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publications, unpublished letters, and manuscript fragments obtained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.
