Editing without Author(ity): Martha Ostenso, Periodical Studies, and the Digital Turn

“Good Morning, Son” serves as a useful example of how an editorial intervention might allow for a revitalized approach to Ostenso’s work from the perspectives of collaborative authorship, periodical studies, and middlebrow studies. I hope to illustrate how a text-based and author-centric editorial approach elides much of what makes Ostenso an interesting literary figure, whereas a digital social-text edition – or archive, or database, or arsenal – provides a variety of lenses through which her work can be productively revisited or, in the case of the short stories, encountered for the first time.