Literate Zeal: Gender and the Making of a New Yorker Ethos

Author(s):
Janet Carey Eldred
Book summary:

In Literate Zeal, Janet Carey Eldred examines the rise of women magazine editors during the mid-twentieth century and reveals their unheralded role in creating a literary aesthetic for the American public. Between the sheets of popular magazines, editors offered belles-lettres to the masses and, in particular, middle-class women. Magazines became a place to find culture, humor, and intellectual affirmation alongside haute couture.



Eldred mines a variety of literary archives, notably the correspondence of Katharine Sargeant White of the New Yorker, to provide an insider's view of the publisher-editor-author dynamic. She chronicles the work at the major women's magazines of the day: Ladies' Home Journal, Mademoiselle, Vogue, and others enacted an editorial style similar to that of the New Yorker by offering literature, values, and culture to an educated and aspiring middle class. These publications created and sustained a mass literacy never before seen in American publishing.

 

Publication year:
2014
Publisher:
University of Pittsburgh Press
Praise:
Quote:
"A beautifully crafted homage to those editors and to the American literary aesthetic they created. . . . an 'insider view' that enriches our understanding of women editors in creating an American literature that otherwise wouldn't have existed. . . . Eldred opens up fascinating new territory for understanding the inner workings of a magazine that was widely regarded as a woman's magazine at this time."
Credit:
American Journalism
Quote:
"Eldred recounts the fascinating history of the New Yorker's development as an iconic literary institution, reconstructing the publishing culture of the early-to-middle twentieth century, when slick mass-circulation magazines regularly published stories and poems by the day's literary stars....Eldred makes it fresh by using the particular case of the New Yorker to trace the influence of female editors and readers in the creation of a national appetite for what she terms 'haute literacy.'"
Credit:
Georgia Review
Quote:
"In recovering and re-visioning women's history, Eldred also calls into question the tendency of many social and literary histories to ignore the overlap between the kinds of authors and works published in 'literary' magazines and those published in what are conventionally seen as 'women's' magazines. While the book's focus is on the 'making of a 'New Yorker' ethos,' among Eldred's key points is that this ethos was not created in a vacuum."
Credit:
Feminist Collections
Quote:
"Long excerpts from White’s correspondence with authors and with other New Yorker staff comprise so much of Literate Zeal that one may enjoy the book as an intimate and revealing epistolary biography of an important figure in twentieth-century American print culture. And Literate Zeal is indeed such a book, but Eldred clearly has more than that in mind, writing, ‘One can’t simply make autobiography, memoir, and personal letters stand in for critical histories.’” And as a critical history, Literate Zeal is a pointed intervention in the history of feminist media studies..."
Credit:
Sean Zwagerman, Peitho
Bio:
Photo:
Short bio:
Janet Carey Eldred is Professor of English and affiliate faculty in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies. She is the author of four books. In collaboration with Peter Mortensen, she authored "Reading Literacy Narratives."
A&S department affiliation:
Book URL:
https://www.upress.pitt.edu/books/9780822963271/