John K. Young
Professor of English,
Huntington, WV
President, 2023-25
Society of Textual Scholarship
Education
Ph.D., English, Northwestern University
M.A., English, Northwestern University
B.A., English, Princeton University
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Scholarly Interests
20th/21st-century American, British, and Anglophone literatures, focusing on the social dimensions of textual scholarship.
Through the documentary traces of textual production—drafts, manuscripts, alternate published versions, advertisements, covers, etc.—my research investigates the ways in which social and cultural systems impinge on texts as both material and immaterial entities.
Major Projects
The Souls of Black Texts: Double Consciousness and the Revised Versions of Modern Black Fiction (in development)
The Roots of Cane: Jean Toomer and American Magazine Modernism (Iowa, 2024, forthcoming)
How to Revise a True War Story: Tim O'Brien's Process of Textual Production (New American Canon Series, Iowa, 2016, 272pp)
"As O’Brien studies proceeds on its archival turn, John K. Young’s How to Revise a True War Story marks an auspicious beginning." —Alex Vernon, American Literary History Online Review
“...an indispensable study of the author and a pathbreaking work of textual scholarship and narratology that significantly revises our understanding of authorship and of what constitutes a ‘work’ of literature.”—Mark Heberle, author, A Trauma Artist: Tim O’Brien and the Fiction of Vietnam
Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth- Century African American Literature (Mississippi, 2006, 240pp)
"One hopes that Young's provocative, informative, and persuasive book will help to initiate a new and vital school of scholarship, editing, and pedagogy." —John Ernest, African American Review
"Black Writers, White Publishers is a nuanced analysis of the relationship between white publishers and black writers as an extension of the racism that permeates all aspects of American life.... This is fresh, well-conceived, and provocative new work." —Dwight McBride
Approaches to Teaching 20th and 21st-century American Short Fiction, edited by Jeehyun Lim and John K. Young (MLA Approaches to Teaching Series, 2024, in review)
Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850, edited by George Hutchinson and John K. Young (Michigan, 2013, 248pp)
"Publishing Blackness is a fascinating, thought-provoking, and long overdue collection." —Matt Cohen, University of Texas at Austin
"Publishing Blackness ... stands as an exemplary text that moves the field forward." —Glenda Carpio, American Literary History
A Careful Hunger: Poems by Judy Young, edited by John K. Young, Foreword by Mary Ann Taylor-Hall and Susan Starr Richards (University Press of Kentucky, 2019, 72pp)
"Young's art is shorn of artifice or decoration; through these uncompromising yet restrained poems, she expresses a yearning—for life, meaning love—that is pure, unflinching, and so honest that we as readers are brought to face ourselves: our own failings and desires." —Joan Aleshire
"Textual Continuity" (Textual Cultures 14:2, 2021: 30-59)
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