Lise Jaillant

Senate House Library holds little-known materials on modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Nancy Cunard and Djuna Barnes. Their experimental texts were published by small presses and little magazines, but also attracted the attention of larger commercial book publishers. To gain greater control over the publication process, Woolf, Stein, Cunard and others created their own presses and engaged closely with the physical materiality of books. To mark the release of the edited collection Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), this exhibition focuses on these fascinating modernist publishers that opened new markets for fiction and poetry. From a mass of little-seen materials in Senate House Special Collections, Leila Kassir and Lise Jaillant have selected books, periodicals, correspondence and ephemera relating to three themes: (1) Women and Publishing; (2) Race and Modernism; (3) Middlebrow and Celebrity. Am...

I am happy to announce that my exhibition on Octave Uzanne will be shown at Senate House, London to accompany the conference Aestheticism and Decadence in the Age of Modernism: 1895 to 1945 (Friday 17 and Saturday 18 April 2015). Octave Uzanne was a French bibliophile, writer and publisher whose work shows that Aestheticism and Decadence were anchored in the modern age. Born in 1851, Uzanne abandoned his studies in law when he came into an heritage at the age of 21. He became friends with a group of bibliophiles, who encouraged his interest in eighteenth-century libertine works by neglected writers . As Willa Silverman puts it, "Uzanne's devotion to the France of Louis XIV and Louis XV would also lead him forward, as a proponent of the neo-Rococo aesthetic and decorative arts that at the turn of the century inspired Art Nouveau." This mix of modernism and anachronism was shared by the Goncourt brothers, whom Uzanne particularly admired. Uzanne was also in...