The Blind Bow-Boy by Carl Van Vechten
- Submitting institution
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University of Newcastle upon Tyne
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 231333-121824-1282
- Type
- R - Scholarly edition
- DOI
-
-
- Title of edition
- MHRA Critical Texts
- Publisher
- MHRA
- ISBN
- 9781781882900
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- August
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
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http://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/Blind-Bow-Boy-by-Carl-Van-Vechten
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- Yes
- Additional information
- This critical edition performs important work in the development of research on Carl Van Vechten, literary modernism, and queer modernism. Through its substantial critical apparatus (7,000 words of introductory and bibliographic information and over 10,000 words of annotations), this recuperation of an out-of-print text brings to the fore new perspectives on Van Vechten that have been overshadowed by scholarship that focuses on the Harlem Renaissance context and on his homoerotic photography. With respect to literary modernism, the edition situates Van Vechten as a leading figure of a school of writers that were at once popular and critically acclaimed. Such writers, the edition argues, cannot be accommodated to the categories of high, low, or middle-brow modernism and are better thought of as exemplars of what can be called “arched-brow” modernism – a knowing, wry, and sophisticated mode. The edition also showcases the novel as an exemplification of Van Vechten’s queer or camp aesthetic in a literary, rather than photographic, mode and considers how this aesthetic enabled him to write a novel of queer identity that circulated in the mainstream. The editorial work, thus, functioned to direct the reader to decoding this coded text which relies heavily on literary, cultural, and artistic allusions, many of them highly topical and context specific. Archival research in his papers at the New York Public Library was integral to framing these “arched-brow” and queer readings of the text. Van Vechten’s scrapbooks, for example, contain reviews not only of his own works, but all reviews in which he is mentioned, enabling the theorization of a school of writing. Beyond this, the collections body of “fan” letters was integral to demonstrating the degree to which readers, queer and straight, understood or sought to understand the meaning of the text.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -