Editorial labor was a crucial — but often overlooked — aspect of creating not only the body of work we now recognize as feminist poetry (and its varied lineages) but…
Issues
“The Most Sympathetic Reader You Can Imagine”: William Maxwell’s New Yorker and the Midcentury Short Story
William Maxwell is perhaps the most significant and least studied of midcentury American literary editors. This conjunction of literary impact and scholarly neglect tells us something about the constitutional reserve…
“It’s Only Vanity if It’s Not Good”: Daisy Aldan and Women Midcentury Small Press Publishers
“Well, if you’re a woman you put yourself somewhere near the beginning & then there’s this other place where you put yourself in terms of everybody” Alice Notley, Doctor Williams’ Heiresses…
The Chevalier and the Commahunter: Norman Holmes Pearson Edits Modernism
I would start out this essay with “Norman Holmes Pearson is best known as…,” but Norman Holmes Pearson isn’t particularly well-known as anything. For scholars of twentieth-century American literature, he surfaces…
Writer Conscious: Katharine S. White, Mary McCarthy, and Editing as Intimacy at The New Yorker
In a closely argued three-page letter in 1946, Mary McCarthy flatly rejected New Yorker editor Katharine S. White’s revisions to her latest submission. “I’m afraid that the new manuscript strikes a chill…
The Third Eye: Editorial Visions of the Draft Text
In a 1993 Paris Review interview, Toni Morrison identifies the value of editing: “Good editors are really the third eye. Cool. Dispassionate. They don’t love you or your work; for me that…
Introduction: Seeing Double: Editors in Postwar American Literature
When literary editors appear in fiction, they are often ambiguous and even duplicitous figures. The plot of Don DeLillo’s Mao II (1991) is set in motion in the top-floor office of a…
Afterword: Ten More Sites of Ambivalence in the “Open”
In the introduction to this special issue, we argued that ambivalence is a disposition animating all criticism, even if only its disavowal, but that ambivalence becomes particularly charged in criticism…
Caribbean Conflagrations: Camouflage, Ambivalence, and Anti-Analogical Entanglements
Beauty’s Blemish: Figuring Caribbean Landscapes The environmental figures that seek to portray the Caribbean’s strange place in the world can be easily recalled and most attributed to the work of…
Racialized Femininity and Representation’s Ambivalences in Trajal Harrell’s The Return of La Argentina
The audience is seated several rows deep, facing a blank gallery wall. As they wait, their chatter buzzes through the room. From an open panel at one side, Trajal Harrell…