The Editor Function: Literary Publishing in Postwar America

Offering the everyday tasks of literary editors as inspired sources of postwar literary history

Michel Foucault famously theorized “the author function” in his 1969 essay “What Is an Author?” proposing that the existence of the author limits textual meaning. Abram Foley shows a similar critique at work in the labor of several postwar editors who sought to question and undo the corporate “editorial/industrial complex.” Marking an end to the powerful trope of the editor as gatekeeper, demonstrates how practices of editing and publishing constitute their own kinds of thought, calling on us to rethink what we read and how.
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