Toward a Taxonomy of the Unpublished.

Unpublished texts come in many forms: rejected submissions, lost manuscripts, unfinished, sometimes fabled, books. Our present moment, in which archival practices have made unpublished material widely accessible and the internet has frayed the binary un/published distinction, offers a perspective from which to view the unpublished within US literary history. Attending to the various circumstances in which writing went unpublished draws out the contingencies and inequities of publication and the transgressive allure of writing that, in one way or another, was not supposed to be read. F. Scott's Fitzgerald's lost short stories gain value from at first being rejected; Claude McKay's novel was lost to the structural racism that thwarted the careers of mid–twentieth-century Black writers; and Eileen Myles' various lost poems and notebooks suggest, perhaps, a casualization of attitudes toward getting work published. An awareness of the unpublished structures and illuminates our engagement with published writing. It is now possible to see the rigid un/published binary in its historical moment.... From this vantage, writers and practices that broke from that binary stand out, as do the time-bound value systems that reinforced it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]