Dimensions
162 x 240 x 45mm
"What do we mean when we talk about taste'? From the perspective of twentieth-century literary culture, taste' takes countless forms. There is the exclusive taste of highbrow critics such as T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis. There is the taste of ordinary book lovers persuaded to buy the best-sellers of the day. And there is the taste of Virginia's Woolf's common reader' that elusive, self-educated quarry whose likes and dislikes may be a generation or two out of date. A taste that in the days of the Victorian reading public was founded on shared standards but now, in the age of Twitter and the blogosphere, is fragmenting into chaos. Spanning a century of literary history, from the pitched battles fought between Eliot-era modernists and Georgian traditionalists to the political in-fighting of the Thirties, the arrival of the upwardly mobile post-war New Man' and the impact of creative writing degrees and the media don, The Prose Factory explores the myriad influences aesthetic, economic and technological that have been brought to bear on English literary life in the past century and the way in which they have shaped our preferences. It is also a tale of personalities
