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Jayne E. Marek addresses the contents and contexts of children’s magazine The Brownies’ Book under Jessie Redmon Fauset’s leadership in “Jessie Fauset and Her Readership: The Social Role of The Brownies’ Book.” By its own account, The Brownies’ Book was intended for “children of the sun” and included stories, letters, poems, songs, games, photographs, and illustrations. While the journal certainly addressed the era’s need for a sensible, encouraging publication aimed at black children and youth, the journal’s real significance extends much further. Many items in its pages speak as directly to adult readers as to young ones. With her editorial experience, how much did Fauset truly shape the ideas of the Harlem Renaissance, above and beyond her perceived role as a “proper lady” novelist? How do her editorial decisions reflect the era’s constraints in terms of gender, race, class, and literacy? How and why did The Brownies’ Book extend the topics and ideas promoted by The Crisis? Marek examines what Fauset’s editing strategies, at that crucial stage of American social history, meant to a public negotiating the complexities of African American identities in a changing and violent environment.

Gary Edward Holcomb discusses in “Editing Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille: A Groundbreaking Harlem Renaissance Novel Emerges from the Archive” how he and co-editor William Maxwell edited the manuscript and composed the introduction on its provenance and history, with attention given to comparing the two extant manuscripts of the novel, the array of correspondence and additional materials that have shed light on its progress and ultimate lack of publication, and the singular obstacles in the way of its publication over the past twenty years.

Dealing with early twentieth-century Black literature more broadly, Korey Garibaldi considers how racial segregation in twentieth-century American society and print culture has informed and undermined numerous achievements made possible by the digital turn in the humanities in “Desegregating the Digital Turn in American Literary History.” As just one valuable yet under-examined historical example, literary interracialism in the early twentieth century could offer digital humanities (DH) practitioners countless generative cases studies for considering when and where racial lines and related categories blur in the digitized past. Despite numerous problems and setbacks, there were countless experiments with literary pluralism in the forms of writing and working across racial divides in the first three decades of the twentieth century. By investigating the roots, dismantling, and re-emergence of segregation in literary culture—as well as shifts in how persons of Black African descent were racialized—Garibaldi offers a valuable case study for contextualizing the need for inclusive DH designs and professional collaborations.

The Coda identifies other translational phenomena related to writing New York that cover the latter part of the twentieth century to the present. More specifically, it highlights the presence of Edward Hopper’s work and potential influence on Iberian literatures. It reflects on the possibility of New York as a motif in Iberian literatures open to multiple re-creations.

Emanuela Kucik engages in a timely pedagogical study in “(Re-) Framing Black Women’s Liberation in the Classroom: Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Twenty-First-Century Editorial Frameworks,” wherein she uses Larsen’s Passing and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God as case studies for illuminating the editorial significance of the twenty-first-century frameworks that accompany recent printings of Harlem Renaissance literature and the transformative capabilities of analyzing said literature within the context of those frameworks. Kucik argues that today’s students are performing expansive, emancipatory readings of these novels, as they enter these classic texts after reading introductions that urge them to think about the novels’ protagonists and authors in the context of Black women’s liberation. These introductions guide students to think about how Clare, Irene, and Janie challenge the categorizations and limitations society tries to impose upon them; guidance from Edwidge Danticat and Carla Kaplan produces a practice of reading in which students approach the novels focused on the emancipatory capabilities embedded within their pages. Additionally, Kucik contends that these guided readings provide students with an amplified understanding of the ways that Larsen and Hurston pushed for robust, flexible, and liberated imaginings of Black womanhood.

Ross K. Tangedal interrogates a particular textual controversy that grew into an editorial controversy—the endings to Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing. In “Clad in the Beautiful Dress One Expects: Editing and Curating the Harlem Renaissance Text,” Tangedal surveys five editorial notes that accompanied five versions of Larsen’s novel, spanning over twenty years, in order to show the urgent need for greater bibliographical and editorial attention when investigating the Harlem Renaissance. Working without a complete textual record, a sound bibliographical foundation, or within the confines of a scholarly edition, the scholars who edited these versions present a case study in editorial controversy by virtue of their personal choices. Though an editor does, and must, make choices when preparing a text for publication, these scholars (rather than editors) made choices without the benefit of sound bibliographical evidence; all the more reason to demand a more thorough textual examination of the Harlem Renaissance. At the heart of this essay are issues of audience, reception, market dynamics, and access, as Tangedal argues for a more rigorous investigation into the dynamic relationship between the textuality and the materiality of Harlem Renaissance texts and the writers who created them.

In “Editing Edward Christopher Williams: From ‘The Letters of Davy Carr’ to When Washington Was in Vogue,” Adam McKible provides an historical account of the novel’s journey from the pages of The Messenger, through the multiple layers of publication and publicity, to the subsequent stewardship of the novel’s reception and legacy. McKible recounts the innumerable decisions—and some significant compromises, including the retitling of the novel—that were made along the way as well as what transpired after the novel’s release, including media appearances and the novel’s reception in and out of academia.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a fascination with the concept of ‘rhythm’ in a range of disciplinary and transdisciplinary contexts, a preoccupation which would later be developed in movements such as Henri Lefebvre’s ‘Rhythmanalysis.’ The experimental psychologists of the turn of the nineteenth century explored rhythm in relation to both the auditory and the visual, and showed a particular concern with the relationship between measures which were externally imposed and endogenous rhythms. This chapter looks at the ways in which locomotion––and in particular the locomotive railway––is used as an exemplum in rhythm studies, and then explores its auditory renditions in nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature and, as ‘implied sound,’ in silent film, in which the question of rhythm as auditory and/or visual becomes particularly charged.

John K. Young poses a series of editorial questions arising from the intersection of periodical and African Americanist studies in “The Renaissance Happened in (Some of) the Magazines.” How might we conceive of Harlem Renaissance “little” magazines along a spectrum of modernist magazine production? How should we edit the poems, stories, and essays of Harlem Renaissance figures within the run of a magazine, in such a way that editors can historicize that publishing context, in other words asking what it would have meant to encounter this text within its original publication history? Finally, how should editors of Harlem Renaissance works respond to the unique challenges posed by forms that are more ephemeral and diffuse than (many) books, especially when doing so often requires culling material from a wide range of archival sources? This kind of work, Young suggests, can position the works of the Renaissance within a more accurately historical framework, demonstrating both the extent of cross-racial textual production and circulation and the material constraints that often kept such cultural encounters temporary and contingent.

Darryl Dickson-Carr investigates the compositional history and issues of plagiarism and ownership in “The Two Gentlemen of Harlem: Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring, Richard Bruce Nugent’s Gentleman Jigger, and Intellectual Property.” Thurman and Nugent began writing drafts of novels with similar pseudonymous characters and events they had shared while they were roommates in 1928. However, since Thurman’s novel was published first, Nugent’s manuscript fell by the wayside until it was published posthumously in 2008. While some consider the episode a case of plagiarism, Dickson-Carr asks a more pertinent set of questions regarding the controversy: Who could claim ownership of the events both writers recount in their narratives? Do Nugent’s more prodigious talents lend him more credibility as the first to write of these events? Does Thurman’s editorial experience, critical eye, and reported production of a first draft make him more believable? Ultimately, Thurman and Nugent’s shared efforts reveal how much the New Negroes disdained the expectations laid at their feet, and how sometimes editing takes the form of being the first on the first on the scene.

In “Creative Conflict and Editorial Collaboration in Outline for the Study of the Poetry of American Negroes,” Shawn Anthony Christian reads Outline as a compelling way to understand how creative conflict and artistic collaboration within anthology building shaped the period. In doing so, Christian employs editorial theory and methods from print culture studies to reflect on and then analyze Outline’s content in relation to letters, drafts, production notes, interviews, and the less visible creative labor and exchange between editor Sterling Brown and James Weldon Johnson—editor of the earlier Book of American Negro Poetry (1922)—that went into completing the study guide. As Christian argues, though Brown’s aims predominate, especially in representing his and Johnson’s (initially) different perspectives on dialect, Outline is a collaborative instance of how the impulse to better understand and ultimately validate varied conceptions of black identity in print functioned as an editorial imperative.

The mutually beneficial patron/artist relationship of the period is examined by Adam Nemmers in “The Pawn’s Gambit: Black Writers, White Patrons, and the Harlem Renaissance.” With a particular focus on Zora Neale Hurston, Nemmers analyzes literature of the Harlem Renaissance through both racial and postcolonial lenses, providing a necessary correction to narratives that portray African American authors as pawns in a white man’s game, when the obverse was just as often true. As Nemmers argues, the interaction between white godparents and black godchildren, as patron Charlotte Osgood Mason termed them, was a hidden yet powerful force in “editing” the written work of the Harlem Renaissance before it ever reached publishers, much less readers. In sum, as patronage was such an essential component of literary production during this period, analysis of its editorial impact on the works produced thereof enlightens our understanding of the movement and its writers.

Chapter 5 argues that although Haiti's presence is relatively absent in much of Aída Cartagena Portalatín’s work, when Haiti is visible, it signals an important transformation in Cartagena's thinking about Dominican national identity; Russ shows that Cartagena eventually breaks loose from the discursive structures that define Dominican nationalism in twentieth-century Dominican literature and twentieth-century Dominican poetry as fundamentally anti-black and anti-Haitian.

Taking a more unique approach to his famous subject, Joshua M. Murray examines Langston Hughes’s editorial process for his two published autobiographies—The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder as I Wander (1956)—as well as his plans for a third autobiography that never materialized, in “Pure Essence without Pulp: Editing the Life of Langston Hughes.” Murray unpacks Hughes’s life writings from the perspective of literary construction and self-representation, two considerations Hughes attempted to balance. Murray extends editorial theory to incorporate the autobiographical process, taking into account Hughes’s multifaceted identity, and formulating a thorough explication of the self-fashioning of his protagonist persona. Additionally, other letters and archival materials from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s demonstrate Hughes’s keen awareness of autobiographical editing, as he deliberately planned his life story and meticulously edited the texts with an eye to the finished products and their eventual public reception. Such an approach sheds light on the editorial nature of autobiography, while also granting an unusually candid glimpse at Hughes’s understanding of the tension at play when self-identity, literary art, and public marketability intersect.

This chapter traces nearly ninety years of reading and writing on Virginia Woolf in Uruguay, focusing first on her early critical reception and then on distinguished Uruguayan writers who either explicitly or implicitly dialogue with her life and works. The study begins with Victoria Ocampo’s early engagements with Woolf’s works, which spurred translations initially on Orlando and A Writer’s Diary in the journals Sur, Marcha and Número. It then discusses the cultural context and early critical reception of Woolf in Uruguay, followed by the ways Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film The Hours kindled major interest in Woolf studies, leading many to re-read Mrs Dalloway and her other works. The chapter then moves on to consider Woolf’s influence on two major Uruguayan writers: Armonía Somers and Antonio Larreta. The final section looks at contemporary women writers who explicitly cite or ‘reverberate’ with Woolf: Cristina Peri Rossi, Alicia Migdal, Fernanda Trías and María Sánchez.

This chapter examines how Virginia Woolf, particularly her feminist literary manifesto A Room of One’s Own, shaped the fictions of the contemporary avant-garde Chinese feminist writer and essayist Chen Ran, whose works depict Chinese women’s subjective and introspective experiences and desires from three perspectives. First, Woolf’s idea of a room of one’s own lays the theoretical and metaphorical feminist basis for Chen Ran’s works. Next, Woolf’s idea of androgyny inspires Chen Ran’s concept of ‘gender-transcendent consciousness’. Third, Woolf’s call for women’s writing – in particular her expression ‘Chloe liked Olivia’ – becomes the literary source and inspiration for Chen Ran’s notion of sisterly affection, which turns out to be an excellent example of gender-transcendent consciousness. Strongly influenced by Woolf, Chen Ran has created many new images of Chinese women with rebellious and insightful outlooks such as the perspectives of Yun Nan from ‘Breaking open’ (2002) and Ni Niuniu from A Private Life.