously transatlantic move in modernist studies."
  • Journal of Modern Literature: “Jaillant’s study is particularly valuable . . . for her welcome complication of the commonly oversimplified understanding of the midcentury ‘battle of the brows.’”
  • Sewanee Review: “meticulous unpacking of just how contentious the players on opposite sides of the Modern Library debates actually were. At this point enter Anthony Comstock, the founder of the New York society for the Suppression of Vice. . . . Jaillant tells his story in ways that bring a human face to the censors and their brand of censorship.”
  • James Joyce Quarterly: “An engagingly written and rigorously researched study of the Modern Library” – “Jaillant’s book constitutes a meaningful contribution to the field of middlebrow studies.”