Our panel seeks to extend this revival of interest in specifically post-1945 institutions to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth- centuries. In the United States, the turn of the twentieth century saw the birth of the English department; the rise of little and mass market magazines; the growth of evening schools for immigrants, workers’ education programs, and literary clubs; and the establishment of professional literary associations, archives, and cultural foundations. These were transformative years for US literary institutions, and yet this period remains relatively understudied amid the scholarly turn toward infrastructure and institutionalism.
Our panelists include graduate students, a postdoctoral fellow, and an associate professor. Their brief 15-minute presentations make visible a world of readers, writers, and workers in the culture industries that have gone unnoticed. The chair will ensure that at least 15 minutes remain for open discussion.
Ena Ozaki’s paper argues that women’s press associations serve as a lens through which to view the intersections between Progressive reform and the literary marketplace. In the 1880s, American women working in the literary and journalistic fields established women’s press associations across the country to work together on reform and philanthropic work through the power of the pen. Focusing on the 1884 establishment of the National Woman’s Press Association, Ozaki will demonstrate that the women’s press associations used “the press” as an inclusive umbrella term and ultimately expanded the possibilities of journalism. The NWPA and many other women’s press associations accepted a diverse range of women, from full-time newspaper reporters to magazine editors, literary critics, and authors. This inclusive view of “the press” enabled reform-minded women in literature and journalism to work together to amplify their voices and fight against injustice in the workplace.
Sheila Liming’s paper focuses on the institutional exchange between Daniel Berkeley Updike, an American printer and typographer, and the author Edith Wharton. After typesetting and designing Wharton’s first book, an interior design manual called The Decoration of Houses (1897), Updike went on to do the same for her four earliest literary works. Liming argues that Wharton’s reputation as a serious literary figure was supported by Updike’s design schemes for her books, which resulted in consistent aesthetic details that announced Wharton’s literary “brand.” At the same time, Wharton’s investment in Updike’s work— brokered through arrangements with her first publisher, Scribner’s—served to increase the Merrymount Press’s profile, resulting in a situation of “mutual patronage,” and enhanced reciprocity between two important American literary institutions.
Alex M. Anderson’s paper examines Black women writers’ contributions to the Birth Control Review, a periodical established by Margaret Sanger in 1917. The Birth Control Review featured reports, testimonies, and paratextual illustrations urging families’ reproductive decisions be determined by the eugenicist dogma “quality over quantity.” The Birth Control Review also sometimes featured poetry and short fiction; more occasionally still, these creative works were authored by Black women. Anderson examines how Black women’s fictive contributions, particularly Angelina Weld Grimké’s stories “The Closing Door” (1919) and “Goldie” (1920), nuance this literary institution’s political aims. She argues that Grimké employs gothic tropes to express the range of Black women’s concerns about motherhood in a society obsessed with race and racial purity. The critical commentary that this strain of macabre fiction provides is particularly prescient nearly one hundred years later, when reproductive rights have re-entered the cultural imagination in prominent—and terrifying—ways.
Finally, Michelle A. Taylor’s presentation argues that turn-of-the-century archives have become a site of cruel optimism. In an archive, scholars can explore without an agenda, suspend the imperative to polemic and the prohibition against attachment. The romance of the archive makes its way into writing about archives — from fiction to scholarship. Yet the archive’s contents are also tokens of scholarly authenticity, proving the real labor of the academic and the importance of their work: the haystack’s needle might make a career, or at least a summer’s paycheck. Taylor examines contemporary fiction set at turn-of-the-century archives and scholarly books that explore archival histories from the early 20th century to suggest that literary culture is now in its archival era.