Book News: The key role of editors in the postwar era

The Editor Function: Literary Publishing in Postwar America

BY ABRAM FOLEY

U of Minnesota P, 2021

ISBN 978-1-5179-1167-6

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-editor-function

Michel Foucault famously theorized “the author function” in his 1969 essay “What Is an Author?” proposing that the existence of the author limits textual meaning. Abram Foley shows a similar critique at work in the labor of several postwar editors who sought to question and undo the corporate “editorial/industrial complex.” Marking an end to the powerful trope of the editor as gatekeeper, The Editor Function demonstrates how practices of editing and publishing constitute their own kinds of thought, calling on us to rethink what we read and how.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

The Editor Function follows avant-garde American literary editors and the publishing practices they developed to compete against the postwar corporate consolidation of the publishing industry. Foley studies editing and publishing through archival readings and small press and literary journal publishing lists as unique sites for literary inquiry. Pairing histories and analyses of well- and lesser-known figures and publishing formations, from Cid Corman’s Origin and Nathaniel Mackey’s Hambone to Dalkey Archive Press and Semiotext(e), Foley offers the first in-depth engagement with major publishing initiatives in the postwar United States.

The Editor Function proposes that from the seemingly mundane tasks of these editors—routine editorial correspondence, line editing, list formation—emerge visions of new, better worlds and fresh textual and conceptual spaces for collective action.

"The Editor Function fills an enormous void in the literary history of the postwar era. Abram Foley’s meticulous archival scholarship reveals the centrality—and the elusiveness—of editors and their practices. This is a must-read book for scholars of contemporary U.S. fiction and poetry, as well as for those interested in small-press publishing and avant-garde communities." —Paul Stephens, author of Absence of Clutter: Minimal Writing as Art and Literature

"If early modern Europe saw the ‘author function’ assume some of the social and legal roles traditionally played by publishers, Abram Foley shows us a more recent assumption of literary and artistic roles by editors. In the process, The Editor Function boldly extends the scope of literary history to the dynamic practices of publishing itself." —Craig Dworkin, author of Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography

Abram Foley is lecturer in literature and the creative industries at the University of Exeter. He has worked as editorial fellow for Dalkey Archive Press and is the founding editor of ASAP/J.

Book News: Reconsidering realism in contemporary British fiction

Rethinking Contemporary British Women’s Writing: Realism, Feminism, Materialism

BY EMILIE WALEZAK

Bloomsbury Academic, 2021

ISBN: 9781350171350

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/rethinking-contemporary-british-womens-writing-9781350171350/

Providing close readings of well-known British realist writers including Pat Barker, A.S. Byatt, Rose Tremain, Sarah Hall, Bernadine Evaristo, and Zadie Smith, this book uses new directions in material and posthuman feminism to examine how contemporary women writers explore the challenges we collectively face today. Walezak redresses negative assumptions about realism's alleged conservatism and demonstrates the vitality and relevance of the realist genre in experimenting with the connections between individual and collective voices, human and non-human meditations, local and global scales, and author and reader.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Considering how contemporary realist writing is attuned to pressing issues including globalization, climate change, and interconnectivity, this book provides innovative new ways of reading realism, examines how these writers are looking to reinvent the genre, and shows how realism helps reimagine our place in the world.

Emilie Walezak is professor of Contemporary English at the University of Nantes, France. A specialist of contemporary British women writing, she has devoted several articles to the works of Angela Carter, A.S. Byatt, Sarah Hall, Rose Tremain and Jeanette Winterson. She is the author of Rose Tremain. A Critical Introduction, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Book News: Delving into the shaded world of Philip Roth

Philip Roth: A Counterlife

BY IRA NADEL

Oxford UP, 2021

ISBN: 9780199846108

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/philip-roth-9780199846108?cc=us&lang=en&

This new biography of famed American novelist Philip Roth offers a full account of his development as a writer.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Philip Roth was much more than a Jewish writer from Newark, as this new biography reveals. His life encompassed writing some of the most original novels in American literature, publishing censored writers from Eastern Europe, surviving less than satisfactory marriages, and developing friendships with a number of the most important writers of his time, from Primo Levi and Milan Kundera to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow and Edna O'Brien. The winner of a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and the Man Booker International Prize, Roth maintained a remarkable productivity throughout a career that spanned almost fifty years, creating 31 works. But beneath the success was illness, angst, and anxiety often masked from his readers. This biography, drawing on archives, interviews and his books, delves into the shaded world of Philip Roth to identify the ghosts, the character, and even identity of the man.

"In Philip Roth: A Counterlife, Ira Nadel exposes the multifaceted disposition of this major voice in American letters: Roth the realist, the ironist, the ventriloquist, the impersonator, the bard. In navigating the intricacies and dualities of the public and private Roth, Nadel shows the complexities, the contradictions, and the counterlives both lived and imagined. As literary sleuth, Nadel has enriched the myriad possibilities for understanding this exacting and defiant writer and his work." 

-- Victoria Aarons, O.R. & Eva Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature, Department of English, Trinity University

 

"Philip Roth: A Counterlife engages and illuminates the scenes of discontent, betrayal, illness, and rage in Roth's own life that allow for new understandings of his work and relationships. Drawing on such primary source material as interviews, personal correspondence, and site visits, Nadel's biography penetrates the carefully composed narrative Roth presented publicly in order to present a "counter" Philip Roth, one who is at once more sympathetic to his readers than critics realize and more dynamic than even his self-creation allows. Nadel seamlessly weaves his interpretations of Roth's most provocative texts into the story of Roth's own life: a life shadowed by pain, illness, and personal injustices, but also illuminated by the joys of writing, ideas, and friendships that will persist long after his death." 

-- Aimee Pozorski, co-executive editor of Philip Roth Studies, professor of English at Central Connecticut State University

Ira Nadel is professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver and is the author of biographies of Leonard Cohen, Tom Stoppard, David Mamet and Leon Uris. He has also published Biography: Fiction Fact & Form, Joyce and the Jews and Modernism's Second Act, in addition to A Critical Companion to Philip Roth.

Book News: the gramophone's influence in Irish literature

 Ireland’s Gramophones: Material Culture, Memory, and Trauma in Irish Modernism

BY ZAN CAMMACK

Clemson UP, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-949-97977-0

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/55431/

Because gramophonic technology grew up alongside Ireland’s progressively more outspoken and violent struggles for political autonomy and national stability, Irish Modernism inherently links the gramophone to representations of these dramatic cultural upheavals. Many key works of Irish literary modernism—like those by James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Sean O’Casey—depend upon the gramophone for their ability to record Irish cultural traumas both symbolically and literally during one of the country’s most fraught developmental eras. In each work the gramophone testifies of its own complexity as a physical object and its multiform value in the artistic development of textual material. In each work, too, the object seems virtually self-placed—less an aesthetic device than a “thing” belonging primordially to the text. The machine is also often an agent and counterpart to literary characters. Thus, the gramophone points to a deeper connection between object and culture than we perceive if we consider it as only an image, enhancement, or instrument. This book examines the gramophone as an object that refuses to remain in the background of scenes in which it appears, forcing us to confront its mnemonic heritage during a period of Irish history burdened with political and cultural turbulence.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

The specificity with which this book, as quoted above, documents the arrival of the Edison’s invention is characteristic of its good use of historical sources to evoke the impact of the phonograph and later the gramophone in Ireland. Another strength is the alignment of such historical details to the machine’s technical realities; this is a book that uses diagrams, graphs, and tables to considerable critical effect. [...] In its marrying of careful textual analysis to historical detail and conceptual sophistication this lucid and engagingly written study should have a significant impact on future considerations of the intersection between technology and memory in Irish writing.

--Tom Walker, Estudios Irlandeses

Zan Cammack is a lecturer in the Department of English and Literature at Utah Valley University. Her research primarily focuses on studies of material culture in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature. She has published on Elizabeth Bowen, G.B. Shaw, Lennox Robinson, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Jane Austen (the latter two publications are manifestations of deep fangirling of said authors). Her current work is situated at the intersection of material culture and gender studies, including work on female performance studies in Samuel Beckett’s plays and flapper fashion and British politics.