Volume 20 | From the Editors of The Space Between
Volume 20 | 2024 | Searching for the Truly Strong Man: Masculinities 1914-1945As this volume reaches you, The Space Between is seeking a new general editor. As many of you know, I took an administrative position in June 2023 and the demands are such that I can no longer divide my time. The years I have spent in this role have been the best and most fulfilling of my academic life: working with authors and special issue editors to develop and publish valuable and important essays has been a thrill. We are now seeking an editor to take the journal into its next phase.
I am truly grateful to my partners in crime here at the journal, including Associate Editor Josh Lam, Book Review Editors Sarah Gleeson-White and Jess Masters, and proofreaders Jesse Cook and Ted Nesbitt. I am also grateful to our anonymous readers for their careful and expert judgement in evaluating manuscripts.
For this issue, we have a slate of essays on masculinity, curated by special issue editor Luke Seaber, a companion volume to our previous special issue “Searching for the Modern Girl” (Volume 18, 2022). In these volumes, we might link politics and gender through essays by Lisa Jackson (“Suffering Bodies”) and Lilean Buhl (“Commodification, Corporeality, Crisis?”); race and gender in essays by David Magill (“The ‘Savage Source’ of Desire”), Jesse Cook (“Hero to Zero”), and Ann Victoria Dolinko and B. A. Thurber (“Constructed Identity and Commodity Culture in My Lucky Star”); and the marketing of particular gendered images in essays by Luke Holmaas (“That Cagney Touch”) and Danielle Stewart (“Feminists and Fashion Plates”).
This volume has been particularly exciting as the material chimes and rhymes in unusual ways. The return of our “Dispatches” section features Eret Talviste’s translation of Leida Kibuvits’s “Ladybirdred,” which references Parisian Apaches, and I was delighted when, linking to Yves Tanguy’s painting for Tara Ainsworth’s essay on Fantomas and Surrealism, I found that one of the Fantomas novels is called Le policier Apache. Talviste’s introduction reminds us of the powerful impact of Tsarist, and later Soviet, Russia on neighboring states, as does Izabella Parowicz’s portrait of Bolesław Wieniawa-Długoszowski, a prominent political figure of interwar Poland.
There have been resonances outside the issue as well. I was recently at the Delaware Art Museum for a special exhibit Jazz Age Illustration. The exhibit, which ran from October 5, 2024 to January 26, 2025, included a number of images from The Saturday Evening Post that will resonate with Rachel Farebrother’s review of Adam McKible’s book Circulating Jim Crow. One illustration from the Post by Frank X. Leyendecker, “End of Vacation” (September 15, 1934), illustrates precisely McKible’s claims. And there were many images of the indomitable flapper, including Girls I Adore by McClelland Barclay (1934), an illustration for a piece of the same title by Alice-Leone Moats. These images, along with stunning sketches of Etta Moten Barnett, demonstrate the centrality and importance of the flapper, addressed in Michelle E. Moore’s review of two short story collections from the Jazz Age. A series of images from the exhibit is available online, but it cannot capture the robust and diverse representation of art production that the exhibit captures.
From Josh Lam, Associate Editor
My thanks go out to all the writers and contributors who helped this issue come together, including my fellow editors, proofreaders, and the readers who work anonymously behind the scenes. I am especially grateful to Jen Nesbitt, who has been an inspiring and gracious mentor to me, as well as a friendly and patient colleague. I have witnessed first-hand how the journal has flourished under her care—an ideal combination of wisdom, devotion, and openness. It’s been my privilege to learn from her, and I will miss her warm presence and guiding hand at the journal, even as The Space Between anticipates its next phase.
We close with a few congratulations associated with this volume of The Space Between:
- Alexandra Edwards, co-editor for our upcoming special issue on “Labor in the Space Between,” earned an honorable mention for her book Before Fanfiction: Recovering the Literary History of American Media Fandom (LSU Press, 2023) as part of the 35th Modern Language Association Prize for Contingent Faculty and Independent Scholars.
- Advisory Committee member (and volume 20 book reviewer) Laura Hartmann-Villalta and her colleague Heidi Herr won the MLA-EBSCO Collaboration for Information Literacy Prize for their course design for AS.004.101: Reintroduction to Writing: Sheridan Libraries Collaboration.
- Hannah Freed-Thall’s Modernism at the Beach, reviewed in this volume by Editorial Board member Debra Rae Cohen, was awarded the 2024 Book Prize from the Modernist Studies Association.
- Adam McKible's Circulating Jim Crow: The Saturday Evening Post and the War Against Black Modernity, reviewed in this volume by Rachel Farebrother, won the Research Society for American Periodicals (RSAP) Annual Book Prize.
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