A Case Study of Small Press Success in "The Rumpus" and "McSweeney’s": How Valuing Experimental Work and the Avant-Garde Generates Community

By Tamiya Anderson, Pfeiffer University

The publishing industry is in a time of continuous change. Small presses, or independent publishing houses, sustain an independent or fully staffed publishing team that manages a smaller enterprise than big-name publishers. As the industry moves in a direction that endures several transitions and developments, this paper works to catalog the efforts of certain small presses in this time of technological, operational, and structural flux. Since the fifteenth-century development of the printing press, the publishing industry has endured several core operational shifts.

Issue XIContent EditorsDecember 17, 2020publishing, modernist, experimentalism, magazine, literature, avante-gardeComment

“What is this thing, Lord?”: Matthew O’Connor and the Queer Theology of the Catholic Church in Nightwood (1937)

By Olivia Harris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The modernist novel Nightwood by Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) is a celebration of difference. Published in 1937,[1] it precociously spotlights the voices of those who are often marginalized: homosexuals, women, Jews, starving artists, political activists, the working class.[2] The story focuses on a lesbian love triangle in Paris:

Editorial, Issue XContent EditorsMay 4, 2020modernist, queer, queer theory, history, LGBTQ+, Catholicism, literature, culture, gender, ChristianityComment