American writer Julia Peterkin (1880-1961) represents a downhill trajectory in terms of literary prominence, from the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1929 to obscurity now, almost 100 years later. For a few years in the 1920s and 1930s, Peterkin was one among few white American authors who wrote primarily about black American lives and experiences. She can be seen as a temporary ally in relation to the contemporary political and cultural situation of black America. This article focuses on Scarlet Sister Mary (1928), Peterkin's most famous and controversial novel, and explores what happened to her literary reputation later, in the historical context of the early 1930s and in connection with the publication of Roll, Jordan, Roll (1933). My claim is that Peterkin's work engages American history and American literary history from a specifically American point in time, post-plantation era and post-Hawthorne, that temporarily allows and even rewards the literary blackface and racial/racist oscillation of Peterkin as a poputchik writer, a fellow traveler in relation to black America.

“An age that is slipping out and an age that is hastening in”: The value of literary sociological analysis in Lacemaker Lekholm Has an Idea by Gustaf Hellström and In This Our Life by Ellen Glasgow (“An age that is slipping out and an age that is hastening in”. Värdet av skönlitterär sociologisk analys i Gustaf Hellströms Snörmakare Lekholm får en idé och Ellen Glasgows In This Our Life) 

This article presents a comparative study of two texts that are examples of largely forgotten works in terms of literary value and valuation: Snörmakare Lekholm får en idé [Lacemaker Lekholm Has an Idea] (1927) by Swedish writer Gustaf Hellström (1882–1953) and In This Our Life (1941) by American writer Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945). These two authors are radically different in many ways, for instance in terms of geographical outlook and positioning. Hellström was working as a foreign correspondent for many years, stationed in different parts of the world, and had an external, distanced view on Swedish society. Glasgow remained based in the American South throughout her career, and focused primarily on that setting in her novels even when she did travel. There are also significant similarities, not least in terms of the valuation of their work during and after their lifetimes. Hellström received De Nios Stora Pris in 1937, and Glasgow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1942, but both have been more or less forgotten later on. Both novels also offer a similar type of sociological analysis in the form of fiction tracing ideas, historical developments, and changing societies. The main literary function of the characters is to constitute various types, which enables a discussion of the ideas that they represent. The main function of families and generations is to represent historical changes. This type of novel of ideas fell out of fashion, which probably explains the devaluation in these two cases. Our comparative reading, based on Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s concept “contingencies of value”, allows us to investigate how this particular kind of sociological analysis in novels relates to literary history, literary value, and literary valuation. When these two novels can no longer fulfill their performative potential, they become more or less forgotten.

The valuation of literature, authorships, and individual texts ripples through time and space like waves. This pilot study which initiates a more extensive project on value considers Mälarpirater by Sigfrid Siwertz (1911) and The Yearling by Marjorie Rawlings (1938) and traces the literary valuation of these award-winning texts, usually seen as classic youth novels about wild boys. The authors were at approximately the same stage of their authorial life cycles at the time of publication, and both have been subject to major renegotiations in terms of value, but they are worlds apart when it comes to rhetorical position and style. The article draws up an inventory of the actors and value-creating acts in the valuation process, and discusses similarities and differences between two works that belong to such divergent contexts as the Swedish and the American literary arenas.

Conceptually, our readings draw on ideas from Pierre Bourdieu and Raymond Williams and operationalise a combination of these in relation to literary value. In the comparative analysis, we apply categories of value from previous Swedish literary research: style and form, knowledge, emotional, social, and economic values. The life cycles of the two authorships provide numerous examples of grounds for upward valuation and devaluation. The classification of Mälarpirater and The Yearling as youth novels, not least based on paratextual aspects, proves to be significant. Both Siwertz and Rawlings are more or less forgotten as authors today, but these works survived much longer than the authorships themselves.

Kay Boyle’s supplementary edition (1968) of Robert McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together (1938) is a self-deconstructive survey of the expatriate community of English and American writers and artists in Paris in the 1920s. Boyle’s version prompts questions about originality and autobiographical truth through the way in which her chapters are alternated with McAlmon’s chapters in a post-mortem “dialogue” or ghostwriting experiment and frequently seem to bracket or undermine his version of the “same” story. I am interested in the way in which self-writing and autobiography in general, and in particular experimental forms of collaborative, queer, or “mock” autobiography, have been used to conjure up supposedly True Stories of the Lost Generation and literary Modernism. Few crowds are as famous, as notorious, as surrounded by myth, as extensively written about in various more or less autobiographical texts, as the “in” crowd of writers, artists, critics and publishers in Paris in the 1920s. The story of Modernism, often a form of contemporary self-definition, has been told and retold and contested in a chorus of autobiographical and biographical discourses competing for the right to present the True Story. In my article, I explore how McAlmon and Boyle present their shared experiences of being American writers in exile in Europe in ways which are sometimes similar and sometimes widely divergent.

This study investigates three texts that can be provisionally defined as “Toklas autobiographies,” or inscriptions of “the true story of Alice B. Toklas.” These are Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book (1954) and What Is Remembered (1963) by Alice B. Toklas. While Stein’s text belongs to the canon, Toklas’ “own” autobiographies have been largely neglected in literary criticism and history. In order to counter this asymmetry, this study brings the three Toklas autobiographies together for analysis, and shifts the critical perspective to conceptualize the Stein-Toklas sexual/textual relationship as fundamentally reciprocal, Toklas as indispensable to Stein’s literary production, and Toklas as a cultural laborer and a writer of her own books.

The Toklas autobiographies are characterized by repetition. Repetition in autobiography creates a fundamental ambivalence: the possibility of a crucial split between historical person and autobiographical persona, between world and word. This abyss between text and hors-texte troubles discourse in general. However, autobiography is a special case, often considered particularly problematic in this regard, and the Toklas autobiographies make the text/life rift visible to an extent which is not typical of the genre. As lesbian autobiographies, moreover, these texts defy not only the protocol of autobiographical discourse but also the expectations of normative heterosexuality.

The main hypothesis of this study is that “the true story of Alice B. Toklas” resides in the destabilization and textualization of autobiographical truth, and in the strategic deauthorization of the author. Instead of looking for autobiographical truth, these texts can be reconsidered as practices of writing, as commodities, and in relation to the legendary division of labor in the Stein-Toklas marriage. Instead of looking for the author, these texts can be constructed as indications that Toklas’ authorial agency resides in a certain reverse discourse of absence.