著名な作家の作品展示例として、チャールズ・ディケンズ『主イエスの生涯』(作者の死後、1934年にさまざまな新聞で連載)、エーリヒ・マリア・レマルク『西部戦線異状なし』 (1928年『フォシッシェ・ツァイトゥング』連載)、アーサー・コナン・ドイル『恐怖の谷』(1914年『ニューヨーク・トリビューン日曜版』連載)、ヒュー・ロフティング『ドリトル先生』(1920年代初頭『ニューヨーク・トリビューン』連載)、そしてラドヤード・キプリングや、ロバート・ルイス・スティーブンソンによる詩が挙げられます。さらに本展示ではこうした著名な作家だけでなく、百年前の当時は人気を博したものの、今や忘却のうちに眠っている作家たちの作品も掘り起こします。彼らは大作家と同じ新聞小説のページで作品を連載されながらも、様々な理由によって変わりゆく読者層の共感を得られなくなっていった、そんな作家たちのことです。
二か月の展示期間中、展示に関連するテーマをめぐってゲストスピーカーによる公開講座・講演も予定しています。
＊6月10日（土）、17日（土）、24日（土）の14:00よりギャラリートークを予定しております。詳細はこちら → 一覧 日本語 English
This exhibition features little-known and scarce original examples of richly
illustrated serialized fiction, short-stories, and poems that appeared
in daily and weekly newspapers during a period of extraordinary creativity,
from the early twentieth century until the beginning of World War Two.
The remarkable success of newspaper fiction resulted from the convergence
of improvements in print technology, increasing and widespread literacy,
and intense competition between newspaper owners for readers.
As the exhibition reveals, fierce commercial rivalry between newspaper
barons, especially in the field-leading American 'Big-city' papers, spawned
the development of 'author cults', and the promotion of novelists as celebrities,
and in some cases, public intellectuals. In the first decades of the twentieth
century, before other media such as radio and later television, were in
direct competition with newspapers as the entertainment package par excellence, newspaper fiction had an unparalleled cultural penetration and pervasiveness
within mainly middle-class readerships, profoundly affecting literary 'taste'.
In part due to the ephemerality of the newsprint medium, but also the 'highbrow'
approach to literature that dominated post-war literary criticism, newspaper
fiction, as distinct from periodical literature, has until very recently
been neglected and its richness and diversity lamentably ignored. This
exhibition therefore uses pertinent original examples of newspaper fiction,
illustrations, and related-items to chronicle how newspapers became purveyors
of (albeit not always fine) fiction, reinforcing class values, and fostering
national pride and solidarity, in what amounted to a highly choreographed
collective reading experience in this little-understood literary flourishing.
Among the works on display by famous authors, are Charles Dickens' The Life of Our Lord (variously serialized posthumously in 1934), Erich Maria Remarque's Im Westen nichts Neues [All Quiet on the Western Front] (serialized in the Vossische Zeitung, 1928), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Valley of Fear (serialized in the New York Tribune Sunday Magazine in 1914), and Hugh Lofting's Adventures of Dr. Doolittle (serialized in the New York Tribune in the early 1920s), as well as poems by Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson. However, as well as showcasing examples of work by famous literary figures, the exhibition also aims to introduce patrons to some of the hundreds of writers who were widely read one hundred years ago, but who now languish in the cemetery of forgotten writers. Writers, who coalesced on the fiction pages of newspapers, with amongst the most celebrated writers of all time, but whose works, for various reasons did not continue to resonate with changing readerships.
Over the course of the two-month exhibition there will be a programme of public lectures/talks by invited speakers on aspects related to the exhibition’s central theme. |
