OZR opvangmandaat Postdoc Robyn Jakeman

Broadsides were single pages of printed material featuring news and ballads that were common from c.1600 to the mid-1900s when the proliferation of newspapers rendered them obsolete. Yet between 1902 and 1938, several small printers and publishers in Britain and Ireland, including Elkin Mathews, the Poetry Bookshop, the Cuala Press, the St Dominic’s Press, and the Verona Press, produced series of broadsides to disseminate poetry illustrated by engravings and woodcuts. Despite this extensive use, broadsides have never been comprehensively examined as a widespread print phenomenon in modernism. This project questions why modernist figures revived the form in the early 20th century; what the specific functions of modernist broadsides were; who their target audiences were; and how they engaged with those audiences. My hypothesis is that while historical broadsides functioned purely as cheap ‘street literature’, modernists used the form in two ways: as easily disseminatable objects that could reach a diverse audience, and as a fine art form that implicitly criticised mass production. Through extensive archival research and an in-depth study of modernist broadsides, this project will: a) provide insight into a little-known modernist print genre; b) develop current understandings of modernist tensions between mass print and small-press printing; c) expand understandings of modernist media ecologies, and d) reconsider image-text relations in modernist print artefacts