The high cultural profile of contemporary feminist publishing in Britain has
previously met with a curiously evasive response from those spheres of academic
discourse in which it might be expected to figure: women's studies, while asserting the
innate politicality of all communication, has tended to overlook the subject of publishing
in favour of less materialist cultural modes; while publishing studies has conventionally
overlooked the significance of gender as a differential in analysing print media. Siting
itself at this largely unexplored academic juncture, the thesis analyses the complex
interaction of feminist politics and fiction publishing in twentieth-century Britain.
Chapter 1 -" 'Books With Bite': Virago Press and the Politics of Feminist
Conversion" - focuses on Britain's oldest extant women's publishing venture, Virago
Press, and analyses the organisational structures and innovative marketing strategies
which engineered the success of its reprint and original fiction lists. Chapter 2 looks back
to Elizabeth Corbet Yeats's early-twentieth-century Cuala Press, a prominent element in
the Irish literary revival and debates around women's relationship to nationalist agendas.
The experience of The Women's Press, Black Woman Talk and Sheba Feminist Publishers
constitutes the crux of Chapter 3 - " 'Books of Integrity': Dilemmas of Race and
Authenticity in Feminist Publishing" - which reads these presses as challenges to the
early-second-wave women's movement insistence on the primacy of sisterhood for
women's identity politics. Chapter 4 investigates feminist publishing's historical
involvement in Edwardian suffrage politics and the vexed role of men within feminist
publishing enterprises. Radical feminist and lesbian publishing is scrutinised in Chapter
5- "Collective Unconscious: The Demise of Radical Feminist Publishing" - which centres
upon Onlywomen Press, Sheba and Silver Moon Books, and explores the problematic
nature of the collective principle for women's media enterprises. The concluding chapter
- "This Book Could Change Your Life': Feminist Bestsellers and the Power of
Mainstream Publishing" - assesses the impact of feminism on mainstream post-war
publishing. It critiques the ways in which mainstream houses' commissioning, design
and marketing of canonical feminist texts have frequently militated against their
oppositional content.
Central to the analysis as a whole is the dynamic tension arising from the
conjunction of radical politics and the commercial market-place, a relationship in which
the contesting exigencies of political progressiveness and business solvency create an
energising - though volatile - dialectic