Saturday, 27 December
52. Defoe, James, and Beerbohm: Computer-Assisted Criticism of Three Authors
5:15–6:30 p.m., Union Square 15, Hilton
Program arranged by the Association for Computers and the Humanities
Presiding: Mark Algee-Hewitt, New York Univ.
1. “The Compleat Semantic Unconscious of Robinson Crusoe,” Martin Joel Gliserman, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick
2. “Style Evolution in Henry James: Fiction, Short Fiction, Nonfiction, Drama,” David L. Hoover, New York Univ.
3. “A Computational Approach to Style in Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson and Seven Men,” Donald E. Hardy, Univ. of Nevada, Reno
Martin Gliserman outlined how his analysis of Robinson Crusoe had revealed what he argued to be the “semantic unconscious of the novel”. Grouping words into a series of semantic groups and maps, on topics such as ‘body’, ‘brain/mind’, ‘time and space’ and ‘geography’, his patterning revealed, for example, the predominance of the built world in the novel – while an army of weapons appears throughout the novel, Robinsoe Crusoe himself only ever touches another human being once.
While Martin Gliserman was looking at meaning, David Hoover had looked at the frequency of words in the novels of Henry James. David created a list of around 1000 of the most frequent words in 13 early and late novels (excluding pronouns and culling most words that appear in only a single novel). He then applied that list to the middle 8 of Henry James’ novels. Strikingly this revealed a (more…)
Monday, 29 December 520. Roundtable on Electronic Editions and Archives of Poetry
12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., Continental 1–2, Hilton
Program arranged by the Division on Poetry
Presiding: Cristanne Miller, Univ. at Buffalo, State Univ. of New York
Speakers: Michael S. Hennessey, Univ. of Pennsylvania; Joseph Foster Loewenstein, Washington Univ.; Jerome J. McGann, Univ. of Virginia; David Radcliffe, Virginia Polytechnic Inst. and State Univ.; William Shaw, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Martha Nell Smith, Univ. of Maryland, College Park
This session is arranged in conjunction with session 692.
I arrived part way through this roundtable so the notes below don’t cover everything that was said.
Jerome McGann talked about the need for digital archives to integrate with each other rather than ending up siloing content.
He noted that digital projects don’t need to have a single author remit and that the digital environment enables a decentred approach. The aim should be to integrate materials located anywhere.
He encouraged scholars to simply try and build a site – learning by doing and by making mistakes and subsequent modifications is the only way to progress. The online legacy for the next hundred years is being built and literary scholars need to participate.
He noted the big and unsolved issue of sustainability – when the project sponsors move on (into the next life) who will run and maintain the projects? Jerry noted that HTML is doomed and that writing code in HTML is essentially a waste of time in terms of legacy.
Finally, he noted a project now in development which hopes to have easy-to-use website templates available within 5-10 years.
William Shaw of the Blake Archive outlined 3 recent major developments:
Firstly, a virtual lightbox application, enabling users to ‘send’ items to their lightbox and manipulate them there. It will enable the gathering of images across genres and time periods. The current comparison feature only enables like-for-like groupings, e.g. here are 10 tigers – the new lightbox can mark across categories, e.g. 2 tigers, 1 lamb, etc. The feature is slated to go live in summer/autumn 2009, and it will be an open-source tool (released under the MIT license, one of the most liberal) which other archives can incorporate. He also acknowledged the work here of Martha Kirschenbaum who was an important developer of the original version.
Secondly, a site redesign offering aesthetic improvements but which will also bring the archive into standards-compliant XHTML, meaning the site architecture is less static. Slated to go live in summer/autumn 2009.
Finally, a new ‘Related works’ tool, now possible due to the change in the site’s underlying data architecture. For example, a plate will be linked to a list of related works, including earlier sketches, etc.
Martha Nell Smith, drawing on her work with the Dickinson Archive, explored the difference between (more…)
The March issue of Literature Compass is now available here!
Here is a keyword stream for this issue:
Modern American Fiction, Digital Scholarship, Celia Fiennes, Uses of Antiquity, Monsters and the Exotic, Elizabethan Landscape, Tudor Coronation Ceremonies, Pfau, Wordsworth, and Hegel, James Woodhouse, Donne’s Letters, Anne, Lady Halkett, the Early Modern Boy-Actress, Shakespeare and Narrative, Gladstone Catalogue, Metre Matters, Browning, Ernest Jones, British Women Hymn-Writers, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Literature of the First World War
The full Table of Contents is at the bottom of this post.
We’re very pleased that this issue contains two clusters on the following topics:
Metre Matters: New Approaches to Prosody, 1780–1914 Conference
This cluster aims to address renewed scholarly interest in versification and form across the long nineteenth century, as well as some of the methodologies underpinning it. The conference, hosted by the University of Exeter’s Centre for Victorian Studies, was held 3–5 July 2008.
The first Compass Interdisciplinary Virtual Conference, to be held in October 2009, aims to help break academic boundaries – within and between disciplines, between theory and practice, approaches and methodologies – by providing a space for multi- and cross-disciplinary review on the theme of “Breaking Down Barriers“.
Abstracts are invited for survey/review papers from the disciplines of History, Literature, Philosophy, Religion, Geography, Linguistics, Sociology, and Social Psychology.
In particular, we welcome papers that explore:
Paradigms | Borders | The Environment | Communication | Justice/Human Rights
Abstract submission deadline: 1 January 2009
An Abstract submission template is available here.
Send to compassconference@wiley.com.
Registration Is free! Click here to register
Join the largest online meeting of minds in the social sciences and humanities!
Papers will be peer-reviewed. Each accepted paper will receive two formal commentaries plus comments from attendees and will be published in one of the Compass journals. Preference will be given to papers which hold interest for more than one discipline.
Guest Post: Daniel Cook (Queens’ College, University of Cambridge)
British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS)
University of Winchester and Chawton House Library
Considering that the biennial British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Post-Graduate Students and Early Career Scholars conference (27th and 28th June) was a conference about “identities”, let’s begin with some outward appearances. Around 65% of the delegates were from overseas, as far afield as Australia, the States, and Japan, and including many from across Europe. The age-mix was also surprisingly diverse, as beginning graduates joyfully exchanged ideas and stories with the more senior members of the eighteenth-century studies community, including members of the BSECS executive board (http://www.bsecs.org.uk/comm.stm). Such a community, as headed by BSECS, is composed of a number of different disciplines – even ones without official names – such as History, English, French, and Austenian Cryptography. I’m pleased to report that such a heady mix was well-represented at the Winchester conference, in no small part due to the eclectic variety of rooms for the panels. Within the University of Winchester itself delegates were able to listen to papers in the cosy chapel room of the West Downs Centre or take in talks in the more traditional seminar rooms. And, no less importantly, lunch was served in the large Shakespeare Room. On Friday afternoon we took a trip to the second of the venues, the iconic Chawton House Library. So, perhaps inevitably, the range of papers was wonderfully diverse. Old favourites were well represented – especially Defoe and Austen – along with a host of unknown names. Needless to say it’s gratifying to find such passionate and illuminating approaches to a period that all eighteenth-century scholars would recognise as both familiar and unfamiliar in equal measure.
FRIDAY
Debbie Welham (Winchester), the conference organiser and BSECS postgraduates and early career scholars representative, opened the conference with a very warm welcome address at the very reasonable time of 10am. Proceeding immediately to the first panels of the day, I chose Panel 1: Forging Literary Identity. The speakers were Claudine van Hensbergen and John McTague (both Oxford), and McTague again, reading the prize-winning paper of the regrettably absent Stephen Bernard (Oxford). All three papers were extremely witty and vibrant, and exhibited some fascinating insights into their respective material. Where do debates go when they die? Once we realise an attribution is wrong, do we lose interest in it? Such questions were explored in great theoretical and practical details. Truly it was a great start to the conference, and I took away a lot of new information about the relationship between ‘Fiction and Law, Wife and Whore’ (van Hensbergen), Swift’s Bickerstaff hoax (McTague), and Authorship and Attribution in Defoe studies (McTague as ‘Bernard’). Were it physically possible I could have learned even more about Bickerstaff – as well as William Hodges and the York Theatre Royal – were I able to attend the parallel panel, Panel 2: The ‘national’ and the ‘civic, in Room 9. Evidently the papers by Gunda Windmueller (Bonn), Susan Valladares (Oxford), and Simon Macdonald (Cambridge) in this panel were received very positively.
Lunch followed in the Shakespeare Room, and it was indeed (more…)
We’re pleased to be able to finally announce that the winner of the 2007 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Shakespeare section, is:
‘Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Post-Reformation Desire’
by Patricia Marchesi (University of Colorado, Boulder)
The final results are listed below (also available as a PDF). Winners and runners-up will be published in Literature Compassover the next few weeks, with winners also receiving $200 / £100 of free Blackwell books.
In addition, the Renaissance prize is sponsored by the Society for Renaissance Studies – the winner also receives a cheque for $200/£100 and will have their essay published in the Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies.
Winners
Troubled Conversions: the Difference Gender Makes in The Sultan of Babylon
Emily Houlik-Ritchey, Indiana University (Medieval Prize)
English Renaissance Drama: The Imprints of Performance
Gavin Paul, University of British Columbia (Renaissance Prize)
Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Post-Reformation Desire
Patricia Marchesi, University of Colorado, Boulder (Shakespeare Prize) (more…)
We’re extremely pleased to announce that the Literature Compass MLA Panel, ‘Got ECCO? The Contents and Discontents of Electronic Media for Early Modern Studies’, is now available to watch online!
The videos are embedded in this post below, and you can also watch them via our Compass Journals channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com/CompassJournals.
The panel was organised and chaired by our Eighteenth Century Section Editor, Cynthia Wall and included our Editor-in-Chief Peter Brown on the panel.
We’d like to extend our thanks to Cynthia Wall for leading the panel, and to all the speakers for their engaged and engaging contributions.
One of the aims in making this panel available online is to allow the discussion to continue and have an ‘afterlife’ following the conference. So do feel free to post your comments on this panel and the issues raised using the comments feature below.
Friday, 28 December 159. Got ECCO? The Contents and Discontents of Electronic Media for Early Modern Studies 8:30–9:45 a.m., Atlanta, Hyatt Regency
Program arranged by the Division on Restoration and Early-Eighteenth-Century English Literature
Photo: ‘Cloud Gate‘ sculpture, more popularly known as ‘The Bean’, in Millennium Park, Chicago.
———-
The MLA this year as usual provided many opportunities to meet, discuss with, listen to and be challenged by the scholarly community and the rich variety of work in progress. With Literature Compass in mind, I was particularly interested to attend some of the many panels on varying aspects of digital humanities – I managed to get to a few which I describe below, but I hope that blog readers may be able to fill myself and the wider community in on any other related panels of note which I missed. This behemoth of a conference of course always means making difficult choices between events!
As well as our annual Literature Compass Editorial Board meeting, which threw up many interesting ideas for the year ahead, the MLA also saw our first ever sponsorship of an MLA Panel. Organised and chaired by our 18th Century Section Editor, Cynthia Wall, and including our Editor-in-Chief Peter Brown, the panel managed to attract a lively and engaged audience despite its early Friday timeslot.
Entitled ‘Got ECCO? The Contents and Discontents of Electronic Media for Early Modern Studies’, the panelists also included
The panel covered many issues related to digital humanities and there was an interesting Q&A afterwards. We were able to add an extra dimension by having the event videotaped. We’ll be making the panel freely available online very shortly for the benefit of all of those of you unable to attend the MLA or this particular panel – this will hopefully create an ‘afterlife’ for the panel and allow you to contribute to the discussion which was started there.
One of the most frustrating things with conference panels is that, at the end, (more…)
Many thanks to all those of you who entered the 2007 Graduate Essay Prize – and also for your patience during the judging process this year which was very tight in many sections.
The final results are listed below (and are also available as a PDF). Winners and runners-up will be published in Literature Compass, with winners also receiving $200 / £100 of free Blackwell books.
In addition, the Renaissance prize is sponsored by the Society for Renaissance Studies – the winner also receives a cheque for $200/£100 and will have their essay published in the Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies.
Winners
Troubled Conversions: the Difference Gender Makes in The Sultan of Babylon
Emily Houlik-Ritchey, Indiana University (Medieval Prize) (more…)
Described by Ian Baucom as “a truly exceptional work of scholarship” likely to become a “keystone text” in the field of Atlantic Studies, the book traces a racialized freedom discourse in both historiography and the novel, treating authors from Aphra Behn to Nella Larsen. In an impressive sixteen chapters, Doyle recasts the story of English-language narrative since the seventeenth century.
Laura Doyle is also the author of Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture; editor of Bodies of Resistance: New Phenomenologies of Politics, Agency, and Culture; and coeditor of Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity.
All MLA attendees are warmly invited to the Literature Compass panel at this year’s conference, organised and chaired by our 18th Century Section Editor, Cynthia Wall and including our Editor-in-Chief Peter Brown on the panel. The session will also be recorded and made available available via the Compass website after the conference. It would be great to see as many of you there as can make it!
Friday, 28 December 159. Got ECCO? The Contents and Discontents of Electronic Media for Early Modern Studies 8:30–9:45 a.m., Atlanta, Hyatt Regency
Program arranged by the Division on Restoration and Early-Eighteenth-Century English Literature Presiding: Cynthia S. Wall, Literature Compass Speakers: Gail Aw, Univ. of Virginia; Peter Brown, Univ. of Kent; David A. Golumbia, Univ. of Virginia; Kathryn J. Lowerre, Michigan State Univ.; David Radcliffe, Virginia Polytechnic Inst. and State Univ.; Christine Ruotolo, University Librarian
We are also very pleased to announce that Cynthia Wall has received an Honorable Mention in the 38th annual James Russell Lowell Prize for her book, The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (University of Chicago Press). The announcement PDF, including details of the committee’s citation for Cynthia Wall’s book, is available here.
Finally, as the MLA fast approaches, below is also a list of panels which Literature Compass editors and board members will be involved in this year.
Best Wishes from the Compass Team!
List of MLA Panels with Literature Compass participants
Thursday, 27 December 66. Open Digital Communities
5:15–6:30 p.m., Columbus Hall G, Hyatt Regency
Program arranged by the MLA Committee on Information Technology
Presiding: Geoffrey Rockwell, McMaster Univ.
1. “The Best of Both Worlds: Peer Review through NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) and Social Research with the Collex Tool,” Laura C. Mandell, Miami Univ., Oxford
2. “Developing and Sharing Language Materials in a Consortium Context,” Robert James Blake, Univ. of California, Davis
3. “Cyberinfrastructure and Open Standards, Methods, and Communities,” John Merritt Unsworth, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana
Respondent: David G. Nicholls, MLA (more…)
We have just published our third Compass Cluster on ‘Britain and British Nationalisms’. Compass Clusters bring together recent and older articles from the archive, presenting these pieces thematically. The first three articles chosen for a cluster are freely available for a limited time!
The cluster is accessible from the righthand box on the homepage and a PDF cluster map is also available for download. The 8 articles included in this cluster are:
The Conquest of the Past in The History of the Kings of Britain
Michael A. Faletra
University of Vermont
British Ill Done?: Recent Work on Shakespeare and British, English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh Identities
Willy Maley
University of Glasgow
Nationalism and Eighteenth-Century British Literature
Alok Yadav
George Mason University (more…)
We have just published our second Compass Cluster on ‘Print Culture & Book History’. Compass Clusters bring together recent and older articles from the archive, presenting these pieces thematically. The first three articles chosen for a cluster are freely available for a limited time!
The cluster is accessible from the righthand box on the homepage and a PDF cluster map is also available for download. The 8 articles included in this cluster are:
The History of the Book and a History of Two Books: How Print Culture Can Inform Literary Study Cyndia Susan Clegg
Pepperdine University
Print Culture, Ephemera, and the Elizabethan News Pamphlet
Paul J. Voss
Georgia State University
Textual Transmission, Reception and the Editing of Early Modern Texts
Adam Smyth
University of Reading (more…)
In this final number of The ASECS Spy, I am obliged once again to go meta, drawing attention to an unexpected coincidence of form and content. In the first number I self-consciously adopted the perspective of an outsider, a graduate student unschooled in the ways of academic networking and daunted by the quantity and quality of scholars participating in ASECS 2007. I figured that describing my experiences through “Trips, Spies, and Amusements” would allow me to observe the conference without being observed while conveying some sense of what it is like to be unobserved. What I did not foresee was that the outsider perspective would itself be an important theme of this year’s conference. Although not always identified in the subjects of sessions or the titles of papers, much of the conference was concerned with marginal figures separated in writing and through writing. I did not expressly seek out social, political, and cultural “others,” yet I still somehow managed to stumble into discussions of exiles, servants, prostitutes, impecunious authors, Catholics in Protestant England, clerks and apprentices, female caricaturists, African men dressed as Persian women, dwarves and disabled persons, Protestants in Catholic France, “phantom” publishers, fairground conjurers, sceptics and pyrrhonists, Harlequins, and, ironically, graduate students. With so many Spies present (or presented) at the conference, I was almost tempted to proclaim a new hegemony of the outsider.
Yet this academic focus on the perspective of marginal figures, “others,” and outsiders was somewhat undercut by (more…)
Having, in the first number, modelled these observations of the unobserved on London’s ubiquitous “Trips, Spies, and Amusements,” I must begin the second number by acknowledging Swift’s principal complaint against these genres: in their attempt to provide a “compleat Survey” of, for instance, the “Manners and Humours of the Town,” the “common Vanities and Follies of Mankind,” or the “surprising Singularities” of contemporary diversion, “Trips, Spies, and Amusements” are convoluted by their pretence to comprehensivity. As they ramble digressively through a “Diversity of Objects,” the miscellaneous replaces the meaningful, and readers are lost in the great hurry of words and things.
What the first two days of ASEC 2007 have made clear is the madness of my own pretence to comprehensivity. I closed No. 1 with a self-conscious promise to review several hundred papers, one-hundred eighty-five sessions, plenary talks, &c., but the extraordinary “Diversity of Objects” has thoroughly overwhelmed my critical faculties. Though The ASECS Spy intends to give some account of conference themes as they develop, the wide range of these themes and the extensive scope of the conference have ensured that whether I “divert, instruct, or tire” my reader, I will most certainly exhaust myself first. With up to fourteen seminar sessions running concurrently, four or five sessions per day, special lectures, business meetings, award presentations, book exhibits, coffee breaks, member’s luncheons, receptions, happy hours, and other social events, much too much time is spent experiencing ASECS to actually write about experiencing ASECS.
As it turns out, however, the pretence to comprehensivity is itself a central theme of this year’s conference. Being the last pre-disciplinary era, the “long” eighteenth century still (more…)
Perhaps predictably, as a graduate student attending the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for the first time, I am tempted to imagine my conference experience by way of literary analogy: my arrival in Atlanta will mark “A Young Man’s Entrance into the World”; I will nervously deliver a “Comic-Epic Paper in Prosaics”; positive reception will be considered “Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners”; and future graduate students will take a lesson from my folly: “With bleeding hearts and weeping eyes we show / A human gen’rous sense of other’s woe, / Unless we mark what drew his ruin on, / And, by avoiding that, prevent our own.”
All hyperbole aside, there is necessarily something humbling about seeing one’s name on a conference program replete with scholars who have either defined the way we understand the eighteenth century or who have inventively complicated these definitions—scholars whose books we have on our shelves and whose articles we treasure in our filing cabinets.Indeed, going from, say, Richetti, Novak, Hunter, (more…)
My long silence identifies me, I admit, as some one too uncouth to be admitted to the conversable world that I evoked in my debut blog. (If I were playing the “jeu de la Conversation” I’d be sent back to ” l’école.”) My excuse for this unmannerly taciturnity is that I’ve just moved, not just across country, but to another country, and settling in has kept me busy.
I am now on the faculty of the University of Toronto and inhabiting a city that is proving full of tempting diversions for dix-huitièmistes, some of which are sure to inspire future blogging (for instance, the fascinating “dance drama” adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, featuring dancers from the Toronto-based National Ballet of Canada, that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation screened last month). Right now, however, I want to return to issues I raised back in November, because further thinking about Stephen Miller’s Conversation reminded me of how, in an undergraduate class on eighteenth-century fiction I taught a few years ago, I experimented with an assignment which I dubbed the “critical coffeehouse/ literary tea table,” which I modelled roughly on Sarah Fielding’s Remarks on Clarissa (1749), and which was meant to prompt my students to imagine themselves into the period’s conversable world. (more…)
With scraps of ribbon and wrapping paper still turning up in odd corners in my house, I am evidently not yet ready to declare an end to the season of gift-giving, never mind the season of thank-you-note writing. Still, I do realize that the holiday season is all but over. That feeling of calendrical hyper-consciousness got me thinking once again today about something that could well be a recurring topic in this blog, which is that eighteenth-century Britons and Americas did things very differently from their Victorian grandchildren and great-children. The holiday season itself could be exhibit A for that difference.
Two books, one a work of U.S. history, Stephen Nissenbaum’s The Battle for Christmas and the other, a book by the indispensable historian of religion Leigh Eric Schmidt, his Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays, make this difference very apparent, as they make it a little easier to ponder Yuletides past without immediately having flashbacks to one’s youthful readings of Charles Dickens. (more…)
On March 20th, 1750, Samuel Johnson inaugurated his semi-weekly series of essays The Rambler by bemoaning “the difficulty of the first address on any new occasion.” Would that there were, he says, some method of gliding “imperceptibly into the favour of the publick,” or some “settled and regular form of salutation” to which the new candidate for public favour might resort at awkward times like these. Writers of epics have it easy, Johnson suggests. Their particular advantage over “candidates for inferior fame” is that they have only to repeat Homer’s first lines for their readers to feel themselves already in the picture. But when members of the “lower orders of literature” make their debuts the situation is more ticklish. In lacking the heroic poets’ “ceremonial modes of entrance,” they lack that which might free them (and that which, on March 20th, 1750, might have freed Johnson) “from those dangers which the desire of pleasing is certain to produce”–dangers that include recourse to “the vain expedients of softening censure by apologies, or rousing attention by abruptness.”
