Pynchon in Popular Magazines

Any devoted Pynchon reader knows that “The Secret Integration” originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post and that portions of The Crying of Lot 49 were first serialized in Esquire and Cavalier. But few readers stop to ask what it meant for Pynchon, already a reclusive figure, to publish in these popular magazines during the mid-1960s, or how we might understand these texts today after taking into account their original sites of publication. “The Secret Integration” in the Post or the excerpt of Lot 49 in Esquire produce different meanings in these different contexts, meanings that disappear when reading the later versions alone

Virginia Woolf\u27s Publishing Archive

Woolf the publisher remains that “drab figure in the gray overalls” for many Woolf scholars, despite an abundance of archival material documenting Woolf’s role as publisher. The most familiar Woolf archives are of course the manuscripts and drafts, many now in print, that have inescapably changed the way we read Woolf’s published texts

Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, and Postmodern Popular Audiences

In this essay the author examines the Oprah Effect on the career of Toni Morrison, who after three appearances on Oprah\u27s Book Club has become the most dramatic example of postmodernism\u27s merger between Morrison\u27s canonical status and Winfrey\u27s commercial power has superseded the publishing industry\u27s field of normative whiteness, enabling Morrison to reach a broad, popular audience while being marketed as artistically important

Versions of an Arab American Identity: Toward a Revision Narrative for Rajia Hassib’s In the Language of Miracles

This essay compares the draft and published versions of three central chapters in Rajia Hassib’s 2015 novel In the Language of Miracles, as a smaller instance of what John Bryant terms a revision narrative. The key differences in characterization across the evolution of the narrative, along with the elements of a related character that remain largely unchanged, indicate the ways in which Hassib negotiates public and private versions of a gendered Arab American identity. By revising one chapter to remove a scene depicting a public assault in a pharmacy, the essay concludes, Hassib resists familiar narratives constraining Arab American subjects within a post-9/11 Orientalism

“Murdering an Aunt or Two”: Textual Practice and Narrative Form in Virginia Woolf’s Metropolitan Market

As evidence for the multiple connections between the commercial and intellectual freedoms provided by the Hogarth Press for its co-owner and leading author, consider a diary entry from September 1925: How my hand writing goes down hill! Another sacrifice to the Hogarth Press. Yet what I owe the Hogarth Press is barely paid by the whole of my handwriting…I’m the only woman in England free to write what I like. The others must be thinking of series’ & editors. Yesterday I heard from Harcourt Brace that Mrs. D & C.R. are selling 148 & 73 weekly--Isn’t that a surprising rate for the 4th month? Doesn’t it portend a bathroom & a w.c. either here, or Southease? (D 3: 42-43) Virginia Woolf was free to write what she liked because of her books’ sales in the UK and the US, and, simultaneously, because no editor (with the very occasional exception of Leonard) interfered with her authorial choices. As this passage shows as well, Woolf’s royalties represented more mundane freedoms—a bathroom renovation portended by the American sales of Mrs. Dalloway and the first Common Reader, and two years later the Woolfs’ first car, financed by the sales of To the Lighthouse. More significantly, the Hogarth Press functioned as a professional sphere in which Woolf’s work as writer, editor, and publisher overlapped and intersected. While most scholars have emphasized the importance of the Press in Woolf’s authorial development, or more occasionally, as an emotional respite provided by the act of setting type by hand, few have actually considered Woolf herself as an editor and publisher. But thanks to the Press, Woolf could not only write what she liked, she and Leonard could also publish her books as they liked and shape the list within which they would appear in Britain. Finally, the publishing choices Leonard and Virginia made, especially once Hogarth shifted from its handpress origins to its more commercial horizons in the later 1920s and through the 1930s, generated further freedoms for Woolf the author. The extraordinary sales (by Hogarth standards) of Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians (1930), or of C. H. B. Kitchin’s murder mystery Death of My Aunt (1929), coincided with Woolf’s own commercial successes in Orlando and A Room of One’s Own, and directly preceded her most experimental (and least accessible) publication, The Waves. As Lee Erickson concludes, “literature is materially and economically embedded in the reality of the publishing marketplace” (8). While most authors work with and/or against their publishers in an effort to attain the “momentary equilibrium between the aspirations of writers and the desires of their audiences” (Erickson 8), Woolf as her own publisher was uniquely positioned to adapt her books’ forms and dissemination to a keen sense of her British and American audiences. Against this historical backdrop, I explore the relationship between textual practice and narrative form in Woolf’s career, asking how her experiences as an editor and publisher shaped the kinds of texts she produced as an author, and how her search for authorial freedom informed her practices as a publisher. That is, my approach to Virginia Woolf and the literary marketplace takes up that relationship both through Woolf the self-published author and through Woolf the editor and co-publisher of many other significant modernist texts. This approach asks questions about how Woolf responded as an author to the desires of the British reading public, and how she helped “set the field,” in George Bornstein’s terms, of modern fiction in Britain and beyond during the 1920s and 1930s, “both by deciding what works came to the public and by determining the form in which those works appeared” (“Editing Matters” 2)

Canonicity and Commercialization in Woolf\u27s Uniform Edition

This paper considers Virginia Woolf the publisher alongside Virginia Woolf the author. While the Hogarth Press has long been known for making Woolf the only woman in England free to write what I like, it also made her free to be published as she liked. Hogarth, Jane Marcus argues, gave Woolf a way of negotiating the terms of literary publicity, and a space somewhere between the private, the coterie, and the public sphere (144-5). I will examine one such negotiation, the Uniform Edition of Woolf\u27s works, a series designed to capitalize on her growing recognition and marketability. Once the Woolfs had become, in Leonard\u27s words, more or less ordinary publishers (Rosenbaum, 7), they began marketing their books in more or less ordinary ways, and these included a construction of Woolf through the Uniform Edition as both canonical and commercial, a crucial combination, I will conclude, for modernist women writers

William Plomer, Transnational Modernism and the Hogarth Press

William Plomer (1903–73), a self-described Anglo-Afro-Asian novelist, poet, editor and librettist, spent only the early years of his lengthy career as a Hogarth Press author but still ranks as one of the Woolfs’ most prolific writers, with a total of nine titles issued during his seven years with the Press. Like Katherine Mansfield, Plomer made his mark with Hogarth before signing with a more established firm, but the depth and breadth of Plomer’s career with the Woolfs is significantly greater: his five volumes of fiction presented Hogarth’s readers with groundbreaking portraits of South African, Japanese and (British) working class cultures. In 1933 Plomer moved to Jonathan Cape, though he continued publishing poetry with Hogarth, both in his own volumes and in John Lehmann’s collections, into the 1940s. Beginning in 1937, Plomer replaced the famed Edward Garnett as Cape’s editorial adviser, serving in that capacity for the remainder of his career.1 Though perhaps now best known, especially in Britain, for the finely crafted verse of his later years, Plomer is a noteworthy figure in new histories of modernism for his role in the international scope of that movement. In this essay I focus primarily on Plomer’s South African fiction, especially Turbott Wolfe (1926) and ‘Ula Masondo’ (1927), two incisive portraits of racialisation’s effects on both black and white subjects, aimed at a British reading public. While his later Hogarth novels, Sado (1931) and The Case Is Altered (1932), may seem to lack the experimental dynamism of Turbott Wolfe, I locate their underlying social subversiveness through queer narratological readings. Finally, I relate Plomer’s career with the Woolfs to their own transition from a coterie Bloomsbury hand press to a ‘proper publishing business’ by the 1930s, in Leonard’s words (Downhill 68)

Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

The famous skywriting scene in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway owes more to 1920s advertising culture than has been previously recognized. In their rapt reading of the “Kreemo” aerial ad, the London pedestrians create both a commentary on consumerism and a model of collaborative, modernist reading

The Principal Axis of the Virgo Cluster

Using accurate distances to individual Virgo cluster galaxies obtained by the method of Surface Brightness Fluctuations, we show that Virgo's brightest ellipticals have a remarkably collinear arrangement in three dimensions. This axis, which is inclined by 10 to 15 degrees from the line of sight, can be traced to even larger scales where it appears to join a filamentary bridge of galaxies connecting Virgo to the rich cluster Abell 1367. The orientations of individual Virgo ellipticals also show some tendency to be aligned with the cluster axis, as does the jet of the supergiant elliptical M87. These results suggest that the formation of the Virgo cluster, and its brightest member galaxies, have been driven by infall of material along the Virgo-A1367 filament.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ Letter