ISBN:
  Cloth: 978-0-89263-012-7
  Paperback: 978-0-89263-013-4
  Wirebound: 978-0-89263-014-1

Le Petit Journal des Refusées

• About the Editor

Although geographically isolated from the world cultural centers of the late nineteenth century, San Francisco was nevertheless very much a part of the age’s lively European and American exchange of new aesthetic ideas and forms. So when the artist and writer Frank Gelett Burgess published this one-of-a-kind sixteen-page pamphlet, printed on wallpaper, trimmed to a trapezoidal shape, and full of parodic references, he was making a critical argument about cultural networks and industries as well as creating an original and unique piece of humor. Purporting to be a publication consisting of works rejected by at least three other journals, Le Petit Journal des Refusées was really the work of Burgess and a few of his friends. This entertaining pamphlet would provide only passing interest if it were not for the remarkable degree of self-consciousness with which it exposed the social nature of aesthetic production. Le Petit Journal stands now as an engaging and thought-provoking artifact of late nineteenth-century international cosmopolitan culture. The publication is at once parodic and original, a work recognizing and declaring that artistic creation begins in the social sphere. Noted scholar Johanna Drucker brings Le Petit Journal back to light in this new facsimile edition, brilliantly explicated by her Afterword detailing the intellectual ferment of the time. Drucker’s essay puts this remarkable artistic statement in a worldwide cultural context with the works of such luminaries as Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and Stéphane Mallarmé.

This volume is the first in Rice University Press’s new Literature by Design series. Literature by Design: British and American Books 1880-1930 consists of literary works published between 1880 and 1930 that foreground the vehicle of the book and the visible nature of language itself. Literature by Design titles incorporate facsimile reproductions of the original editions—all of which are noteworthy for the role design and typography played in shaping readers’ responses—along with new critical material by leading contemporary scholars.

About the Editor

Johanna Drucker is the inaugural Breslauer Chair in Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She has lectured and published widely on topics related to the history of writing, book arts, avant-garde art, contemporary aesthetics, and digital media. Her most recent book, SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2009. Drucker has held faculty positions at Yale, Columbia University, the University of Virginia, and University of Texas at Dallas and has been the recipient of Mellon, Getty, and Fulbright Fellowships. During the 2008-09 academic year, she was the Digital Humanities Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. In addition to her scholarly work, she is internationally known as a book artist and experimental writer. Her works are represented in special collections in libraries and museums worldwide.