The Margins of the Market: Women Writers and the US Publishing Industry in the Long 1950s
type: CreativeWork
description: This dissertation examines the intersection between the literature of the long 1950s "1945 through 1963" and the industry changes in the publishing world that shaped the experiences of authors and impacted the works making it to market. I examine how women authors and the field of publishing responded to the increasingly conservative culture from the end of WWII through the early 1960s. In addition to looking at how women authors operated within a restrictive cultural climate to retain access to the public market for their works and their careers, I also unpack the ways publishers responded to women writers and how women writers are portrayed in the public market. Utilizing the methodologies of book history and literary scholarship, I scrutinize the complexities of textual creation and how this process "one often imagined as purely creative" is shaped by market and cultural conditions, and how authors' responses to these conditions can produce texts that have the potential to reshape the market and culture. Throughout this dissertation, I examine the undercurrents of raced-, classed-, and gendered-expectations affecting women's authorship and the market for women's work. Through archival research, I uncover how authors' interactions with their publishers, editors, and agents were shaped by gendered and raced market pressures. I also explore reviews, marketing materials, interviews, and book covers to see how authors were marketed to either fit with or challenge expectation and appeal to certain cultural values given the site of publication and generic conventions. And lastly, I evaluate how publicity and authorship are portrayed in women writers' fiction, how this was undergirded by the threat of violence, and how this violence was countered or subverted. The authors I consider here" Ann Petry, Dorothy B. Hughes, Laura Z. Hobson, Shirley Jackson, Carson McCullers, and Dorothy West" represent a spectrum of authors published in both trade and mass-market fiction. In C…
abstract: This dissertation examines the intersection between the literature of the long 1950s "1945 through 1963" and the industry changes in the publishing world that shaped the experiences of authors and impacted the works making it to market. I examine how women authors and the field of publishing responded to the increasingly conservative culture from the end of WWII through the early 1960s. In addition to looking at how women authors operated within a restrictive cultural climate to retain access to the public market for their works and their careers, I also unpack the ways publishers responded to women writers and how women writers are portrayed in the public market. Utilizing the methodologies of book history and literary scholarship, I scrutinize the complexities of textual creation and how this process "one often imagined as purely creative" is shaped by market and cultural conditions, and how authors' responses to these conditions can produce texts that have the potential to reshape the market and culture. Throughout this dissertation, I examine the undercurrents of raced-, classed-, and gendered-expectations affecting women's authorship and the market for women's work. Through archival research, I uncover how authors' interactions with their publishers, editors, and agents were shaped by gendered and raced market pressures. I also explore reviews, marketing materials, interviews, and book covers to see how authors were marketed to either fit with or challenge expectation and appeal to certain cultural values given the site of publication and generic conventions. And lastly, I evaluate how publicity and authorship are portrayed in women writers' fiction, how this was undergirded by the threat of violence, and how this violence was countered or subverted. The authors I consider here" Ann Petry, Dorothy B. Hughes, Laura Z. Hobson, Shirley Jackson, Carson McCullers, and Dorothy West" represent a spectrum of authors published in both trade and mass-market fiction. In C…
author: West-Brownell, Laura
keywords: Authorship, Gender, Genre, Publishing
date published: 2024
date modified: 2026-07-27T21:48:09Z
provider: University of Nevada - Reno
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Nevada, Reno