Arranging Stories

Arranging Stories is a literary and cultural history of short story collections by four southern women writers—Kate Chopin’s Bayou Folk (1894); Ellen Glasgow’s The Shadowy Third (1923); Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s When the Whippoorwill (1940); and Katherine Anne Porter’s The Old Order Stories in The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944), The Old Order: Stories of the South (1955), and The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965)—that examines writers’ negotiations of a changing periodical marketplace alongside their publications of collected volumes. In the 1880s-90s, opportunities for southern white women writers increased dramatically, bolstered by readers’ demands for southern stories in northern periodicals. Yet, confined by magazine requirements and social expectations, writers often relied on regional settings and tropes to attract publishers and readers. Publishing a short story collection, unlike other genres, allowed a writer to transcend popular magazine contexts to construct a narrative framework of her own. Drawing upon archived correspondence, manuscripts, periodicals, and collections, the book argues that selecting and ordering magazine stories for short story collections was not arbitrary or dictated by editors, despite a male-dominated publishing industry. Instead, collected volumes conveyed an author’s intention for how to envision a single text in relation to a larger oeuvre by privileging stories, or contextualizing a story by its proximity to other tales, as a form of social commentary. It complicates how we read collective works by situating narrative selection and arrangement as a critically relevant frame for reading and interpreting text.