The Politics of the Page

Abstract

This essay argues that attending to the bibliographic codes of early and multiple versions can enhance our understandings of the material forms of texts in the ways that George Bornstein modeled in Material Modernism. Focusing on modernist women’s complex engagements with print cultures, the essay analyzes pages from Willa Cather’s novel The Professor’s House, Zora Neale Hurston’s short story “Sweat”, Gwendolyn Brooks’s sonnet “the progress”, and Una Marson’s poem “Little Brown Girl”. These texts are most widely available in editions that place their richest print contexts “under erasure”. This essay argues that these kinds of material analyses can be used to center the work of Black women modernists as these approaches can enrich the research and teaching of less canonical texts without as many versions.