Hustlers in the Ivory: Press and Modernism from Mallarmé to Proust — the first book to explore how French modernism took shape in the mass press — is now available in paperback.
Currently shortlisted for 2025 R. Gapper Book Prize.
Hustlers in the Ivory Tower explores how French modernist writers, including Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Proust, used newspapers and magazines as a forum for literary experimentation. Drawing on extensive documentary research, this book looks behind the scenes at the wrangling and wheeling-dealing between authors, editors, and publishers that drove the rise of modernist literature in France.
These interactions with the press yielded nuanced, self-conscious portrayals of the tensions between journalism and literature in works of modernist poetry and prose that confront their own journalistic hinterland in unprecedented depth. At once a model and a foil, the newspaper emerges in Hustlers in the Ivory Tower as the locus of French literature’s broader struggle to come to terms with modernity.
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Reviews:
‘Cet ouvrage, remarquablement documenté et agrémenté d’une quinzaine d’illustrations, offre [...] un tour complet des rapports complexes qu’ont entretenus la presse et la littérature à l’époque où celle-ci entrait dans l’ère moderne.’
Pascal Ifri, Nineteenth-Century French Studies
‘In this ambitious and accomplished survey, Max McGuinness addresses the tensions embodied within the emerging “civilisation du journal”, in which writers who increasingly depended on newspapers nonetheless railed against their corrupting influence on their pages [...]. It is an incisive work of criticism, exploring a state of affairs that feels particularly relevant in our post-digital world.’
Lisa Hilton, Times Literary Supplement
‘An engaging and wide-ranging narrative of the tension between literature and journalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Hustlers in the Ivory Tower provides a smart and compelling account of the role of journalism in modernist French literature and its ongoing relevance in the 21st-century digital era.’
Karen Quandt, The French Review
‘McGuinness’s book makes a valuable contribution to a strand of nineteenth-century French studies concerned with the impact of periodical culture on literary forms. [This book] is impressive in the depth of its research, and in its nuanced portrait of the interlocking worlds of novelists, poets, and journalists over the years of the Third Republic.’
Edmund Birch, Romanic Review
‘McGuinness’s book shows impressive range. […] McGuinness is also incisive in establishing important socio-economic and political contexts for our understanding of the range and focus to be found in niche and mass publications of the period. […] A thought-provoking epilogue offering a transhistorical sketch of modernism concludes McGuinness’s absorbing study.’
Edward J. Hughes, French Studies
‘McGuinness, challenging scholars such as Pierre Bourdieu and those following his theory of a clear division between modernist literature and capitalist modernity (including the mass press), deftly breaks down such binaries throughout his book.’
Kristina Åström, Irish Journal of French Studies