The British Library Digitizes Over 300 Modernist Treasures, Including Manuscripts, Magazines, Photographs

In Discovering Literature, The British Library has digitized and made available to the public over 300 items from their collection, including the second draft of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar; a typescript draft of J.G. Ballard's Crash; Angela Carter's manuscript notes on fairytale material (including "Bluebeard"); astrological charts from Ted Hughes; first editions by Joyce, Auden, Eliot, Woolf, Cecil Beaton; issues of Blast; the 1926 journal of Lady Ottoline Morrell; and more literary drafts, rare first editions, notebooks, letters, newspapers and photographs. The full collection can be perused here.

It's not just a display case. Featured articles include Elaine Showalter on Mrs. Dalloway; an introduction to Katherine Mansfield's short stories; Seamus Perry on presences in The Waste Land (and why, here is Eliot's oft-quoted Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton!), and many other close readings.

Here's an excerpt from Richard Price on the legacy of little magazines, using The Germ and Blast as period examples:

Among friends: little magazines, friendship and networks

A ‘little magazine’ is a literary magazine which, typically, attracts only a small number of readers. Circulation can be numbered in the low thousands, or, as likely, in hundreds or even in tens.

Characteristically, little magazines last only a few years, or even less. Looking back, this can seem surprising because in classic magazines those they publish have since become so famous, influential or popular – or their ideas have.

One good example of this is The Germ, published in 1850, and whose title is used in the sense of a ‘seed’ germinating rather than anything biologically aggressive. A little magazine called The Germ today would be more likely to use the term with a dystopian frisson but The Germ of the 19th century celebrated nature. It was the magazine of the Pre-Raphaelites. They looked back, controversially, to medieval approaches in painting as a way, they hoped, of renewing English contemporary art. If you think of the 15th-century artist Botticelli’s painting Primavera, you can see some of the co-ordinates the Pre-Raphaelites took their bearings from. It is a mythological painting – the fertility of spring is embodied in the pregnant figure of Primavera – but it also attempts an almost scientific exactitude in the intricate flowers on the forest floor and the fruits in the forest canopy. The Pre-Raphaelites wanted to go back to such an approach, which stressed mythical, even religious storytelling at the same time as keen observation of the natural world.

Curious if Price knows about The Germ (1997-2005), created in homage? In any case, see more at The British Library.