- 41 views
- 45 downloads
The Literary Activism of Lillian Smith and Paula Snelling’s Little Magazine South Today
-
- Author / Creator
- Butchart, Megan Eileen
-
Between 1936 and 1945, white, queer, writer-activists Lillian Eugenia Smith and Paula Snelling co-founded and co-edited a small literary magazine from their home in Clayton, Georgia. Successively titled Pseudopodia (1936), The North Georgia Review (1937-1941), and South Today (1942-1945), the “little” magazine had thousands of readers at its height and was an important site of counter-discourse in the Jim Crow South. This thesis explores the magazine as a literary activist counterpublic that developed distinct but interrelated praxes of social and racial justice through its organizational structure and content, peripheral activisms, and readership. Looking beyond the magazine’s discursive content and editorial contributions, I explore how the counterpublic of South Today merged the capacities of the periodical form and its formation of print communities with practical efforts to enact written imaginaries in local and national spaces, as well as how such “on-and-off-the-page” activisms and publics continuously reinforced and advanced each other in co-constitutive ways. I draw on an interdisciplinary methodological framework of close reading, archival research, and data collection and interpretation, as well as the robust theoretical scholarship of periodical studies, public sphere theory, and social and political movement theory, including infrapolitics. Ultimately, this thesis asserts that South Today should be read as a literary activist counterpublic that developed an insightful understanding of the generative intersections of print, community, and activism. See https://doi.org/10.5683/SP3/BIH0ST for supplemental material related to this thesis.
-
- Subjects / Keywords
-
- Graduation date
- Fall 2022
-
- Type of Item
- Thesis
-
- Degree
- Master of Arts
-
- License
- This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Library with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.