Combining book history and literary analysis remains a tricky business. How does the material form of a book, often rendered transparent by its familiarity and its ubiquity, affect reading experiences both contemporary and historical? How does materiality relate to the book's literary contents? Skeptics contend that the material circumstances of production have little to do with aesthetics or with ideas, while print and book-trade historians can occasionally be unimpressed by the literary-critical tendency to focus on exceptional works and authors rather than on the more popular, ubiquitous books that readers frequently consume. Jennifer Sorensen's excellent new book adds to the growing body of scholarship that genuinely bridges these often distinct modes of inquiry and should further convince remaining doubters of the merits of considering material and literary form to be inextricably linked to one another. Sorensen describes her method as “material formalism” (2) and, via Katherine Hayles, George Bornstein, and others, she focusses on what Hayles calls the “interplay” between material text, literary content, and social context. This carefully researched book is a welcome addition to the thriving field of modernism and print culture.

Sorensen's book consists of four substantial sections, each focussing on a well-known modernist figure. She begins with an analysis of Henry James's periodical pagescapes in the story “The Real Thing”; then moves to the publication of Djuna Barnes's “A Night among the Horses” in the Little Review and A Book (1923); continues by examining the complex publication history of Jean Toomer's Cane; and finally treats the (by now well-studied) example of Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press, particularly focussing on Woolf's Flush and the early Hogarth Press publications. Each of these chapters is backed by substantial archival research, careful analysis of the visual dynamics of the page, and close reading. The way in which Sorensen bridges material and literary forms is, in part, by thinking of genres as what she calls “media forms with particular histories” (3). This is not in itself a new approach (employed to wonderful effect in modernist studies in the work of Sean Latham and Patrick Collier, among others), but it is a sensible and fruitful one. Genre is at once material and abstract: it is signalled by paratexts, it is executed in literary manoeuvres and conventions, and, crucially, it is essential to readers’ expectations. The focus on genre as a bridge between the material and the literary also allows Sorensen to emphasize moments of radical experimentation that occur simultaneously on the physical page and in the literary text.

Sorensen's work here is in line with current scholarly expectations in modernist studies in their refusal to accept rigid separations (between American and British literature, between high and low culture, and between mainstream and alternative publications). Crucially, following the example set by the recent work of Lise Jaillant in Cheap Modernism: Expanding Markets, Publishers’ Series, and the Avant-Garde (2017), Sorensen pays attention not just to the more expected modes of production for experimental literature (small presses and little magazines), but also to the wide-circulation publications that brought modernist texts to a large public, sometimes even before the work had made its mark in high literary or bohemian circles. Sorensen offers a sensitive analysis, for example, of the serialization of Willa Cather's The Professor's House in Collier's Magazine, which brought the novel to millions of readers in illustrated serial form before its eventual publication by Knopf in 1925.

At the end of this wonderfully detailed and nuanced book, the central question that remains, and that will be present for critics working at the intersection of literary and material history for a long while to come, is that of selection. Each of Sorensen's cases is thoughtfully presented and each gives an authentically new reading of well-known modernist texts. But how do we choose what we include in studies like this? Might every modernist work be subjected to a similar methodological treatment? These are the questions that need more attention going forward for scholars of book history and print culture, particularly as the boundaries of modernist studies grow ever wider. In the meantime, we are lucky to have Sorensen's engaging explorations of modernist experiments in material and literary form.