Transatlantic Mediators: Grove Press, Evergreen Review and Postwar European Literature.
PhD Defense of 25 January 2016, Radboud University Nijmegen.
On 25 January, Maarten van Gageldonk defended his PhD titled Transatlantic Mediators: Grove Press, Evergreen Review and Postwar European Literature. In his thesis Van Gageldonk studied the American publisher Grove Press (1951-now) and its in-house literary magazine Evergreen Review (1957-1973). Drawing on a voluminous amount of archival materials housed at Syracuse University, the thesis reconstructs Grove Press’s role as a transatlantic cultural mediator, as it brought a wide variety of postwar, European avant-garde writers to the American literary market in the 1950 and 1960s. Among the most successful writers Grove Press introduced in the United States Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Eugène Ionesco, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Boris Vian. Next to charting the successes and failures of Grove Press’s European writers on the American literary market, this thesis also reevaluates current theories on cultural transfer and cultural networks, and is embedded in ongoing debates within the field of periodical studies.
Maarten van Gageldonk teaches American literature and culture at Leiden University and Amsterdam University, as well cultural and literary history at the ArtEZ Institute for the Arts in Arnhem.