Title Arranging stories : framing social commentary in short story collections by Southern women writers / Heather A. Fox

Published Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2022]

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Description 1 online resource (xii, 182 pages) : illustrations (some color) Contents Introduction: arranging stories as a frame for social commentary -- Mapping spacial consciousness in Kate Chopin's Bayou Folk (1894) -- Advocating for social justice in Ellen Glasgow's The Shadowy Third and Other Stories (1923) -- Preserving the hammock in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's When the Whippoorwill (1940) -- Reconstructing memory in Katherine Anne Porter's The Old Order Stories (1944, 1955, 1965) -- Epilogue: reading arrangement Summary "Between the 1880s and the 1940s, opportunities for southern white women writers increased dramatically, bolstered by readers' demands for southern stories in northern periodicals. Confined by magazine requirements and social expectations, writers often relied on regional settings and tropes to attract publishers and readers before publishing work in a collection. Selecting and ordering magazine stories for these collections was not arbitrary or dictated by editors, despite a male-dominated publishing industry. Instead, it allowed writers to privilege stories, or to contextualize a story by its proximity to other tales, as a form of social commentary. For Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Katherine Anne Porter-the authors featured in this book-publishing a volume of stories enabled them to construct a narrative framework of their own. Arranging Stories: Framing Social Commentary in Short Story Collections by Southern Women Writers is as much about how stories are constructed as how they are told. The book examines correspondence, manuscripts, periodicals, and first editions of collections. Each collection's textual history serves as a case study for changes in the periodical marketplace and demonstrates how writers negotiated this marketplace to publish stories and garner readership. The book also includes four tables, featuring collected stories' arrangements and publication histories, and twenty-five illustrations, featuring periodical publications, unpublished letters, and manuscript fragments obtained from nine on-site and digital archives. Short story collections guide readers through a spatial experience, in which both individual stories and the ordering of those stories become a framework for interpreting meaning. Arranging Stories invites readings that complicate how we engage collected works"-- Provided by publisher Bibliography Includes bibliographical references Notes Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on August 24, 2022) Subject American literature -- Southern States -- History and criticism American literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism Social justice in literature. Short story. American literature American literature -- Women authors Short story Social justice in literature Literature: history & criticism. Literature. Southern States Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. Literary criticism Literary criticism. Critiques littéraires. Form Electronic book LC no. 2022017932 ISBN 9781496840462 1496840461 9781496840493 1496840496 1496840488 9781496840479 149684047X 9781496840486

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