Katherine Anne Porter, Magic, and transition

Abstract

Although Katherine Anne Porter began her writing career in the magazines, these periodicals have been largely erased from critical discussions of her work. This essay begins to recover the neglected publication history of Porter’s magazine fiction by reading her short story “Magic” in the context of its original publication in transition. Eugene Jolas’s transnational, interwar magazine cultivated transformative literary innovations with a rhetoric of magic that Jolas developed throughout the magazine. By returning “Magic” to the “American Number” of transition where it first appeared, reading it alongside Jolas’s individual contributions to the magazine’s language of magic, and considering the ways it anticipated the verticalist theory that Jolas would go on to cultivate in the magazine, this essay recovers Porter’s contribution to the magazine’s aesthetic vision.