Jean Toomer’s Magazine Auras

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John K. Young

Abstract

Drawing on George Bornstein’s idea of a “textual aura”, this essay proposes a distinct instantiation of this effect arising from the particular circumstances of periodical publication and reception, a magazine aura. Jean Toomer’s publications in a range of modernist magazines illustrate the manifestations of a magazine aura, with particular attention to Toomer’s appearances in Broom and The Little Review.

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Article Details

Section
For George Bornstein (August 25, 1941– February 2, 2021)
Author Biography

John K. Young, Marshall University

John K. Young is Professor of English at Marshall University, where he studies and teaches 20th- and 21st-century American, British, and Anglophone literatures, focusing especially on the social dimensions of textual scholarship. His essay in this issue draws from his forthcoming The Roots of Cane: Jean Toomer and American Magazine Modernism. Young has written Black Writers, White Publishers (2006) and How to Revise a True War Story (2017), and co-edited, with George Hutchinson, Publishing Blackness (2013); with Mary Ann Taylor-Hall and Susan Starr Richards, A Careful Hunger: Poems, by Judy Young (2019); and, with Jeehyun Lim, a forthcoming volume on 20th- and 21st-century U.S. short fiction for the MLA’s Options for Teaching Series. From 2010-21, he served as executive director of the Society for Textual Scholarship.