Writing for The New YorkerCritical Essays on an American Periodical
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About this book
Original critical essays on an iconic American periodical, providing new insights into twentieth-century literary culture
This collection of newly commissioned critical essays reads across and between New Yorker departments, from sports writing to short stories, cartoons to reporters at large, poetry to annals of business. Attending to the relations between these kinds of writing and the magazine’s visual and material constituents, the collection examines the distinctive ways in which imaginative writing has inhabited the ‘prime real estate’ of this enormously influential periodical. In bringing together a range of sharply angled analyses of particular authors, styles, columns, and pages, this book offers multiple perspectives on American writing and periodical culture at specific moments in twentieth-century history.
Key Features:- Eleven new perspectives on major American writers, including Roth, Cheever, Plath, and Updike, in relation to their first publication contexts
- Reconsiders modern and contemporary American writing and periodical culture, focusing critical attention on commercially successful ‘smart’ magazines
- Draws on new research in The New Yorker’s manuscript and digital archives
- A distinctive combination of close critical reading and cultural analysis
Reviews
‘Writing for The New Yorker is a rich and fascinating book that will receive considerable attention not only amongst academics, but also in the wider intellectual world.’Professor Andrew Thacker, Professor of English Literature, Nottingham Trent University
...conspicuously well-written and a pleasure to read.
Table of contents
Acknowledgements; Abbreviation; Notes on Contributors; Introduction, Fiona Green; I. Magazine and Marketplace; The New Yorker, the Middlebrow, and the Periodical Marketplace in 1925, Faye Hammill; 2. ‘We Stand Corrected’: New Yorker Fact-checking and the Business of American Accuracy, Sarah Cain; 3. Marianne Moore and the Hidden Persuaders, Fiona Green; II. Self-Fashioning; 4. Philip Roth’s Kinds of Writing, Bharat Tandon; 5. Spark’s Proofs, Deborah Bowman; 6. Sylvia Plath and ‘The Blessed Glossy New Yorker’, Linda Freedman; 7. The Distractions of John Cheever, Tamara Follini; III. Lightness and Gravity; 8. Portrait of the Rabbit as a Young Beau: John Updike, New Yorker Humorist, Thomas Karshan; 9. Sports at The New Yorker, Kasia Boddy; 10. The New Yorker Life of Hannah Arendt’s Mind, Duncan Kelly; 11. On Blustering: Dwight Macdonald, Modernism and The New Yorker, Tom Perrin; Index