Abram Foley. The Editor Function: Literary Publishing in Postwar America. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. 224p. Paper, $25.00 (ISBN: 978-1517911676).

Abstract

In The Editor Function: Literary Publishing in Postwar America, Abram Foley, a lecturer in English with a background in editing, embarks on the immense and complicated task of documenting the practice of postwar publishing and its theoretical underpinnings. Writing in response to academic criticism’s focus on the corporatization of US postwar publishing and omission of print culture in histories of postwar US literature, Foley centers the specific circumstances of individual editors, particularly those involved with smaller-scale, independent publications. Foley’s main thesis is that “editing…advances its own legible theories of textuality and meaning-making” (5). This editorial practice is historically situated and diverse in form, as Foley shows in his analysis of five case studies in the subsequent chapters. Each chapter combines close readings of texts written and published by the central editors with texts that inform these works. Foley illustrates how these “textual theories” inform and stem from “the workaday tasks of editing” (19).