Literate Zeal: Gender and the Making of a New Yorker Ethos
by Janet Carey Eldred
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014 Paper: 978-0-8229-6327-1 | Cloth: 978-0-8229-4409-6 | eISBN: 978-0-8229-7739-1 Library of Congress Classification PN4879.E53 2012 Dewey Decimal Classification 070.510820973
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
In Literate Zeal, Janet Carey Eldred examines the rise of women magazine editors during the mid-twentieth century and reveals their unheralded role in creating a literary aesthetic for the American public. Between the sheets of popular magazines, editors offered belles-lettres to the masses and, in particular, middle-class women. Magazines became a place to find culture, humor, and intellectual affirmation alongside haute couture.
Eldred mines a variety of literary archives, notably the correspondence of Katharine Sargeant White of the New Yorker, to provide an insider’s view of the publisher-editor-author dynamic. Here, among White’s letters, memos, and markups, we see the deliberate shaping of literature to create a New Yorker ethos. Through her discrete phrasing, authors are coaxed by White to correct or wholly revise their work. Stories or poems by famous writers are rejected for being “dizzying” or “too literate.” With a surgeon’s skill, “disturbing” issues such as sexuality and race are extracted from manuscripts.
Eldred chronicles the work of women (and a few men) editors at the major women’s magazines of the day. Ladies’ Home Journal, Mademoiselle, Vogue, and others enacted an editorial style similar to that of the New Yorker by offering literature, values, and culture to an educated and aspiring middle class. Publishers effectively convinced readers that middlebrow stories (and by association their audience) had much loftier pursuits. And they were right. These publications created and sustained a mass literacy never before seen in American publishing.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Janet Carey Eldred is professor of English, affiliate faculty in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the founding director of the Writing Initiative Studio in Engineering (WISE) at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Sentimental Attachments: Essays, Creative Nonfiction, and Other Experiments in Composition and coauthor of Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States.
REVIEWS
“A beautifully crafted homage to those editors and to the American literary aesthetic they created. . . . an ‘insider view’ that enriches our understanding of women editors in creating an American literature that otherwise wouldn’t have existed. . . . Eldred opens up fascinating new territory for understanding the inner workings of a magazine that was widely regarded as a woman’s magazine at this time.” —American Journalism
“The author ingeniously weaves together discussion of the magazines and their respective editors. This sharply written book sheds significant light on how gender informed author-editor-reader relations in twentieth-century magazine publishing. Highly recommended.” —Choice
"In recovering and re-visioning women's history, Eldred also calls into question the tendency of many social and literary histories to ignore the overlap between the kinds of authors and works published in 'literary' magazines and those published in what are conventionally seen as 'women's' magazines. While the book's focus is on the 'making of a 'New Yorker' ethos,' among Eldred's key points is that this ethos was not created in a vacuum." —Feminist Collections
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Preface: Haute Literacy
Introduction: Literacy, Gender, and the Rhetorical Work of Editing
One: Between the Sheets: Editing and the Making of a New Yorker Ethos
Two: “The Precision of Knives,” or More Than Just Commas
Three: Mademoiselle, the New Yorker, and Other Women’s Magazines
Conclusion: Lady Editors, Katharine White, and the Embodiment of Style
Afterword: Katharine White’s Bequest, or Ruminations on an Archive
Notes
Works Cited
Index
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
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Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
Literate Zeal: Gender and the Making of a New Yorker Ethos
by Janet Carey Eldred
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014 Paper: 978-0-8229-6327-1 Cloth: 978-0-8229-4409-6 eISBN: 978-0-8229-7739-1
In Literate Zeal, Janet Carey Eldred examines the rise of women magazine editors during the mid-twentieth century and reveals their unheralded role in creating a literary aesthetic for the American public. Between the sheets of popular magazines, editors offered belles-lettres to the masses and, in particular, middle-class women. Magazines became a place to find culture, humor, and intellectual affirmation alongside haute couture.
Eldred mines a variety of literary archives, notably the correspondence of Katharine Sargeant White of the New Yorker, to provide an insider’s view of the publisher-editor-author dynamic. Here, among White’s letters, memos, and markups, we see the deliberate shaping of literature to create a New Yorker ethos. Through her discrete phrasing, authors are coaxed by White to correct or wholly revise their work. Stories or poems by famous writers are rejected for being “dizzying” or “too literate.” With a surgeon’s skill, “disturbing” issues such as sexuality and race are extracted from manuscripts.
Eldred chronicles the work of women (and a few men) editors at the major women’s magazines of the day. Ladies’ Home Journal, Mademoiselle, Vogue, and others enacted an editorial style similar to that of the New Yorker by offering literature, values, and culture to an educated and aspiring middle class. Publishers effectively convinced readers that middlebrow stories (and by association their audience) had much loftier pursuits. And they were right. These publications created and sustained a mass literacy never before seen in American publishing.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Janet Carey Eldred is professor of English, affiliate faculty in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the founding director of the Writing Initiative Studio in Engineering (WISE) at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Sentimental Attachments: Essays, Creative Nonfiction, and Other Experiments in Composition and coauthor of Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States.
REVIEWS
“A beautifully crafted homage to those editors and to the American literary aesthetic they created. . . . an ‘insider view’ that enriches our understanding of women editors in creating an American literature that otherwise wouldn’t have existed. . . . Eldred opens up fascinating new territory for understanding the inner workings of a magazine that was widely regarded as a woman’s magazine at this time.” —American Journalism
“The author ingeniously weaves together discussion of the magazines and their respective editors. This sharply written book sheds significant light on how gender informed author-editor-reader relations in twentieth-century magazine publishing. Highly recommended.” —Choice
"In recovering and re-visioning women's history, Eldred also calls into question the tendency of many social and literary histories to ignore the overlap between the kinds of authors and works published in 'literary' magazines and those published in what are conventionally seen as 'women's' magazines. While the book's focus is on the 'making of a 'New Yorker' ethos,' among Eldred's key points is that this ethos was not created in a vacuum." —Feminist Collections
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Preface: Haute Literacy
Introduction: Literacy, Gender, and the Rhetorical Work of Editing
One: Between the Sheets: Editing and the Making of a New Yorker Ethos
Two: “The Precision of Knives,” or More Than Just Commas
Three: Mademoiselle, the New Yorker, and Other Women’s Magazines
Conclusion: Lady Editors, Katharine White, and the Embodiment of Style
Afterword: Katharine White’s Bequest, or Ruminations on an Archive
Notes
Works Cited
Index
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE