{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.030743740795287185, 'fraction_numerical': 0.00975699558173785, 'mean_word_length': 5.0299667036625975, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Visual Culture of: Prairie Schooner

design, which seemed to be adapted from the "international" abstract-geometric style then dominate in contemporary architecture, sculpture, and painting. The covered wagon image was turned into a sleek semi-abstract "schooner" that was moved from the cover to the table of contents page. His re-design of the Prairie Schooner cover attempted not only to equate its contents with the literary vanguard, but to reassert the autonomy of the literary by eliminating visual illustration. Ironically, this was accomplished in part through an alternative visual aesthetic. Indeed, Shapiro "nudged Prairie Schooner from its position as a regional journal and transformed it into a national literary phenomenon that readers all across the country began to follow with interest and excitement."7 But he did so by transforming the regionalist image of "prairie schooner" into a useful and powerful metaphor for avant-gardists who have used their "underground" or "marginalized" status as a badge of honor. Like the Judeo-Christian theological doctrine of the "faithful remnant," avant-gardism has thrived for two hundred years by fig. 3, volume 5, no. 2 (Spring 1932). defining itself as a minority community operating in opposition to the dominant culture. As a liberal Jewish New York intellectual working for a poorly-funded little magazine on the campus of a conservative prairie university, Shapiro was all too familiar with the blessings and curses of marginalization and exile. Although his desire to rename the publication was short-lived, as were his subtle but important changes in the use of visual imagery, Shapiro's anti-regionalism and explicit avant-gardism set the stage for subsequent editors to assimilate both the regionalism of Wimberly and the avant-gardism of Shapiro. After Shapiro resigned in 1963 over a censorship controversy with the University of Nebraska, poet and Willa Cather scholar Bernice Slote assumed the editorship. Slote and her successor, Hugh Luke (1980-87), resolved this Wemberly-Shapiro tension and their increased use of visual imagery played an important part in this process. About the meaning and significance of Prairie Schooner, Slote observed that the name of the quarterly communicated "not regionalism but a spirit of.. . adventure and action and endurance that could have some significance."g Slote embraced Shapiro's desire to make the Prairie Schooner transcend its local, regional, and parochial origins. She regarded the "prairie schooner" to be a metaphor for U.S. avantgardism, a metaphor with a distinguished pedigree in 20th-century U.S. letters. But as a Cather scholar, Slote celebrated the role of "Prairie Intellectuals," such as Nebraskans Mari Sandoz, Cather, Weldon Kees, and Wright Morris to U.S. culture. Slote and later Hugh Luke accomplished this in part through a more liberal and diverse use of visual imagery. Both editors began to utilize and integrate different visual images on the cover design of their issues, images that were intended to relate to the subject or theme of that particular publication. One of the earliest of these designs is a 1971 issue devoted to children's poetry in which a three-year old's drawing of a duck adorns the cover (fig. 4). Unlike Wimberly's use of visual imagery, which was limited to a 19th-century-style woodblock illustration "branding" the publication, and Shapiro's use of a distinctive, but generically, "modern" non objective style as a "visual backdrop," Slote and Luke integrated visual imagery into the "content" of the publications, which were used to expand the meaning of each issue. In addition, visual imagery even found its way "into" the publication. The cover of the fiftieth anniversary issue, published in Spring 1977 featured a reproduction of a painting by George Ault from the collection of the Nebraska Art Association at the Sheldon Art Gallery. Five more paintings from the Sheldon's collection were reproduced in the issue, and, as the editor states, "all from the period of the 1920s and 1930s-the beginning years of Prairie Schooner" (p. 54). This issue marked the earliest attempt by the Prairie Schooner to integrate fine art thematically into the publication, explicitly weaving the visual and the literary arts, and doing so with the assistance of the collections at Sheldon Art Gallery. Hilda Raz succeeded Hugh Luke as editor in 1987 and, with designer Dika Eckersley (who had designed the publication since 1983), aggressively extended and expanded the scope of visual imagery in the Prairie Schooner. She sought at once to integrate the visual imagery with the contents of the publication more creatively and to allow it to take on an aesthetic life of its own. Raz gave Eckersley unprecedented license to design visually provocative covers, such as her photograph of a pink rubber scrubbing glove on the front and back covers in fall 1995 (cover). Not only are Eckersley'S compositions striking but they reveal a subtle postmodern turn in Prairie Schooner. It has increasingly engaged issues of identity, including gender, sexual, national, and personal identities, and has explored how they are constituted, worked through, and expressed through writing. Raz and Eckersley both understood the significance of material and visual culture and used it, through a visual politics of the cover, to "represent" or "image" the shifting focus of the Prairie