SHARP News Volume 25, Number 2 2016

Conferences ‘Contemporary Book History Discourse: my home campus, the University of Victoria, Writing, Reading, and Researching in the and to continuing the excellent discussions SHARP 2016 Reflections Digital Sphere.’ Bold presented on “The Social from July 2016. Merci SHARP 2016! Author: Identifying a New Generation of SHARP 2016 was a whirlwind of intel- Influencers and Innovators in Contemporary Alyssa Arbuckle lectual discussion in Paris. It was my first Authorship,” where she examined the self- University of Victoria publishing platform Wattpad and compared time attending a SHARP conference, and I c was really struck by the depth and breadth the audience impact of various users. Martens of the keynote presentations, paper sessions, spoke to the growing corpus and complications Global Book History at Paris of specialized fan fiction in “The Language and digital demonstrations. From Antoine SHARP 2016 Compagnon’s opening keynote Monday of Betrayal: Ownership, Power, and Control of J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore Website,” and evening on Ma langue d’en France to the closing With the support of the Gladys Weedon offered a thoroughly researched and plenary roundtable on Thursday afternoon Kreble Delmas Foundation, the SHARP considered talk entitled “Reflecting on Uses with guest of honour Roger Chartier, all of conference brought together six scholars of Quantitative and Qualitative Methods in the featured speakers (Campagnon, Anne from developing countries, to review the Researching Digital Reading and Writing, Coldiron, David McKitterick, and Chartier) state of book history in their native countries. Online Communities, and Readers.” All offered thought-provoking meditations and The speakers at the Delmas Workshop were three presenters were engaged conceptually arguments on the past, present, and future of from South America (Argentina and Brazil), in digital publishing, and were able to offer the book – including its scholarship, contexts, Asia (Vietnam) and Eastern Europe (Russia, audience members a thorough overview of and many actors. Croatia, and Rumania). The session was co- contemporary trends, especially within the There were many highlights for me as a chaired by Jean-Yves Mollier (Université de context of a global readership. newcomer to SHARP (not least of all the Versailles-St-Quentin-en-Yvelines), Martyn Andie Silva presented “‘Planely and Truly Wednesday evening floating banquet on Lyons (University of New South Wales) and Expounded’: Navigational Paratexts and the Seine, a rather memorable conference Susan Pickford (Université Paris-Sorbonne), the Language of Mediation” in a panel on experience!), but I’d like to highlight a few who also acted as translator when this was ‘Paratext and the Art of Mediation,’ and I presentations here that especially stuck out, required. Between 20 and 25 participants think that paratext may have been one of beyond the aforementioned. Meaghan Brown, attended. the words most frequently found in the Jessica Otis, and Paige Morgan sat on a panel We began with contributions from South conference programme and on attendees’ lips. titled ‘A Text by Any Other Name: Citing America, by Mariana de Moraes Silveira, The broad interpretations and applications Primary Sources in Bibliographical and Early a doctoral student at the Universidade de of Gérard Genette’s theories lent the subject Modern Studies.’ Brown, Otis, and Morgan São Paolo (Brazil), and Gustavo Sorá, an matter a deserved weight. During the panel discussed a current project they’ve been anthropologist from the Universidad de ‘Imagining the Text: (Digital) Typefaces Past developing where they collect and analyze Córdoba (Argentina). Both spoke in French. and Present,’ James Andrew Hodges explored the citation data of a handful of key early Mariana Silveira emphasized the existence book history ideas through experimental modern journals. A time-heavy undertaking, of a strong tradition of antiquarianism and software in “Timothy Leary’s Incomplete to be certain, but one that could potentially bibliography in late 19th and early 20th lead to standardization across publications, Software and the Dream of Post-Literal which would carry significant benefits for Culture (1985-1996).” researchers, libraries, publishers, and journals All in all, I found the SHARP 2016 Contents alike. This thematic panel allowed for an in- conference an incredibly rewarding experience, depth and multi-perspective engagement with and I hope that the brief synopses of selected the project at hand. presentations above gives you a sense of Conferences 1 Melanie Ramdarshan Bold, Marianne some of the cutting-edge research being Book Reviews 4 Martens, and Alexis Weedon came together discussed in this community. I look forward Exhibition Reviews 38 in a fascinating panel on contemporary digital to welcoming SHARP 2017 Technologies of E-Resource Reviews 40 writing platforms and experiences aptly titled the Book (http://www.sharp2017.com/) to Bibliography 43 2 c 2016 SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2

century Brazil, which has now evolved into even in rural areas, Lê Hông Phuoc reported SHARP News a form of book history constantly open that historical research in Vietnam has barely to European intellectual influences. Brazil left the ground, and that its main value lies in has always looked to France for its cultural its contribution to the professional training editor Padmini Ray Murray models, and book history there absorbed the of librarians. Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology legacies of French cultural history and the Our three eastern European colleagues, [email protected] histoire des mentalités. Brazilian book historians who all spoke in English, described have produced many scholarly studies of difficulties of a slightly different nature in Editorial Assistant censorship, the history of the press and of their own countries, and they located the main Shalmi Barman libraries, and important syntheses already problems in their emergence from Soviet or Jadavpur University exist, such as Laurence Hallewell’s Books Soviet-style regimes in Russia and Rumania, [email protected] in Brazil: A History of the Publishing Trade or from Yugoslav communism the case of reviews editors (1982), translated into (Brazilian) Portuguese Croatia. Tatiana Bogrdanova, a Ph.D student Susann Liebich, Books –Australasia/Pacific in 1985. Today, researchers influenced by from the University of Eastern Finland in University of Heidelberg, Germany the transnational turn concentrate on the Joensuu, explained that research into ‘book [email protected]. reception of nineteenth-century French science’ virtually ground to a halt in the Soviet de fiction but, in Silveira’s opinion, connections Union during the Stalinist years, when the Christina Ionescu, Books – Europe with the United States remain under- book market was flooded with propaganda Mount Allison University, Canada explored. literature produced on a massive scale by [email protected] Silveira’s masterly overview sketched the state-regulated publishing houses. After Clayton McCarl, Books – Latin America history and achievements of a flourishing the fall of communism, many publishers University of North Florida, FL, USA discipline which casts regular glances towards could not survive economic de-regulation [email protected] its Argentinian neighbours for comparative and collapsed; but eventually university Jeffrey Makala, Books - North America purposes. Gustavo Sorá’s presentation programmes, independent scholarly journals Furman University, SC, USA confirmed this growth of comparative and libraries recovered. The Moscow State [email protected] Latin American studies. Sorá outlined the University of the Printing Arts dominates the Erin A. Smith, Books - North America relevant academic programmes and research field of book studies and information science University of Texas at Dallas, TX, USA centres on book history in Buenos Aires in Russia. Bogrdanova pointed towards a [email protected] and Córdoba. He underlined the emergence potential threat to further progress in Russian Abhijit Gupta, Books – South Asia of publishing houses specialising in book book studies – the growing intellectual Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India history, such as Ampersand in Buenos Aires, isolation of the Russian Federation does not [email protected] which recently produced the first national augur well for its future. Melanie Ramdarshan Bold, Exhibitions history of the book in Argentina by José In Croatia, as Nada Topić from the Solin University College, London Luis de Diego (La otra cara de Jano. Una mirada Public Library reported, book studies re- [email protected] crítica sobre el libro y la edición [The Other Face main a new field involving a small research Molly Hardy, E-Resources of Janus. Critical Perspectives on the Book community. The discipline is centred around American Antiquarian Society, MA, USA and on Publishing], 2015). In Argentina, as in libraries, information science, museology [email protected] Brazil, Sorá outlined a thriving autonomous and the digitisation of the national heritage. tradition of book history which remains The main centres of activity are at the three Bibliographer extremely receptive to external and especially universities of Zagreb, Osijek, and Zadar. Cecile M. Jagodzinski French influences, and is a vital part of an Alex Cioroga, a Ph.D student from [email protected] expanding network of South American Babeș-Bolyai University at Cluj-Napoca c scholars in general. (Rumania), told a similar story: book history Lê Hông Phuoc, from the Vietnamese is not a systematic field of research in his SHARP News [ISSN 1073-1725] is the National University in Ho Chi Minh City, country. He sketched the slow emergence of quarterly newsletter of the Society for the History provided a complete contrast. Speaking a Rumanian national literature (17th century), of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, Inc.. The in French, he briefly demonstrated the a national newspaper press (19th century) and Society takes no responsibility for the views difficulties involved in establishing a Rumanian publishing houses (20th century). asserted in these pages. Copyright of content national book history in a post-colonial As in Russia, the sudden introduction of rests with contributors; design copyright rests environment. He stressed the long history a market economy after the fall of the with the Society. Set in Adobe Garamond with of the importation of Confucian literature Ceausescu dictatorship precipitated the Wingdings. from China in Mandarin, and in modern failure of many bookshops and publishers. SUBSCRIPTIONS: times the importation of French books and Overall, the presentations offered strong [email protected] the French educational system to Indochina. contrasts between well-developed research Vietnamese book historians may thus need traditions in South America, and book history COPY DEADLINES: expertise in Mandarin, traditional and in its infancy in the other countries surveyed. 1 March, 1 June, 1 September, 1 December SHARP WEB: alphabeticised Vietnamese as well as French In Eastern Europe, the label ‘book science’ http://sharpweb.org and English. Although many libraries exist implied a slightly different emphasis than SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 2016 d 3 does the phrase ‘book history’, with which digital methods in the study of historical document of cultural history, one which western European and North American newspapers. Leon Jackson opened the first resists the chronicity of narrative. While scholarship is more familiar. ‘Book science’ panel by reminding us of the etymological presenting Loyola University’s “Jesuit grounds the study of books within the field roots of the ‘digital’ – that is, the Latin digitas, Libraries and Provenance Projects,” Kyle of traditional bibliography and adopts it as which pertains to the use of the fingers (or Roberts took a nineteenth-century finding an instrument in the vocational training of toes). Like many others who thought of the aid as an object of inquiry and as a snapshot librarians. In spite of this, the history of relationship between the physical and its of earlier epistemologies. Focusing on the reading is an under-developed field in all the electronic representations, Jackson argued outdated technology of the microfilm, Lisa national contexts under discussion. that “digital haptics” should work to recover Gitelman investigated the prehistory of the In discussion, Roger Chartier encouraged a sense of tactility through relative scaling digital and asked questions about nested book historians to take a broader view of and other types of bibliographic description. re-representations that digital forms cannot the intellectual context of their subject. If Todd Thompson and Jessica Showalter asked always fully capture. we define book history or book science too what it might mean to create a scholarly The enduring importance of human narrowly, he argued, we would fail to connect edition of a newspaper, while William Slauter interpretation alongside digital methods it to important cultural developments like aggregated and re-contextualized content was a key takeaway of several other the Central European Enlightenment of the from eighteenth-century satirical British presentations. Lauren Klein fused the eighteenth century. He went on to remark that newspapers to show how they mirrored “carework” of archivists, who enact a type the history of censorship was a field in which contemporary social practices. of guardianship over the past, with the all the countries represented had an interest; Many speakers considered how the “codework” of computational methods the comparative history of censorship awaits application of digital methods to archival such as topic modeling. Edward Whitley its author. materials might draw forth new narratives. explored the use of networks in the “Vault The Delmas Workshop demonstrated the Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, for example, at Pfaff ’s” project, concluding that this tool varied and multidisciplinary nature of book used text encoding to disembed runaway can manage vast amounts of information history; but it also showed us that a global view slave advertisements from newspapers, but also can flatten the social relationships of book history confronts us with different creating a new genre of interpolated it is meant to convey. In the closing panel, definitions of what actually constitutes the Caribbean slave narrative where none had Matthew P. Brown approached N-gram discipline. I believe, however, that we all previously existed. Michael Kelly discussed counts and corpus-based analysis with have an interest in understanding what book the process of building an archive of Native skepticism and humor, proposing terms history looks like through another’s lens, American literature at Amherst and, in his like “archival reading” and “small data” to and SHARP hopes that similar workshops study of a sermon by Samson Occom, re-orient digital scholarship toward detail, at future conferences will pursue this. We used metadata and networking to bring historicity, and the intimacy of the material. eventually intend to publish a selection of indigenous histories to light. In the week following the conference, the presentations in translation through the In a wide-ranging keynote address that a group of 18 scholars participated in the SHARP website. opened the second day of the conference, Digital Antiquarian Workshop. Led by Carl Stahmer considered the future of curators, catalogers, and guest instructors, Martyn Lyons bibliography in a linked data environment. the workshop offered practice-based University of New South Wales As an alternative to field-based databases, learning in methods for digital archival he proposed a system of peer-reviewed study. The gaps and silences of the archive c social curation, a model that would embed were a frequent concern, as researchers Digital Antiquarian process and provenance within each record. considered what is lost in the acts of Conference and Workshop The Digital Antiquarian Workshop, which curation and preservation and how behind- took place the following week, would pick the-scenes decisions about the schematics American Antiquarian Society up many of the questions about digital of information shape the knowledge that 1–5 June 2015 bibliography that Stahmer raised. is gleaned from them. Conference presentations conveyed the Diverse library materials featured Under the dome of the American depth of the host institution’s collections prominently in many of the presentations Antiquarian Society’s iconic reading room, as well: by way of her work with the and exercises: newspapers, works of graphic librarians, archivists, and academic researchers Mather family library, Meredith Neuman art, manuscripts, hybrid documents, and came together this June to investigate the examined archival slippages that occur when even nineteenth-century board games ways in which the digital humanities and cataloging print-manuscript hybrids. Thomas were used to illustrate the challenges archival study intersect. Juxtaposing the Knoles, Curator of Manuscripts at the AAS, of representing historical materials in perspectives of book historians and library discussed a forthcoming edition of William standardized information systems. Many of curators, panels showcased the work of Bentley’s diaries, which include unpublished the attendees study the history of print and scholars who employ digital methods in book accounts – a rich, untapped resource therefore benefitted from the AAS’s wealth innovative literary and historical research. for early American book historians. of materials relating to the printing and After an opening keynote by Kenneth Several participants also considered bookselling trades: their Printers’ File, for Carpenter and Michael Winship, the first metadata itself as a historical object: Craig example, helps date early American printed day of the conference primarily focused on Carey considered the finding aid as a matter and forms the basis for the AAS’s 4 c 2016 SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2

Children’s Literature Database. projects’ may have become in English and they are – points to a central problem with the Participants gained a thorough knowledge history departments, African-American collection. Published in November 2014 after of MARC and learned strategies to clean literature continues to be enlivened by the “a very long journey from the 2010 Society of and manipulate catalog data in order to do ongoing critical resuscitation of early works. Early Americanists Special Topics conference historical analysis with metadata. Many of the To this end, Nicole N. Aljoe and Ian on Borderlands” (ix), the collection feels problems of misinformation that arise from Finseth have brought together seven other surprisingly out of date. Boutelle’s excellent searching digital catalogs are not necessarily literary scholars and one historian to offer essay is only one of the chapters that could rooted in carelessness, Alan Degutis pointed analyses of a genre whose scope is as have been strengthened by dialogue with out, but arise from the fact that we are asking transnational as the vectors out of which it (among other recent book-historical projects) new questions of longstanding logics. arose: “institutions of African enslavement,” Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Questions of access ran through many of “missionary and abolitionist movements,” Stein’s Early African American Print Culture. the discussions as well: how can databases and a rapidly expanding early modern print (Published in spring 2012 by Penn Press, the be optimized for searching and browsing? culture (5). Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the collection includes Brooks’s “Unfortunates.”) How can catalogs and digitized copies aid Early Americas is only the most recent in a Other than in Kristina Bross’s apparently in the serendipitous discovery that often series of anthologies that seek to get Beyond more recent “Coda,” the only citations to accompanies archival research? Digitization, Douglass (in the apt title of Michael Drexler sources published after 2011 are to Marcus text encoding, and image presentation with and Ed White’s 2008 collection) by setting Rediker’s Amistad Rebellion and editor Aljoe’s Omeka were all explored as avenues to back the clock and widening the compass of own Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from facilitate public access. Afro-diasporic life-writing. Briton Hammon, the British West Indies, 1709-1838. (Citations Following a week that linked the knowledge Boyrereau Brinch, Juan Francisco Manzano, to 2011 and 2010 sources are nearly as rare.) of librarians, cataloguers, and archivists with and Omar Ibn Said – not Frederick Douglass As this 2016 review of a 2014 anthology the skillsets of digital humanists, conference and Harriet Jacobs – are the key figures illustrates, academic publishing faces its and workshop attendees left Worcester with here. (The absence of female authors is own challenges to survival. But surely, new tools to enrich their research and new duly noted.) in the terms of the marketing argot by perspectives on the old and new alike. Although the focus remains on such which we are increasingly asked to “assess” conventional narratives, José Guadalupe our “outcomes,” the “value-added” of a Sara Partridge Ortega makes fascinating use of the judicial published volume of critical essays over a New York University records housed in the Cuban National conference is its more thorough – and thus Archives to reconstruct the strategic legal enduring – engagement with ongoing critical self-fashioning of a Bahamian slave who, discussions in the field. It is only by speaking ook eviews B R in the upheaval of the Haitian Revolution, with, not past, each other that scholars can escaped to Cuba. As Juan Antonio, the ensure that textualized Black lives continue to Nicole N. Aljoe and Ian Finseth, fugitive English slave forged a new identity matter – and survive – in the future. eds. Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the as a skilled wage laborer even as Cuba’s Early Americas. Charlottesville: University slaveholding sugar economy benefited from Jeannine Marie DeLombard of Virginia Press, 2014. 256p. ISBN the influx of such workers. University of California, Santa Barbara 9780813936383. US $29.50 (paperback and But the collection’s most original, ebook); US $59.50 (hardback). substantive essays come from its most c junior contributors. Basima Kamel Shaheen Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A Bibliographical “Books … have life spans and life offers an informative account of the literary, Handlist of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments chances … that correlate positively with the Qu’ranic allusions and structures that, she Written or Owned in England up to 1100. race of the author,” argues Joanna Brooks in argues, makes the Arabic Life of Omar Ibn Said Compiled by Helmut Gneuss and Michael her brilliant essay, “The Unfortunates: What (1831) a revealing countertext to the highly Lapidge. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: the Life Spans of Early Black Books Tell Us publicized life of this purported Christian University of Toronto Press, 2014. xix, 937p. about Book History.” Brooks is particularly convert and South Carolina slave. R. J. ISBN 9781442648234. £119.99 / $175.00 interested in “those substantial, more pricey Boutelle persuasively excavates the Cuban (hardback). books of more than forty-eight pages.” Still, and British literary and political contexts that Attempting to compile and record the we can cautiously extend her insight to other informed the production and reception of entire known corpus of manuscripts produced racialized material texts, which face some Irish abolitionist R. R. Madden’s compilation or historically owned in a single country of the same existential challenges, from of Manzano’s (and Madden’s own) poetry over a period of five centuries is at best a “being written, published, sold, bought, read, and prose in Poems by a Slave in the Island of daunting, if not impossible, task. Trying to reprinted, [and] circulated” in the first place Cuba (1840). do so while also providing as comprehensive to being “collected and preserved” over Yet Boutelle’s efforts to “interrogate the a record as possible of the critical multi- and time. Hence the foundational importance privilege accorded to the author function interdisciplinary scholarship dealing with of collections like Dorothy Porter’s Early in slave narrative studies” through a “print those manuscripts transforms such a project Negro Writing 1760-1837 (1971) to the cultural methodology” that “shifts us away from a (relatively) simple – if painstaking, institutionalization of Black Studies. from the figurative language of vocality/ lengthy, and exceptionally useful – act of However unfashionable such ‘recovery voice that dominates” the field – laudable as bibliography to a scholarly effort of heroic SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 2016 d 5 proportions. In their Handlist (surely a word a wealth of data laid out with economy and the Bodleian Library website. If the that understates the massive undertaking and clarity, including standard information volume has any weakness, it would be its this work represents), Professors Gneuss such as the following: each manuscript’s inability to update its secondary bibliography and Lapidge have provided Anglo-Saxon current location and shelfmark; its date of automatically. Hopefully, however, there and manuscript studies scholars with production (determined by a combination of are plans in place to update this critical a remarkable, elegantly organized, and information related to its history, contents, information at regular intervals in the years exhaustively informative resource that will and codicological and paleographical to come. not just guide the work of researchers in qualities); its firm or tentative place of More than 60 years in the making, this these fields, but one that also will help origin; its known or inferred provenance Handlist represents the most significant determine the course of future scholarship history; and a listing of its textual contents. bibliographic achievement in the field of in these areas for decades to come. Not included are descriptions of the Anglo-Saxon manuscript studies. But it is The publication of the Handlist represents manuscripts’ codicological, paleographical, also much more than a tool that facilitates the culmination of a project whose origins and decorative features, as full descriptions access by listing known manuscripts and stretch back over 60 years to Prof. Gneuss’s of such details are readily available in other their current locations. It also enables days as a young scholar at St. John’s College, published resources. researchers to contextualize individual Cambridge, when, as the volume’s preface Supplementing all of this is a massive – and manuscripts within their larger historical, states, he first began to lay out plans for massively useful – systematic bibliography of textual, and artistic settings, as well as such an effort. The first version of the secondary resources published primarily up identify critical lacunae waiting to be filled. list emerged in the 1970s as an in-house to 2010 (with studies of “unquestionable Additionally, it provides a remarkable reference tool for graduate students at the importance” published through 2012) that bibliographical model upon which many University of Munich, but recognizing its deal with each of the manuscripts included future catalogues of medieval manuscripts wider utility, Prof. Gneuss expanded its in the inventory. As useful as the individual could – and should – be based. contents and eventually published it for entries recording the manuscripts’ locations, international scholarly consumption in 1981. origins, provenance, and content may be, it Eric J. Johnson With contributions of further information is the added value of this complementary The Ohio State University and research from scholars around the world, secondary information that, in my opinion, a much fuller and more detailed updated list makes the Handlist an absolutely essential and c was published in 2001, with two subsequent successful reference tool. The bibliographical lists of additions and corrections appearing portions of each entry are subdivided Autorenbibliotheken: Erschließung, in 2003 and 2012. In collaboration with Prof. into numerous sections citing secondary Rekonstruktion, Wissensordnung. Bibliothek und Lapidge, work on the Handlist’s final form resources dealing with a range of topics, Wissenschaft 48. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz commenced in 2005 with the identification including: studies of the manuscript as Verlag, 2015. 198p., ill. ISBN 9783447103404. and addition to the list of all relevant codicological or paleographical object; €99.00 (paperback). secondary publications related to each of examinations of decorative, illustrative, the included manuscripts. The result of this and art historical content; citations of Author’s libraries gained increasing massive undertaking is impressive, to say the published editions of the texts included in interest in recent scholarship. The 2015 least, and the data presented includes entries each manuscript (but only in the case of issue of Bibliothek und Wissenschaft is devoted for 1,291 known Anglo-Saxon manuscripts editions that are based on the manuscript to the subject and the six contributions to – whether codex or fragment – written in in question or that include the manuscript the journal study author’s libraries with a England up to the year 1100, and additional in its formal collation of sources); analyses regional focus on Germany and Switzerland manuscripts written in the rest of Britain, of language and linguistic elements; general during the late early modern period and the Ireland, or the European continent, provided studies that consider the cultural, historical Age of Enlightenment. An interview with that they “certainly or probably” reached and textual contexts of the works preserved the contemporary writer Péter Esterházy England before 1100. in each manuscript; and references to opens the collection of studies and provides The Handlist is a model of organizational facsimile appearances of the manuscripts, insight into the ways in which authors use, elegance and efficiency designed to make whether in complete editions or as selected collect and arrange their books. each entry as informative and illustrative as reproductions of individual pages published Ivonne Rohmann’s contribution deals possible, while at the same time remaining to accompany scholarly works. Although the with the possibilities of reconstructing clear and easy to read. The compilers divide compilers do not include references to digital author’s libraries. Rohmann has chosen a the list into two main sections, the first facsimiles due to a variety of (good) reasons set of interesting examples for her study. recording manuscripts housed in British related to space and the often ephemeral Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s library is libraries, and the second listing those nature of web-based content, in the volume’s practically complete and the significance manuscripts now located in collections general introduction they do provide a list of the poet, as well as his ability to provide outside Britain. Also included is a third, of some of the more important (and stable) for the keeping of the library financially, very brief, section identifying known, online resources, such as the British Library’s has made it an outstanding example for an but now lost and untraced, manuscripts Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, the Parker author’s library. Reconstructing the libraries and fragments. Within the two major on the Web featuring relevant manuscripts of Johann Gottfried Herder and Christoph divisions, each individual entry provides at Corpus Christi College (Cambridge), Martin Wieland proves considerably harder, ... /6 6 c 2016 SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 given that their book collections were sold Taken together, the volume presents of the specific journalistic sources of Joyce’s almost immediately after the death of the a well-selected range of approaches with writing. As it is, the energetic line of attack authors. Rohmann demonstrates how their which to consider author’s libraries. Both works with some reasonably well-known but contents can be traced today through the use in terms of their scope as well as their important material that is given a new edge in of auction catalogues and inventories, as well theoretical perspective, these articles further terms of its “scandalous” dimension: such as as through searching in academic libraries. our understanding of author’s libraries in the the scandal of Parnell and Oscar Wilde, and Goethe’s reading habits have been well German-speaking context. the presence of the Victorian campaigning studied already and in her contribution journalist W. T. Stead in the “saving” of to the journal Kirsten Krumeich turns Jan Hillgaertner Stephen from Nighttown in ‘Circe,’ and even her attention to the borrowing of books University of St. Andrews the scandalous elements in Shakespeare’s life belonging to the German author. Goethe and plays. also served as head librarian of the library c Interestingly, the fresh approach of and Krumeich traces how he controlled the Margot Gayle Backus. Scandal Work: James Backus’s study reminds us that scandal- acquisition of new books for the public Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule mongering journalism works by naming real library in accordance with the holdings of Newspaper Wars. Notre Dame, IN: University people – just as Joyce “notoriously” does in his own library so as to avoid unnecessary of Notre Dame Press, 2013. xviii, 310p. his fiction. Highbrow and lowbrow forms expenditures. The borrowing records also ISBN 9780268022372. US $37 (paperback). of culture clash unsettlingly in the world of reveal that Goethe took out books for his scandal and an ethics that can all too often friends and acquaintances and provided them An engaged, communicative style and merge into hypocrisy. We are reminded by the with volumes that were normally meant for approach immediately mark out Margot study throughout that scandal is a cultural- consultation in the library only. Backus’s study of the role of journalistic political weapon and that, although it hurt Michael Knoche and Dietrich Hakelberg and political scandal in the work of James Joyce’s career and his reputation in several discuss in their articles two lesser-known Joyce as a fresh and winning contribution to ways, requiring him to construct a quasi- German librarians and spiritualists, one the critical debate. Several well-established mythical image of the publicly hounded and from the seventeenth century and the other elements of the Joyce story make this betrayed artist, and perhaps contributing to from the nineteenth. Reinhold Köhler approach just right. Joyce’s work centrally the aloofness of the Dedalus persona and ranks amongst the most important German and repeatedly dramatises the political sex the difficulty of the later work, it might also librarians with a strong scholarly interest. scandal that brought down Charles Stuart have been a weapon which he could use and During his appointment as librarian at the Parnell. His artist-hero Stephen Dedalus is adapt for aesthetic ends. Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, especially sensitive to this scandal and the Köhler amassed a library of over 6,000 profound political rift which ensued. Joyce Richard Brown editions of international works on fairy himself became embroiled in an angry University of Leeds tales and related secondary sources. His dialogue about the supposedly shocking c library, Knoche argues, conveys the image nature of his early collection of stories, Vincent L. Barnett and Alexis Weedon. of a scholar who wished to register all Dubliners, which scandalously kept them Elinor Glyn as Novelist, Moviemaker, Glamour aspects of a field of investigation, a scholar out of print for a decade. However, a Icon and Business Woman. Farnham, UK & who moreover had the aspiration to read succès de scandal was eventually the making Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. x, 238p., ill. everything he collected. Dietrich Hakelberg of Ulysses as the underground classic of ISBN 9781472421821. £60 (hardback). studies the library of Benedict Bahnsen, literary modernism. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce a German spiritualists and émigré to the returned to the theme of scandalous sex Vincent L. Barnett and Alexis Weedon Netherlands based on a surviving auction crime and the plethora of discursive activity provide the first full-length, scholarly catalogue and remainders of his library now that inevitably surrounds it. To approach examination of the professional life of the kept in Wolfenbüttel. Hakelberg proves in his this material anew in terms of scandal itself, internationally renowned British writer and work that Bahnsen, who became active as and especially the ways in which political early Hollywood personality, Elinor Glyn publisher in the early 1660s, took a cue for his self-interest and the institutions of the new (1864–1943). Although few recall the name publishing programme from his own library. journalism deploy and manipulate scandal today, the authors ably indicate that a serious In the final article, Magnus Wieland as a political weapon both then and now, study of Glyn – whom they call “a pioneer summarises studies of the ways in which is acute and engaging in a way that few of a new mode of professional authorship” Friedrich Dürrenmatt has used the works academic studies of Joyce manage to be. (3) – is long overdue. in his library. Through this, he introduces a Joyce’s writing is full of journalism and The publication of her first novel, The way of conceptualising different forms of often about journalism, and it is a strength Visits of Elizabeth (1900), made Glyn a marginalia based on the purpose that they of this study that the ambivalences of its ‘best-seller’ in the UK and the US as well serve for the author. complex relation to its journalistic other as the British Society’s leading novelist. Her Methodologically, the articles use the and the centrality of this to Joyce’s cultural sixth novel, Three Weeks (1907), provoked entire toolkit of how to research author’s empowerment are kept in view. Archivally- an enormous outcry from Anglo-American libraries, relying on, for example, indexes, flavoured, especially in its use of cartoon critics for telling the tale of an older, auction catalogues, borrowing lists and illustrations, the study might perhaps have mysterious, married Balkan Queen’s seduction publishing programmes. promised exhaustive in-depth examination ... /7 SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 2016 d 7

... / 6 of an aristocratic English youth in a manner raising as many questions as they answer. Baverstock writes in the introduction that seemed to sanction the principles of In the end, the reader is left to wonder that she has expanded the book’s coverage free love. Glyn turned this censure to her why Glyn’s stature was so much greater of social media and this is particularly well professional advantage, crafting a persona in the US than in the UK, how much she done, with practical examples showing as a glamorous ‘authoress’ who offered managed to shift ideas about sex and in what publishers how they can use metadata the public advice on modern romance, sex particular directions, and whether gendered effectively to increase the likelihood that roles and sexuality through her fiction, non- assumptions blinkered the decisions of prospective readers will come across their fiction and extensive journalistic work. Her “Team Glyn” as much or more than the titles in online searches, tips about the use of success in this part eventually brought her to film producers with whom she worked. But Facebook, Twitter, and author engagement, Hollywood in 1920. As Barnett and Weedon intriguing further questions are, after all, one as well as a caution about the amount of amply demonstrate, once ensconced in Los of the best things that a first effort about an time that may be required to maintain a blog: Angeles, Glyn took “cooperative involvement under-studied important figure can prompt. “it’s much easier to start one than to keep in the film industry further than any other it going” (224). Pleasingly, case studies of literary figure of the era, both personally as Hilary A. Hallett publishers’ use of social and online media an individual ‘star’ author and cross-media Columbia University, New York indicate the ways in which they themselves celebrity, and professionally as part of a c are learning through trial and error. Part wider group of family collaborators” whom III contains ‘Specific Advice for Particular the authors call “Team Glyn” (3). During Alison Baverstock. How to Market Books. Markets’ and, while few readers would be the 1920s, Glyn intimately oversaw what 5th ed. London and New York: Routledge, likely to draw on all of its sections, each one she called the “picturization” of her stories, 2015. xx, 471p., ill. ISBN 9780415727587. provides knowledgeable, practical advice. including her most successful story-to-film £29.99 (paperback). Having recently undertaken a study adaptation, It (Paramount, 1927), starring which involved interviewing over 25 senior Clara Bow. The authors conclude with Glyn’s How to Market Books is, as the title publishers in Australia, I was interested to return to Britain in 1929 to direct two motion suggests, a practical guide for publishers compare Baverstock’s advice with these pictures whose commercial failure ended and authors. It has been in print for over 20 publishers’ accounts of their marketing her long-sought desire to attain complete years and is a well-established reference title. strategies. It was impressive to see the strong control over the process of translating her The new edition takes into account extensive connections between Baverstock’s logically ideas into film. changes in the publishing industry over the set out explanations, framed in sound Glyn’s career allows Barnett and Weedon past five years, and Baverstock places her marketing principles, and CEOs’ discussions to offer insight into the emergence of many discussion in a broader framework: “at times about their own experiences of marketing in of the practices that attend commercially of great change it’s worth slowing down, the contemporary environment. successful authorship in the twentieth isolating the theory behind practice and Baverstock briefly acknowledges the century. Their careful work in Glyn’s archive looking back for guidance on how previous uneasy tensions between editorial-driven at Reading University uncovers her role in generations solved problems” (xv). publishing and marketing, and the increased forging or perfecting this process through Baverstock explains the basics of role of marketing in many publishing her development of a personal brand (in segmenting markets, branding, integrated companies, but the purpose of the book is today’s parlance), embrace of cross-media marketing communications, and relationship not to engage in theoretical debates about promotion, and efforts to control the marketing. The book is comprehensive, these issues. Rather, this book is particularly shepherding of literary works across national even exhaustive, in defining terms used useful for publishing studies courses where boundaries and into different media forms. in the industry – eg. different types of the material could be discussed section by Their contention that Glyn’s remarkable licences, the components of promotional section over a longer period of time and success and influence – she helped to spawn messages. One chapter is devoted to students could apply the theory to their own the modern romance genre after all – was drawing up and monitoring a budget and projects. Small publishers may also find it a derided or ignored until late because of strategies for securing financial support, useful resource and valuable for comparing literary scholars’ discomfort with ‘low-brow’ while other chapters set out the steps their own experiences with those outlined popular writers and feminist critics’ concern in preparing a marketing plan, writing in the case studies. Given the extensive over her interest in fashion and (alleged) effective copy, disseminating marketing changes underway in the industry, aspiring espousal of reactionary sex roles seems well- materials, and working with the media. publishers will benefit from the book’s founded and is supported by recent articles Breakout boxes contain useful case studies. overview of developments and the practical that examine Glyn’s ideas about sexuality in Her experience with publishing students is implications for connecting more readers more depth. evident in the preface to Chapter 8 (‘Direct with their books. One wishes at times that the authors Marketing’): “Even if you are in a hurry to ventured a bit further afield from recounting get on and learn about online marketing, Jan Zwar the intricacies and details of Glyn’s many please read this chapter first” (170). She Macquarie University contractual negotiations in order to assay rightly emphasises the importance of broader interpretive claims. The tendency to understanding foundational marketing draw lightly upon film, women’s, and cultural principles which can be applied to specific history compounds the authors’ drift toward contemporary circumstances. 8 c 2016 SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2

Anna Bayman. Thomas Dekker and the William Ferbrand. The final three chapters sharp on bibliography should fail to provide Culture of Pamphleteering in Early Modern analyse Dekker’s anatomisation of London one. Given the notoriously difficult business London. Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2014. as an enthralling commercial and recreational of attributing anonymous pamphlets, it viii, 160p. ISBN 9780754661733. £65.00 centre as well as sink of sin and vice. Bayman would have been extremely useful to see a list (hardback). scrutises Dekker’s construction of stock of primary works confidently attributed to characters such as gulls and rogues in detail Dekker as sole author alongside co-authored When the dramatist and pamphleteer to argue that he was sensitively attuned to the pieces and those of uncertain authorship. Thomas Dekker wanted to take the performativity of civic and moral identities, These, though, are lacunae in an otherwise fascinating study which will be of interest to temperature of London’s Jacobean book “exposing the rules according to which all students of the pamphlet culture of early trade, he had the steeple of St Paul’s [London] operated” (115) for readers who modern England. Cathedral itself survey the activities were encouraged to know and appreciate the conducted below in its churchyard: “at one metropolis rather than be terrified by it. The Marcus Nevitt time, in one and the same ranke, yea, foote final chapter considers the politico-religious University of Sheffield by foote, and elbow by elbow, shall you see dimension of Dekker’s pamphleteering, walking, the Knight, the Gull, the Gallant, demonstrating his preference for peace c the upstart, the Gentleman, the Clowne, following the accession of James I – except Paul Begheyn, S. J. Jesuit Books in the Dutch the Captaine, the Appel-squire, the Lawyer, a brief period of belligerence immediately Republic and its Generality Lands 1567-1773: the Usurer, the Citizen ... the Scholler, the after the Gunpowder Plot. What was unique A Bibliography. Leiden and Boston: Brill, Begger, the Doctor, the Ideot, the Ruffian, about Dekker’s perspective on such matters, 2014. xvii, 454p., ill. ISBN 9789004270602. the Cheater, the Puritan, the Cut throat ... and distinguished him from courtly writers €150.00 (hardback). the Law-man, the True-man, and the Thiefe, or those associated with the civic elite, was of all trades and professions some, and of his emphasis on the connection between Jesuit Books in the Dutch Republic and its all Countreys some.” While the building peace and the “benefits of trade ... for the Generality Lands delights in its thoroughness. itself was aghast at the heedless pursuit of melting pot of individuals who ... flourished In the opening lines of both the preface economic interests, the promiscuous mixing on the trickling down of the prosperity of and the introduction, we are reminded that, of social classes and nationalities taking the merchant and courtly elites” (144). for the last two decades, the author of this place in its environs, the pamphlet in which There are plenty of highlights in this work, Paul Begheyn, has combed through this extravagant prosopopoeia first saw book. The introductory work on pamphlet Europe’s research libraries in search of hard print, Dekker’s The Dead Tearme (1608), drew retail pricing is acute and nuanced, and bibliographical evidence of early-modern its lifeblood from such eclectic company. offers a welcome corrective to a prevailing Jesuit book publishing. He has fleshed out As Anna Bayman shows in this insightful assumption that the cost of an unbound book our understanding of some fascinating and eloquent study of Dekker’s relationships was equivalent to the price of admission to volumes, made many new discoveries, and with London’s burgeoning trade in cheap an outdoor theatre. Bayman shows that a chased down extant copies of the most print, Dekker’s pamphlets made their way “fair-length” pamphlet of 48 pages could obscure texts. That such remarkable and in the world by remaining open to the cost 4d and was thus more expensive valuable work might have struggled to find multiple perspectives, voices and interests than public open-air playhouses where the a suitable publisher – Begheyn describes his of a diverse body of metropolitan readers. cheapest entry was 1d (28–9). Likewise, volume as born under a lucky star, catching Bayman suggests that this multivocality the bibliographic work with Dekker’s Foure a wave of growing interest in the history and and a willingness to entertain apparently Birds is a treat, revealing how the author’s culture of the Jesuits – is truly regrettable. discordant positions was one of the most migration from preferred quarto to octavo Bibliophiles, serious students of the enduring lessons that Dekker learned from format mirrored a rhetorical move to the Jesuits and those, like the current author, his early career writing for the stage. (He quiet piety of a prayerbook (128). fascinated by the richness and diversity was involved in the authorship of around 50 However, the business of rhetoric, of the products that exited from the plays before 1603, when plague forced him technique and style is not nearly so well presses of Europe’s ‘North’ during the early to seek writing income from other sources). handled as the bibliographic analysis. We are modern period, will find much to admire. Bayman only makes this point in passing repeatedly asked to take apparently revealing Begheyn justifiably revels in the ways that since she largely avoids Dekker’s theatrical things about Dekker’s characteristic style on his bibliography updates and extends aspects output in favour of a focus on his printed trust; attribution of works to Dekker are of its departure point, the Alsatian Jesuit prose and verse. The book begins by asserted because they are “characteristically Carlos Sommervogel’s turn of the twentieth- surveying the cultural and bibliographic verbose” (127) and “wholly in keeping with century Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de status of pamphlets in seventeenth- Dekker’s style” (21), or how “in stylistic Jésus, as well as other subsequent scholarly century London. The second chapter terms [particular pamphlets] could certainly work. The bibliographer finds 430 editions narrows the focus to study Dekker’s place be his” (120). There is, however, no sustained not mentioned in Sommervogel, dismisses within Jacobean book trade and patronage analysis of the specifically literary and many false attributions and, due to his networks, putting him in the company of rhetorical techniques that Dekker deployed to exclusive focus on the Dutch republic and its a kindred of dramatist-pamphleteers like distinguish himself from other pamphleteers generality lands, provides substantially more Thomas Middleton as well as printers and in this competitive and crowded marketplace. detailed descriptions which extend to the publishers such as Nathaniel Butter and It really is very surprising, too, that a book so street address of book publishers. It provides ... /9 SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 2016 d 9 a level of detail and completeness that Benjamin Bennett. The Defective Art and symmetrical. Bennett’s purpose is not contrasts sharply with the patchy coverage of Poetry: Sappho to Yeats. Houndmills, to set up a norm, even less to demolish one. provided by the Short Title Catalogue Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. It is simply to follow the consequences of Netherlands (STCN). x, 208p. ISBN 9781137381873. £53.50 poetry’s originating imperfection through And Begheyn’s scholarly focus certainly (hardback). some exemplarily brief, taut, and affecting does amount to something. The hard graft poems. behind Jesuit Books in the Dutch Republic Benjamin Bennett’s book traces a line, as The book starts out – puzzlingly or creates a bibliographic dataset as contained its subtitle suggests, from Sappho to Yeats, dialectically – with the negation of a and complete as we might possibly hope. as if to encompass most of the Western negation, a move that makes more sense And it is this completeness that provides a European lyric tradition. Its eight chapters on second reading. Facing “the silencing spectacular insight into the extent and nature discuss a dozen or so poems in extenso and opposition between passion and poetic of the Jesuits’ ‘Dutch’ network, as well as allude to a handful of others as supporting form,” Sappho stands out for “her insistence many of its facets. Its spatial dimensions evidence. on the problem as a problem, her refusal are especially interesting. Whilst the network Several of the poems Bennett discusses – to back away from it, her implacable laying unsurprisingly centred upon Amsterdam, Sappho’s invocation to Aphrodite, Goethe’s bare of a fundamental defect in the very 369 printers in 39 towns are listed. Relatively “Über allen Gipfeln,” Verlaine’s “Chanson idea of a passionate poetry” (30). For in few printers used false addresses, although a d’automne” – have been held up by one Sappho’s “Poikilothron’” ode, where the minority of Amsterdam Catholics preferred critic or another as examples of perfection. lover’s disappointment is shown turning to put Antwerp on their wares to more easily All the exhibits are short: from a few dozen into a call for revenge, there is for Bennett escape Dutch censorship. And its temporal to perhaps 300 words. With so few moving “no gap between the immediate kinesis fluctuations and changes – Begheyn takes parts, a reader might expect that little could of passion and the unfolding of language. us from before the origins of the Dutch go wrong. Many poetry addicts will possess And precisely the absence of such a gap, I Republic, through the Golden Age, and right several of these poems in memory, and thus contend, is in Sappho’s practice the aim of to the suppression of the Jesuits – are both be in a position to evaluate their integrity of poetry, the reason for poetry.”(22) marked and telling. The latter entries remind design. With such examples before us, how Like Michael Riffaterre or Paul de Man, us, of course, that the radical presses of the can Bennett brand poetry with what the law Bennett is a reader who scrutinizes the likes of Marc-Michel Rey were far from the would call inherent vice or latent defect? mimetic surfaces of poems for tell-tale gaps, whole story of Dutch printing during the In its simplest form, the problem around inconsistencies, impossibilities, and from Enlightenment. which Bennett builds his case studies is these draws clues about the ultimate sources It would be greedy to ask for more. But, “the basic defect of poetry—that poetry, of the poem. It is absurd for Goethe to considering all Begheyn’s archival legwork, in the age of the printed book, always have said so baldly “Die Vögelein schweigen it is hard not to imagine a desk crammed invokes a quasi-musical immediacy and im Walde,” for in a forest the main way to full of titbits of print runs and complicated communicativeness that it can never actually know whether birds are there or not is to authorial arrangements and publishing deliver” (123; see also p. 2). A reminiscence listen for them singing – not “being silent.” affairs that are not detailed in Jesuit Books of music survives in our conventions for The slight failure to make sense tips us off, in the Dutch Republic and its Generality Lands. reading, writing, and printing poetry (e.g., however, to a more consequential structure Although the opening presentation is good, line breaks and the right-hand margin), but of perception and awareness that wraps the bibliography contains few notes to these signs usually amount to no more than around the poem itself as linguistic event, enrich or explain its contents. And, perhaps relics of a former time. Returning poetry as “hieroglyph” (49). This is obviously related, one wonders if this most bookish to its home in music is one of the recurrent not New Critical reading for totality of books born under a lucky star might not utopias of Western culture, recognizable and autonomy, nor is it a biographical one day enjoy some digital afterlife. The through such dissimilar events as the reading that would seek to reestablish the richness and complexity of the information founding of opera in the age of Monteverdi transparency of an original experience. It is presented at times seems straitjacketed by and the prophecies of a future materialistic reading for incoherence – but not the way an its strictly chronological presentation. What poetry of action in Rimbaud’s “Lettre du enemy of poetry would perform it; rather, patterns might be lurking unnoticed in all voyant.” But Bennett’s interest is not in the way a Socratic friend of poems might the data? Perhaps a digital edition would restoration. It is rather in what the defect sidle up and through questioning make them prove another twenty-year endeavour so, for produces. uncomfortably self-aware. not at least, we can be happy that specialists The absence of melody, a defender may Each chapter trains the reader to and bibliographers will appreciate Begheyn’s say, merely prompts the compensatory recognize new forms of the enabling ‘defect.’ excellent labour of love just as it is! supplement of additional charges of The chapter on “Hyperions Schicksalslied” meaning in the words, degrees of meaning carries out an intense and subtle questioning Mark Curran which singing might but poorly transmit: of practically every affirmation made in that Queen Mary University of London necessity proving the mother of invention. poem, along with the slightest details of Thus lyric’s inadequacy as music is its its meter, leading to a recognition of “the advantage as language and thought. This opposition between the poem as artifact and counter-argument is one Bennett has already the poem as action ... Hölderlin ... uses [this] considered, but apparently found too simple basic defectiveness of poetic form to signify 10 c 2016 SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 a truth concerning the relation between 261). The critique can be admitted without and the verbal. kinetic reading and intellectual reading, defensiveness. Lyrics like those discussed in Chapters two, three, and four are and hence a truth concerning the relation this book found “the possibility of a future interrelated as they follow Sala’s writing in between fate as experience and the knowledge hermeneutics” on the knowledge that their three distinct locations: London, Paris, and of fate” (101). The chapter on Verlaine’s contact with “the understanding” will rarely Russia respectively. The earlier chapters assess “Chanson d’automne” (“Les sanglots longs be smooth – and on the certainty that there Sala’s writing for Charles Dickens’s Household / Des violons / De l’automne…”) derives is no shame to being found out as defective, Words and his role as social commentator in powerful metapoetic arguments from what if it happens at the end of an investigation London, comparing these functions to his sounds to some ears like mere melancholy like those recounted here. role as urban spectator in Paris. Blake analyzes humming. The chapter on the use of Mörike’s the effects that studying societal problems “Auf eine Lampe” as a speaking platform by Haun Saussy and experiencing Parisian bohemian life had Heidegger, Staiger, and Spitzer reserves a fine University of Chicago on Sala’s career. Chapter four follows Sala’s surprise: that none of the poem’s interpreters time in Russia as a special correspondent and have noticed how deftly it undercuts their c his emerging desire to write novels while his own pretensions to hermeneutic authority, Peter Blake. George Augustus Sala and the journalistic stories blur the line between fact founded on their claims to have read the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: The Personal and fiction. poem conclusively. The late poem “Lapis Style of a Public Writer. Farnham: Ashgate, Chapters five and six look at Sala’s Lazuli” by Yeats proposes that we look on 2015. 286p., ill. ISBN 9781472416070. UK departure from and ultimate return to present-day political crisis with the “ancient, £60.00 (hardback). journalism. In chapter five, Blake looks at glittering eyes” of two carved Chinese on Sala’s move to fictional territory, analyzing a chunk of semi-precious stone. Wisdom? George Augustus Sala was a central the influence that realism and sensationalism Rather a preparation for the point that figure to the New Journalism that emerged in his journalistic style had on his fiction “both poetry and politics, when conducted at the end of the nineteenth century. With a writing and the anxieties that he experienced properly, involve the acceptance of a radical, seemingly equal and vocal amount of devout in moving away from journalism. Chapter irreparable defect in themselves…. What the followers and vehement detractors, Sala’s six examines Sala’s move back to journalism two endeavors have in common is in truth personal style of writing was both praised and his shift toward being one of the first nothing but defect” (183). and lambasted. This dichotomous reception international special correspondents. Blake The book’s continuous argument occurs appears to remain to this day. Peter Blake explores this through Sala’s travel writing through the repeated discovery of an sees Sala as a wrongly marginalized figure, from America, Algeria, Italy, Australia, and indispensable flaw in the poem’s authority someone who many have heard of, but New Zealand and comments on the effect to affirm, to prophesy or to make beautiful. whose life and work is not well understood. this writing had on foreign reportage. Blake The recurrence of a single motif as the This volume is his attempt to rectify this asserts that here Sala helped forge a new pivot of these various readings may suggest problem. style of reporting which mirrored “a more an atemporal poetic. But careful reading Blake’s work centers on a chronological general shift in Victorian thinking ‘away revises that impression. Bennett is conscious analysis of Sala’s life, career, and influence on from domestic class conflict toward racial of differences in the historical situations the New Journalism. Blake argues that Sala’s and international conflict’” (181). of the successive poets. He could perhaps career was molded by his work across various Chapter seven examines Sala’s have brought out their specific conditions mediums including visual arts, bohemian pornographic writing and obsession with of utterance a little more without seeming journalism, contemporary novels, travel flagellation, an area in Sala’s life which Blake to endorse a thorough-going ideology of writing, and pornography. Written for those views to be both important and under- “context” as the background that obviates interested in nineteenth-century journalistic researched. Blake looks at the events in Sala’s argument. It does seem to this reviewer, writing and readership, this volume also life that led to this fascination and how it for example, that the dream of a poem as discusses the effects that societal changes manifested during the first part of his career action (quickly set on a collision course with had on Victorian periodicals and the effects in his illustrations. Blake also analyzes Sala’s the ideal of a poem as form) is a Romantic that such changes had on society in turn. participation in the flagellant correspondence invention, the conditions for its emergence Blake does a commendable job of addressing column phenomenon, “particularly the way set by poetry’s unsure place among the media these changes through his study of Sala’s that these correspondents subverted the of a democratizing age. journalistic career. ideologies of family magazines” (15). In Poetry deserves such subtle, relentless, The introduction, which takes a broad doing so, Blake provides a broad study of and inventive readers as Bennett. His respect look at Sala’s career and influence, establishes Victorian pornography and its politically for the art is not in the least discomfited by his central position in the period and subversive nature. such arguments as de Man’s, that “the lyric provides a background against which In the conclusion, Blake assesses Sala’s is not a genre, but one name among several Chapter one seeks to situate the early origins influence upon the evolution of a new wave to designate the defensive motion of the of his writing style. Blake lays out how, from of journalism as well as how this profession understanding, the possibility of a future being blinded as a child, to the beginning of changed from the beginning of his subject’s hermeneutics” (“Anthropomorphism and his career in the visual arts, this part of Sala’s career to the end. This conclusion leads Trope in the Lyric,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism life laid the foundation for his writing style Blake full circle to his purpose stated at [New York: Columbia University Press, 1984], by blurring the distinction between the visual the beginning when he writes: “I contend ... / 11 SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 2016 d 11 that without this overall survey and without that she uses “epistolary” to describe fiction of self ” (81). Chapter five provides a analysing the influences and theories behind featuring embedded diaries as well as letter particularly engaging and insightful analysis Sala’s work we cannot truly understand Sala’s exchanges, arguing that neo-Victorian of Katie Roiphe’s fictionalization of the influence on the New Journalism.” (10) novelists often blur distinctions between relationship between Lewis Carroll and Alice Blake mentions that only two other serious the two forms (for instance, by creating a Liddell, demonstrating how the novel reveals studies have been written analyzing Sala’s diary intended for a particular reader). In the present-day readers to be voyeurs, eagerly writing and career. In part, this volume is chapter that follows, Brindle develops her imagining the Victorians’ sexual secrets to Blake’s attempt to foster new discussions and discussion of neo-Victorianists’ use of diaries fill textual gaps. Brindle’s book provides a research on Sala’s life and influence and to and letters in relation to Victorian literature, valuable and timely contribution to the field create a “sustained effort to encapsulate his literary criticism, and theory. These first two of neo-Victorian studies. It develops ideas [Sala’s] style and the theories underpinning chapters are well researched, providing good expressed in recent works such as Helen his writing” (7). introductions to key concepts associated with Davies’s Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian Blake’s study consistently brings the diary fiction, epistolary novels, historical and Neo-Victorian Fiction: Passionate Puppets discussions back to nineteenth-century fiction, and the neo-Victorian novel; they (2012) and Tatiana Kontou’s Spiritualism and journalism, publishing, and readership. It will be useful to students and specialists. Women’s Writing: From the Fin de Siècle to the Neo- provides a deeper understanding of Sala’s However, her definition of neo-Victorianism Victorian (2009) (both published by Palgrave life, the many facets of his career, and his is somewhat limited by overreliance on Macmillan), applying them to a pervasive influence in the context of Victorian print Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn’s claim but little discussed feature of neo-Victorian culture. It is an interesting and informative (made in Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in fiction. Although the complexity of Brindle’s study, even for those with only elementary the Twenty-First Century, 1999-2009) that the writing style and her use of critical theory knowledge of this area. genre only emerged in the 1960s, with the may make parts of the book challenging for publication of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso an undergraduate reader, the text will prove Diana La Femina Sea and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s useful for graduate students and specialists Independent Scholar Woman. That definition problematically working in this field. c excludes earlier works of metafiction that engage with the Victorian past and the ways Amber Pouliot Kym Brindle. Epistolary Encounters in in which subsequent generations relate to it. Harlaxton College, University of Evansville Neo-Victorian Fiction: Diaries and Letters. As early as 1933, Rachel Ferguson’s Charlotte c Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Brontë: A Play in Three Acts played with the vii, 240p., ill. ISBN 9781137007155. ₤50 idea of the unknowability of the Victorian Arni Brownstone. War Paintings of the (hardback). past, featuring, among other metafictional Tsuu T’ina Nation. Edmonton: University devices, a letter exchange between Charlotte of Alberta Press, 2015. xii, 143p., ill. ISBN Epistolary Encounters in Neo-Victorian and her teacher; access to the letters is 9781772120523. CAD 35.00 Fiction explores the ways in which diaries withheld from the audience and even and letters are used by neo-Victorian Charlotte is unable to decide whether they War Paintings of the Tsuu T’ina Nation builds novelists to exemplify postmodern ideas were love letters, demonstrating Ferguson’s from the premise that during much of the about the unknowability of the past. The commitment to indeterminacy and possibility. nineteenth century, pictographic paintings textual remains of the nineteenth century Some discussion of critical attention to earlier on tipi liners and story robes functioned are necessarily incomplete, meaning that works of neo-Victorian fiction would have as the closest equivalent to written records the past can never be entirely understood. enriched this chapter. for the Indigenous peoples of the North Brindle argues that lacunae in the historical In chapter two, Brindle draws a compelling American Great Plains. Thus, for scholars record have been colonized by neo-Victorian connection between diaries and letters and with an interest in the histories of authorship novelists. They use diaries and letters the bodies of their authors in A. S. Byatt’s and reading that extend beyond print – which are vulnerable to interception, Possession, comparing the layers of clothing and script, Brownstone’s study will be of theft, and destruction – as part of pastiche that seductively envelop Christabel LaMotte’s particular interest. Indigenous pictographic practices to emphasize the fragmentation body with the wrappings and ribbons that sign systems are another written form of of the historical record and to promote a protect her letters from Ash. This idea documenting knowledge and telling stories, metacritical agenda. Their fictionalization of provides continuity between chapters that requiring alternative forms of literacy. Victorian mysteries and marginalized figures, consider diverse employment of epistolary Scholarly interest in this subject has slowly whose experiences were often excluded forms. Chapter three (about fictionalizations taken root over the last decade (see, for from history, encourage readers to reflect of the Victorian occult), chapter four (which example the work of Germaine Warkentin, on their reading practices and to consider considers Margaret Atwood’s construction of Robert Bringhurst, Brendan Edwards, the extent to which any attempt to construct a diary-like space for Victorian criminal Grace Heidi Bohaker, and Niigaanwewidam a narrative of the past necessarily involves Marks), and chapter six (which discusses James Sinclair). Nonetheless, Western assumption and invention. These ideas are the ways in which fictional diaries of ill understandings of literacy are still deep- developed over six chapters, an introduction, Victorians parody nineteenth-century beliefs rooted. Brownstone’s work is particularly and a postscript. about sanity and wellness) all consider how notable because he frames pictographic In the introduction, Brindle explains diary functions as a “textual embodiment paintings as both artistic and literary. In 12 c 2016 SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 other words, the artistic and literary are not Michael C. Cohen. The Social Lives of Poems dense, long volume. Cohen leaves most all of characterized as mutually exclusive, as is in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia, his many off-set quotations hanging off the normally the case in Western interpretations PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. end of paragraphs and thereby frustrates any of Indigenous forms of knowledge exchange. 281p., 23 ill. ISBN 9780812247084. US readerly attempt to skim the quotations and For the past 30 years, Brownstone has $55.00. skip to the analysis. These nineteenth-century redrawn more than 50 Plains Indian drawings. poems may not have been read in their day, Although these are large works drawn on Michael C. Cohen’s The Social Lives of Poems but Cohen wants to ensure his readers read buffalo robes and other animal-hides, he in Nineteenth-Century America is a fascinating each excerpt. notes that the critical cues to understanding and full account of the relationships between In pulling together this rich archive of their narratives are often found in small poems and readers between the 1790s and nineteenth-century poems, Cohen’s book details. In the course of reproducing these early 1900s. Dedicated to a “lived history of does a great service. I could not but be works, Brownstone has been able to better literary writing in the United States,” Cohen fascinated by the “Melancholy Shipwreck” understand the overall composition of investigates the “variety of social relations ballad from 1807, its work as a news report, the paintings and decipher their narrative that poems made possible,” both materially and its wonderful header of black coffins cues. Much of this book focuses on and theoretically (1). His six substantial (shown in an image). So too, the beautiful Brownstone’s comparative analyses of five chapters (and an introduction) move through manuscript book made by John Greenleaf key pictographic war exploit paintings from history, from itinerate balladmongers (chapter Whittier’s friends – and Cohen’s astute museum collections in the United States one); abolitionist verse (chapter two), poems treatment of how this group of friends used and Canada, complemented by readings of about contraband slaves (chapter three); the poems – was wonderful. And, notably, there related artifacts. mid-century desire to collect supposedly are no fewer than 23 images within The Social Biographical war records were the most authentic oral ballads (chapter four); how Lives of Poems, five of this remarkable Whittier common subject of Plains Indian pictorial the postbellum country reimagined J. G. manuscript book. Ultimately, this excellent painting, and they served a primary purpose Whittier as a national poet by forgetting his volume will be of interest to anyone who of keeping an individual’s proficiency as a abolitionist verse (chapter five); and finally, wants to think more about the circulation, warrior in public view. The authors of these the Fisk Singers and the racial politics of reception, and creation either of poetry or documents used a pared-down, economical slave songs and black minstrelsy. (John of literature in the nineteenth century. The visual language – a shorthand, if you will – Greenleaf Whittier and his poems crop up book is a smart, readable, worthwhile, and which was intended to be read and readily repeatedly and serve as a sort of through-line helpful addition to on-going studies of the understood by other members of the Tsuu in the book.) history of reading. T’ina (previously known as the Sarcee) and Throughout The Social Lives of Poems related tribal groups. Brownstone’s work Cohen thinks not just about the formal Lydia G. Fash carefully reveals the commonalities and features of these poems but also about Boston University shifts in style and content of five surviving how “poems facilitated actions, like reading, c pictorial paintings, particularly as intertribal writing, reciting, copying, inscribing, Plains warfare came to a halt at the end of scissoring, exchanging, or circulating, that Margaret Connolly and Raluca Radulescu, the nineteenth century. This book thus positioned people within densely complex eds. Insular Books: Vernacular Manuscript provides important insight not only into webs of relation” (6–7). His book, then, Miscellanies in Late Medieval Britain. Oxford: the visual communication forms that were portrays multiple communities being formed Published for the British Academy by commonly practiced by more than 30 tribal through the exchange and use of “popular” Oxford University Press, 2015. xviii, 330p., groups across the North American Great (i.e. used by the people) verse of all different colour ill. ISBN 9780197265833. US $155.00 Plains, but it also provides a ‘translation’ of sorts. Sometimes such exchange means that (hardback). the pictograph paintings, thus enriching our poems were not even read (and certainly historical knowledge of the Tsuu T’ina nation not close-read) and their non-reading had Insular Books: Vernacular Manuscript and their relations with other tribal groups, cultural import, as in, for example, American Miscellanies in Late Medieval Britain contains including the Blackfoot, Cree, and others. Anti-Slavery Society mailings sent to the a collection of essays that emerged from a War Paintings of the Tsuu T’ina Nation makes South and burned upon arrival in riots that conference on this subject held in London at a valuable contribution to the still emerging helped precipitate the “gag rule” against the British Academy in June 2012. As stated scholarly discussion of Indigenous forms anti-slavery petitions in Congress. In taking on its website, the conference’s objective of literacy, and serves as a model of what this tack, Cohen’s book joins the work of, was to “bring a new and multidisciplinary it is possible to ascertain from Indigenous among others, Mary Loeffelholz and Joan focus to the late medieval miscellany, a material culture as forms of historical record. Shelley Rubin, who have written about how little-investigated and poorly understood US poems were read and received, as well type of manuscript” (www.britac.ac.uk/ Brendan F. R. Edwards as Meredith McGill, Ellen Gruber Garvey, events/2012/insular_books_vernacular_ Royal Ontario Museum and Leah Price, who have worked on the misc_in_late_med_britain.cfm, last accessed circulation and use of the written word in June 2016). The resulting book’s principal c the nineteenth century. foci are to outline “the main issues for those Cohen’s interest in non-reading ironically unfamiliar with this particular aspect of relates to my one small complaint about this medieval studies” (xiii) and to suggest “some SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 2016 d 13 directions that might fruitfully be taken up compare two manuscripts; she examines Carl Dair. Epistles to the Torontonians, by future researchers” (xiv). In other words, their accretive structures and how they with Articles from Canadian Printer and Insular Books concentrates on identification, document “the individual in relation to Publisher. William Ross, Introduction, and by defining the complex term miscellany in the community, particularly with reference Rod McDonald, Notes. Toronto and New the context of late medieval Britain, and to religious devotion and practice” (167). Castle, Delaware: Coach House Press with on methodology, by considering the diverse Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan’s “Writing Without Sheridan College and Oak Knoll Press, 2015. ways in which miscellanies can be critically Borders: Multilingual Content in Welsh 127p. ISBN 9781584563396. US $75.00. analysed. Miscellanies from Wales, the Marches and The broad definition of miscellany Beyond” and Dafydd Johnston’s “Welsh There is something magical about advanced in Insular Books is “essentially a Bardic Miscellanies” examine Welsh discovering old letters. Whether it be in prose and poetry respectively; and Emily multi-text manuscript, made up of mixed the attic or the archive, reading old letters Wingfield’s “Lancelot of the Laik and the contents” (1). The scholars who have Literary Manuscript Miscellany in 15th- provides a personal insight into the lives contributed to this collection start from and 16th-century Scotland” addresses the of both the sender and receiver that stands this premise to examine the production “lamented lack of scholarship on Scottish apart both from histories of their lives of miscellany manuscripts, “pointing to literary manuscript miscellanies” (209). and the more self-conscious writings of cultural practices established in Wales and Deborah Young’s “Entertainment Networks, autobiographies and diaries. Through letters Scotland and particular regions of England Reading Communities, and the Early Tudor we can eavesdrop on the past. (with their distinct linguistic and cultural Anthology: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Epistles to the Torontonians captures the traditions)” (1). They focus on case studies Rawlinson C. 813” and William Marx’s conversations that Canadian typographer of single manuscripts or manuscripts of a “Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Carl Dair (1912–1967), and his wife Edith, “more physically composite nature, made of MS Peniarth 12: The Development of had with other members of the Toronto discrete elements” (1), and apply comparative Bilingual Miscellany—Welsh and English” typographical community during 1956–57. approaches to either individual manuscripts study community in Tudor England: the first, Dair, who is now perhaps best known as the or manuscripts “in which particular types of how entertainment networks facilitate the author of Design with Type (1952), desired to text are housed” (11). transmission of ideas; and the second, how create the first Canadian Latin typeface and The editors recognise that Insular Books the manuscript’s compilation was “driven by received a grant from the Royal Society of is itself a miscellany and “encourage a sense of contemporary need” (262). And, Canada to spend a year studying under type- readers to approach [the] essays both lastly, Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards’s cutter Paul Rädisch at the Johannes Enschedé sequentially and selectively” (xiv); “Towards a Taxonomy of Middle English Foundry in Haarlem, Netherlands. nevertheless, the essays appear to be Manuscript Assemblages” and Margaret Through the Dairs’ letters home to their grouped according to specific boundaries, Connolly’s “The Whole Book and the friends we get not only a glimpse into life in specifically linguistic, methodological, Whole Picture: Editions and Facsimiles of post-war Holland, but, more importantly, an Medieval Miscellanies and Their Influence” geographic, and chronological. Marianne inside look at the contemporary European present a whole-book perspective to consider Ailes and Phillipa Hardman’s “Texts in closely the taxonomy and accessibility of late typographical scene. The letters recount Conversation: Charlemagne Epics and medieval miscellanies respectively. Dair’s meetings with Jan Tschichold, Romances in Insular Plural-text Codices,” The editors of this collection Hermann Zapf, Jan van Krimpen, Maximilian Keith Busby’s “Multilingualism, the Harley unquestionably realise their primary Vox, and others. They also recount in great Scribe, and Johannes Jacobi,” Susanna objectives through their multidisciplinary detail Dair’s apprenticeship under Rädisch, Fein’s “Literary Scribes: The Harley Scribe approach and their inclusion of scholars the last master punch-cutter, and his assistant and Robert Thornton as Case Studies,” whose expertise enables readers to obtain S. L. Hartz. Metal type was on the verge and Ad Putter’s “The Organisation of insight into the complex nature of vernacular of becoming obsolete, and these letters Multilingual Miscellanies: The Contrasting manuscript miscellanies in general and document the immense skill that was required Fortunes of Middle English Lyrics and their contents more specifically. Their to take a letter from a drawing to a piece Romances” offer multilingual intertextuality descriptions of manuscripts, such as Tanner of type. Finally, through Dair’s urgings that as their commonality. Wendy Scase’s “John 407 and Beinecke 365 by Meale, are vivid and his friends participate, the letters hint at the Northwood’s Miscellany Revisited,” Raluca engaging, and numerous secondary sources emergence of the Society of Typographic Radulescu’s “Vying for Attention: The in footnotes encourage readers to conduct Designers of Canada. Contents of Dublin, Trinity College, MS further independent research. However, In addition to the letters, the book 432,” and Andrew Taylor’s “The Chivalric the devil manifests often in the abundance contains an Introduction by William Ross, Miscellany: Classifying John Paston’s of detail – that is, the effort to understand a note on Dair’s Cartier typeface by Rod ‘Grete Booke’” feature case studies on the physical and socio-cultural conditions McDonald, who used it as a basis for his own individual manuscripts and explore the of a manuscript’s production is at times Cartier Book, illustrations of Dair’s work, socio-cultural circumstances influencing overshadowed by the thorough cataloguing including sketches towards the development their compilation and dissemination. Carol of content. of Cartier, and a number of articles Dair M. Meale, in “Amateur Book Production wrote for Canadian Printer & Publisher. The and the Miscellany in Late Medieval East Jocelyn Hargrave book is very handsomely designed by Stan Anglia: Tanner 407 and Beinecke 365,” Monash University Bevington and superbly printed by Toronto’s presents East Anglia as a backdrop to Coach House Press. In particular, the 14 c 2016 SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 reproductions of the letters are extremely has to overcome not only the Manichean view nuances, a common feature was its profound clear and easy to read. of a writer struggling against a wicked censor connection to the power structures. For However, in capturing the magic of but also the idea that anything that hinders Darnton, censorship is essentially bound to discovering a box of old letters, the book communication can be labeled censorship. the state, to its monopoly of power and its also recreates some of the frustrations and First of all, censors cannot simply be ability to sanction. Moreover, it is precisely thus unnecessarily limits its use. The letters discarded as “watchdogs.” Underpaid or such a political understanding of censorship are arranged in mostly chronological order, not paid at all, the censors in Bourbon that prevents the object of research from but all of the “Epistles” are lumped together, France were mostly prominent intellectuals dissolving as merely one of the many possible breaking up the order. There are also items – sometimes working hard to improve the constraints in communication. Although missing, such as Epistles 7 and 8, and one texts submitted and to defend the “honor of Darnton refrains from conjecturing on can only assume they were not in the archive. French literature,” as one of Malesherbes’s more recent manifestations of censorship, This lack of structure makes it easy for a men once put it. Even though they did defend his thorough insights into the ways in which mistake to slip in – a duplicate page appears, the rulers and the clergy, “censorship was policy makers have thought about it in the resulting in a missing page of another letter. not simply a matter of purging heresies” past might prove inspiring for a reflection on It is also up to the reader to know, or to (29). Notably, it was not so much the ideas its manifestation in the present times. All the find out, whom exactly the people in the that censors deemed dangerous, but the risk more so since today the state – and this is how letters are; for example, most of the letters of offending the potentates of the Ancien the author closes this seminal book – “may be are to “Frank and Sheila,” but nowhere is Régime. However, the censors granting watching every move we make” (243). their surname given (Smith). Similarly, the royal privileges (or tacit permissions) only illustrations lack captions. A few footnotes represent one half of the story; the other Marijan Dović and a small editorial introduction would have half – narrated in this case with a masterful ZRC SAZU Institute of Slovenian Literature and been valuable additions. literary touch – is about the harsh police Literary Studies Any shortcomings in the book are more repression of the extensive corpus of illegal, than made up for by the inclusion of the “clandestine” books that were circulating c DVD Carl Dair at Enschedé: The Last Days under the cloak. Sari Edelstein. Between the Novel and the of Metal Type. This remastered version of British rulers in India resorted to violence News: The Emergence of American Women’s Dair’s 16mm footage of Rädisch at work is as well. In theory, they were granting the Writing. Charlottesville: University of Virginia introduced by Rod McDonald and narrated subjects of the Raj freedom of expression. Press, 2014. 226p., 7 ill. ISBN 9780813935904. by Matthew Carter. Carter himself trained at In practice, however, “the disparity US $29.50. Enschedé, and his narration and interview between preaching liberalism and practicing cast further light on the last days of metal imperialism” (124) became overtly manifest Sari Edelstein’s Between the Novel and the type. when the colonial rulers felt increasingly News offers a bold corrective. While scholars threatened after 1900. British surveillance of and teachers have often connected male Jon Bath the vernacular book production, initiated in realist writers to journalism – the opening of University of Saskatchewan the mid-century, was replaced by punishment. Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham in which c Courtrooms became hermeneutic battlefields the eponymous character is being interviewed and jails were filled with arrested writers, tried for a newspaper series is a quintessentially Robert Darnton. Censors at Work. How for sedition – a legal notion vaguely defined realist moment – critics have not given similar States Shaped Literature. London: The British as exciting feelings of “disaffection” to the attention to how women writers in the long Library, 2014. The Panizzi Lectures 2013. 316p., authorities. The rulers simply “could not nineteenth century struggled to use and ill. ISBN 9780712357616. £25.00 (hardback). allow the Indians to use words as freely as counter journalistic depictions of women and Englishmen did at home” (142). journalistic modes of narration. As Edelstein This excellent book represents a peak in Using brutal force was seldom necessary writes, “women writers have long regarded Robert Darnton’s long-term research and in totalitarian regimes. In East Germany, the the press an ideological problem whose should indeed become compulsory reading Party control was so omnipresent that the social and political influence had serious for all those interested in censorship and, major work – the thorough self-censoring repercussions for lived experience” (148). more generally, mechanisms of control in – was already done by the authors. The She develops this argument over five the age of print. Darnton takes the reader rest was achieved by central “planning” of major chapters that trace groups of works in on an exciting voyage through censorship the annual book production, a process that conjunction with advancements in American as exerted by three authoritarian systems in involved negotiations among authors, editors, journalism, a shorter introduction, and a three different centuries: eighteenth-century officially non-existent censors (part of the conclusion. With a focus on Judith Sargent France, the British Raj, and Communist governmental structure) and high officials of Murray’s The Story of Margaretta, the first East Germany. Instead of starting from the Communist Party. But even in such cases, chapter thinks about how women-authored definitions, he provides subtle “ethnographic” warns Darnton, “it would be misleading to seduction novels commented on the partisan insights into day-to-day censorial practices. characterize censorship simply as a contest fights carried out between Federalists and By offering “a ‘thick description’ of how between creation and oppression” (234). Republicans at the end of the eighteenth censorship actually operated” (19), he argues Although censorship in the three analyzed century. The second chapter discusses that the understanding of this phenomenon systems took quite diverse shapes and how authors, including Catherine Maria SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 2016 d 15

Sedgwick, used sentimentalism to establish Helen A. Fairlie, Revaluing British Boys’ take account of the readers is a central aim an alternative ‘truth’ grounded in ethics Story Papers, 1918-1939. Basingstoke: of this book, and Fairlie draws upon a wide rather than in the ‘facts’ touted by the penny Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. x, 214p., ill. ISBN range of theoretical perspectives, including papers that sensationalized women’s (often 9781137293053. £50.00 (hardback). new historicist approaches, reader response dead) bodies in the 1830s. Interested in theory and theories of cultural production in E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand Helen Fairlie’s Revaluing British Boys’ Story an attempt to do so. It is a shame, then, that (1859) and antebellum story-papers, the third Papers, 1918-1939 sets out to reconsider the she does not really succeed in synthesising chapter considers “the era’s anxieties about value of publications such as Hotspur and her theoretical approach with the subject the breakdown of the national as well as the The Magnet in the light of their reception by matter itself. A reading of the story papers in gender conventions that female authorship child readers themselves. This is a welcome relation to their actual readership might have threatened to overturn” (68). Chapter four intervention into scholarship on a period opened up particularly interesting avenues examines how Elizabeth Keckley and Louisa which has until recently been characterised May Alcott practiced eyewitness reportage in in the case of school stories; although these their fictionalized memoirs, which gestures as a largely unexciting one for British often sought ostensibly to inculcate respect toward the rise of embedded reporters during children’s literature – a view that fails to take for the authority of school and master, the Civil War. Edelstein concludes at the end into account the vibrancy of the periodical the fact that story papers were frequently of the century with a chapter that explores market which, as Fairlie shows, comprised disparaged by real-life teachers suggests an how various women writers – Charlotte a substantial part of children’s reading lives interesting interplay between subversion and Perkins Gilman, Ida Wells-Barnett, and at this time. Where boys’ story papers are authority. Ultimately, however, Fairlie fails to Edith Eaton – “simultaneously reproduce recognised, critics have tended to follow really interrogate this beyond observing that and criticize the sensationalist practices of George Orwell in characterising them as a child readers were well able to distinguish mainstream newspapers” and what came to vehicle for conservative ideologies. Fairlie between the fictionalised public school be called yellow journalism (15). suggests that the story paper has thus been settings and their own school experiences. The great strength of this book is its undervalued in terms of its perceived lack of One reason for these shortcomings is ambition. Edelstein pulls together a range literary quality, its status as popular literature, the dearth of information about the readers of authors who work over a long period of and its ephemeral physical nature, arguing themselves. Fairlie eschews an oral history time and offers a compelling argument about that, by focusing on readers and their lived approach because of the issues raised how women, in order to write public words, experiences, it is possible to revalue the texts by retrospective accounts of childhood necessarily had to grapple with the newspaper themselves and their role in the cultural life experience (although she does draw on technologies and trends of their time. To of Britain. memoirs and on existing oral histories), but make her temporal argument clear, Edelstein After a useful introductory chapter given the limitations of contemporary data offers wonderful succinct explanations of mapping out the critical and historical about reading habits this leaves her with print history – the developments in paper perspectives which underpin the book, Fairlie many questions unanswered. The book thus making and press technology as well as the devotes three chapters to specific aspects demonstrates the potential for a reader- corresponding trends in journalism – over of the story papers: their moral code, the the hundred-odd years featured in the book focused analysis of these texts, but also the and compellingly ties them to standard school story, and the imperial hero. Taking pitfalls of such an approach. and lesser-read fiction by women. The Hotspur and The Magnet as her case studies, seven accompanying illustrations also do a she argues that while the papers do offer a Lucy Pearson great job communicating how newspapers largely conservative worldview which prizes Newcastle University were material and how their size, shape, “traditional” values such as loyalty, respect c organization, and formatting influenced their for authority, and physical bravery, this reception and communicated their intentions does not entail a straightforward top-down Susanna Fein and Michael Johnston, – facets with which these women authors transmission of ideology. Drawing on a eds. Robert Thornton and his Books: Essays on grapple. My favorite image was of a Southern number of cultural and reader-response the Lincoln and London Thornton Manuscripts. Civil War newspaper printed on old wallpaper theorists including Jonathan Rose and Rochester, NY & Cambridge, UK: York which accompanies Edelstein’s argument Wolfgang Iser, Fairlie makes the case for a Medieval Press, 2014. xii, 316p., ill. ISBN about Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper.” more complex reception of these messages 9781903153512. £60 / US $99 (hardback). Overall, the book is an impressive piece of by child readers. Furthermore, she draws scholarship that illuminates the complicated attention to the relationship between the story Robert Thornton was a mid-fifteenth- relationship between women’s writing and papers and the child readers, pointing out that century Yorkshire gentleman who compiled journalism. It is indispensable to those the importance of children themselves as and wrote two miscellanies for household seeking to understand more about U.S. purchasers as well as consumers facilitated a use: Lincoln Cathedral Library, MS 91 periodical culture and American women’s much more active role for the child reader. and London, British Library, Additional writing. The following chapter considers the impact MS 31042. Lincoln’s three main booklets of cinema on the popularity of the story contain romance, religious, and medical Lydia G. Fash papers, while the final chapter considers the texts, respectively, reflecting an interest in Boston University papers as cultural artefacts, with a particular world history; the less neatly organized focus on advertising. London explores sacred history – and Formulating a critical approach that can raises similar questions about genre and 16 c 2016 SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 devotion – through its textual pairings and only Thornton’s own developing investments, scholars” (12), as Johnston puts it, showing sequences. The current volume toggles but also key elements of Yorkshire book how our various specialized skills as book productively between technical book history culture in the fifteenth century, from pamphlet and literary historians can inform each other. and literary analysis, opening with a new and circulation to the complex interrelation of very useful “descriptive list” of the contents romance and devotional materials (witnessed Elizabeth Schirmer of both manuscripts by Susanna Fein, and also by Sir Gawain’s MS Cotton Nero A.x., c. New Mexico State University concluding with an afterword on “Robert 1400). Ralph Hanna and Thorlac Turville- Thornton Country” by Rosalind Field and Petre, in turn, offer a rigorous and bracing c Dav Smith demonstrating the cultural vitality discussion of dialect forms and alliterative Frank Felsenstein and James J. Connolly. of medieval Ryedale. The essays in between metrics in the Morte Arthure as prolegomenon What Middletown Read: Print Culture in a provide a wealth of material on late-medieval to a “more satisfactory” edition of Lincoln’s Small American City. Boston: University of English book-making practices, and on flagship romance (155). Massachusetts Press, 2015. 320p., ill. ISBN fifteenth-century textual cultures and habits As the anthology pivots to foreground 9781625341419. US $28.95. of reading more generally. literary analysis, it keeps sight of such The volume opens with paired technical elements while retaining an interest In What Middletown Read, Frank Felsenstein introductory moves, conceptual and practical. in Thornton’s complex generic sensibilities. and James Connolly offer a compelling Michael Johnston’s introduction resurrects Mary Michele Poellinger traces a shared contribution to the growing scholarship on late twentieth-century historiographical language of violence in Lincoln’s Passion the history of reading. Using circulation debates between longue-durée narrative and and Arthurian narratives, which transfers records of the Muncie public library from “micro-history,” framing Thornton as a some of the affective power of the Passion 1891–1902 contained in the What Middletown “marginal” book producer who offers as to the suffering of romance heroes and Read (WMR) database and historical, such a “richer, and more accurate, perception invites us to judge their sacrifices in light demographic, and bibliographic data about of cultural attitudes” (6). Skipping ahead, of Christ’s. Julie Nelson Couch offers the the borrowers and what they borrowed, Johnston’s contributing essay persuasively volume’s smartest reading of interplay of Felsenstein and Connolly investigate “the asserts Thornton’s “cultural agency” as devotion and romance in Thornton’s opus, place of books and reading in the lives of scriptor, compilator and commentator, making and of his parallel interest in history. Locating ordinary Americans a little more than a him representative of (rather than marginal Lincoln’s Childhood of Christ in relation both century ago” (13). to) a unique moment in book history. Any to that manuscript’s Passion narratives and The first section of the book, ‘A City and conceptual weaknesses here are more than to the Crusading romance that follows it, Its Library,’ provides the historical context made up for by Fein’s superb description Richard Coeur de Lyon, Couch suggests that the for the circulation records found in the WMR of the manuscripts. Organized by booklet, manuscript as a whole develops a Passion- database. It positions 1890s Muncie as a her list has been “updated” to single out based historiography – setting the Passion as boomtown with rising cultural aspirations, Thornton’s “framing words” and signatures “the beginning and the end of history” and examines the development of the public (14, 20). Individual entries are carefully making history itself “a matter of the Passion library (including a helpful contrast with researched, richly describing not only the and its vengeance” (217, 224). Finally, Julie the shorter-lived Workingmen’s Library), contents of texts but also their layout and Orlemanski turns to what might seem the and explores the role of printed materials in decoration, marginalia and transmission in generic outliers of the corpus, Thornton’s cultivating a cosmopolitan sensibility among both contemporary manuscripts and modern medical texts: Lincoln’s final booklet, its residents. Part II, ‘Reading Experiences,’ editions. The result is an invaluable resource containing the Liber de Diversis Medicinis and looks at reading in turn-of-the-century for Thornton scholars and a model for others. fragments of an herbal; and a partial copy of Muncie through chapters focused on library The essays that follow demonstrate the Lydgate’s Dietary, which appears among the borrowing patterns, the experiences of mutual value of technical studies in book Lydgatiana of London’s Booklet 2. Medicine, children and women readers, and readers’ history and literary-critical approaches. like vernacular literature, was a young and diaries. George R. Keiser analyses Thornton’s burgeoning field of discourse in the period; Perhaps the most useful sections for experimentation with letter-forms in order to medical genres were themselves “flexible” demonstrating the potential of the database elucidate his evolving scribal confidence and and “porous” to other kinds of instructional are chapters four (‘Borrowing Patterns’) and creative vision. We learn here that London’s discourse. What, Orlemanski productively six (‘Reading and Reform’). In chapter four, Northern Passion and Siege of Jerusalem were asks, do romance, religion and medicine have Felsenstein and Connolly convincingly use copied together early on, setting the tone to say to and with each other in compilations borrowing patterns from the WMR database for the volume; or that Lincoln’s opening like these? What, for such books and their to challenge notions of turn-of-the-century Prose Alexander and the Perceval that closes readers, did it mean to be “profitable?” libraries as primarily purveyors of moral the romance booklet were both added late, This volume will be of great benefit not improvement and social uplift. Concluding framing the collection. And in seeing this, only to scholars working on Thornton or that “the library operated primarily as a we can see more clearly Lincoln’s parallel his texts, but to anyone interested in (lay, supplier of cultural material from which exploration of earthly and heavenly glory, or vernacular) bookmaking in the period just its patrons could absorb the impressions London’s central obsession with vengeance before print. It is a good model for anyone of the world created by popular fiction, not as on the Jews for the crucifixion. Joel Fredell’s looking to place a single manuscript or scribal a conveyor of the knowledge contained study of decorative patterns illuminates not output “under the microscope of a team of in scholarly works and the cultural capital SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 2016 d 17 conveyed through highbrow literature” of research activities undertaken by relevant commendable initiative has to be applauded (134, my emphasis), they reveal that the specialists and conducted in accordance and encouraged in so far as it seeks to provide Muncie public library affirmed popular tastes with the highest academic standards. As it is the academic community with a crucial open- rather than complicated them. Chapter six pertinently claimed in the editorial, the current access and peer-reviewed meeting point for persuasively uses reading records, historical and increasing interest in the area coincides international and specialized scientific debate. data, textual details, and demographic with the rise in importance and use of the A careful reading of the essays collected information about individual borrowers digital and electronic book. Interestingly, in this first volume, which are judiciously to demonstrate how members of reform- within the framework of a general mutation selected and coherently assembled, is highly minded women’s literary clubs “treated of the material object into image, the old recommended. These articles explore the fictional texts as [minimally transgressive] typographic text is being transformed into production, circulation, and dissemination tools for understanding the world” (169) in a virtual realm. The extended process and of the book in a variety of languages and a society still wary about changing roles for procedure of digitization, as a consequence traditions. Therefore, the textual artefact women. of technological innovation in the educational is approached not only as an extraordinary As Felsenstein and Connolly note, the and administrative systems, now takes object endowed with its own life and power most significant limitation of the database is precedence over the invaluable smoothness but also as a conceptual metaphor going its inability to provide evidence about how of paper as a medium, an everlasting witness beyond the social and cultural mechanism individual readers interpreted and used what of nations and cultures. No matter what, of its production. Furthermore, two integral they borrowed (and presumably read). For a rare book not only tells us an incredible sections of the journal (the first containing the most part, the authors use supplemental and captivating story but also speaks of notes on scientific advances or research information effectively to address this lacuna a social and economic history enacted by breakthroughs; the second, reviews of (as described above). However, despite printers, librarians, editors, illustrators and current works in the field of rare books), presenting a productive balance of gender bookbinders. should contribute to the establishment of and class perspectives, the four diaries written This exciting periodical is named after the a solid publication for which I predict a by young people included in chapter seven “demon of scribes,” represented for the first promising future. seem less directly relevant to the project at time in Spain in a fragment of the painting hand. While the diaries may, as the authors La Virgen de la Misericordia con los Reyes Católicos Ramón Bárcena state, allow us “to comprehend at a far more y su familia (c. 1495), by Diego de la Cruz, Universidad de Cantabria intimate level the place of books and reading preserved in the Monasterio de las Huelgas in c in the lives of Muncie’s young people” (212), Burgos. This famous figure patron is depicted the tangential relationship of these diaries to in the right part of the image and is supposed J. A. Garrido Ardila, ed. A History of the the database makes this section feel slightly to act on behalf of Belphegor, Lucifer or Spanish Novel. Oxford: Oxford University out of place. Nonetheless, the authors have Satan to introduce errors into the work of Press, 2015. xii, 404p. ISBN 9780199641925. made an important contribution to our scribes and, later, in the printing presses: £65.00 (hardback). understanding of reading in this community Fragmina verborum Titivillus colligit horum at the turn of the century, and they offer quibus die mille vicibus se sarcinat ille (Johannes This multi-authored volume, edited by suggestive opportunities for further research Gallensis, Tractatus de poenitentia, c. 1285). It J. A. Garrido Ardila, is conceived of as a with databases of this type. is said that he used to visit the scriptoria every “reference history of the Spanish novel for day providing an easy excuse for the errors students and scholars of Spanish literature, Jennifer Nolan that were bound to creep into manuscripts as and more generally, of Western literatures” North Carolina State University they were copied. He introduced the mistakes (vi). The apologetic tone of the preface c made by the monks and typesetters in a sack, and the editor’s grievance at the supposed which he carried on his back. At night, he ignorance of Spanish letters in the English- Pedraza García, Manuel José, ed. Titivilus: descended into hell, where all inaccuracies speaking world indicate that the target International Journal of Rare Books, vol. I (2015). were registered in a book to be reclaimed the audience is primarily readers not familiar with Zaragoza: Prensas de la Universidad de day of the final judgement. Spanish literature. Zaragoza, 2015. 470p., ill. ISSN 23870915. Behind such an evocative and exciting In the first chapter, Garrido Ardila €30.00 (paperback). title lies the ambitious and meritorious supplies ‘A Concise Introduction to the intention to put forward a benchmark for History of the Spanish Novel,’ which is, Titivilus is a fresh and new international the Hispanic world. Titivilus is concerned as a matter of fact, a concise history of journal devoted to the topic of rare books, with the whole cycle of life of rare books the Spanish novel in fifty-five pages. After a publication conceived and edited by the in the widest sense, embracing manuscripts some brief reflections on the generic status Department of Documentation Sciences and and imprints, incunabula, and ephemera, paper of the novel, the author identifies the the History of Science of the Universidad and parchment. It broadly regards every issue Spanish picaresque novel and Miguel de de Zaragoza, Spain. This multidisciplinary related to the written world and the multiple Cervantes’s Don Quixote as the essence of endeavour, funded by the Ministry of aspects of the book (material, formal and Spanish literature, which provided the vital Economy and Competitiveness, is aimed at historical), incorporating its presence in models and patterns for later novelists. For the field of book studies, with the purpose of collections and libraries as well as its impact Garrido Ardila, the novel is characterized spreading, at an international level, the results on society, economy, and culture. Such a by “realism” and psychological depth. This 18 c 2016 SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 projection of an essentially nineteenth- fascinating seventeenth-century writer of Auschwitz, merely as “monuments to the century notion of the novel produces a story novellas – who has never authored a novel. author’s survival, not as texts in their own of this Spanish literary genre with a strong At the same time, Fernando de Rojas’s La right” (62). Gwyer squelches comparable teleological inflection. It is based on works Celestina, a “dialogued novel” of monumental analyses by probing characters in novels by that were “important” for the “development importance for the development of the genre, Adler, Augustin, and Aloni, who exist in an of Spanish literature” (vi). The criteria for is only mentioned in passing. “unhoused past, meandering through a realm importance are nowhere explained; it can be The reader of A History of the Spanish suffused with images of both the recent and inferred that aesthetic value translates into Novel will certainly benefit from the excellent the distant past” (93). Everything seems canonicity. Garrido Ardila’s presentation articles it contains, but as a whole it is marred insurmountable to them, because exile and of the Spanish literature during the Franco by its lack of a coherent concept. psychological disruption have resulted in the regime has a decidedly revisionist bent: “traumatic persistence” (30) of loss. we read that the aesthetic qualities of the Robert Folger Finding oneself in an unhoused past is literature of the time have been ignored for Universität Heidelberg nothing new; Dante’s Guelphs and Ghibellines political reasons; under “Nationalist” rule, c suffered similar relegation, both in the Fifth the 1950s are an age of regeneration after Kirstin Gwyer. Encrypting the Past: The and the Sixth Circles of Hell. Characters a decline in the 1930s and a Golden Age of German-Jewish Holocaust Novel of the First in Aloni’s Der Wartesaal [The Waiting Room] sorts for Spanish literary criticism. Recent Generation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, lurch likewise between bewilderment and literature is largely dismissed for its lack of 2014. x, 246p. ISBN 9780198709930. £65.00 perplexity, as they do in Augustin’s Auswege imagination and aesthetic value. (hardback). (the original title of which was Labyrint). This first chapter has not only the function Complicating the sense of dislocation in of providing a story line, but is also an ersatz This superbly researched monograph re- Aloni’s narrator is her experience as a Jewish for a chapter on the Spanish novel after the investigates (and in some cases, re-discovers) survivor who collaborated with the Nazis. Civil War. In the last chapter, Germán Gullón works of fiction written in the aftermath Having successfully disguised her Jewish reflects critically on cultural and editorial of the Holocaust experience. Critics at identity, she got a job with the SS typing up politics in relation to contemporary literature the time of publication often found such deportation lists; one of these lists contained and the reason for what he perceives as the narratives by “first generation” German- the name of her own mother. Because time lamentable state of the Spanish novel, but Jewish writers incomprehensible; some seems to be stretching behind her and also essentially this History of the Spanish Novel branded them unethical, immoral, or worse. in front of her, she narrates her memories ends in the 1930s with the avant-gardes. The They were narrative attempts to “express the to an imaginary daughter. Navigating this open disdain expressed by Garrido Ardila and ineffable” (20), after all. It was better, some kind of labyrinth is difficult, and Gwyer’s Gullón for the recent contemporary Spanish believed, to allow preterition to be the better work is exemplary for “decrypting” the novel will hardly win readers over to the part of disclosure. Author Kirstin Gwyer significance of such episodes. Erich Fried’s Spanish novel in general. successfully debunks such biases, a process Ein Soldat und ein Mädchen [A Soldier and a Girl] The 16 chapters on different aspects in she calls “mapping the blind spot” (18). The dislocates “meaning” throughout, creating an the history of the Spanish novel are authored narratives of H. G. Adler (1910–1988), Jenny atmosphere encrypted in what Freud termed by internationally renowned scholars, all Rosenbaum Aloni (1917–1993), Elisabeth das Unheimliche, best understood in English, but two currently working in British and Augustin (1903–2001), Erich Fried (1921– Gwyer believes, as “uncanny.” Her treatment US-American universities. These chapters 1988), and Wolfgang Hildesheimer (1916– of Hildesheimer’s Tynset (1965) and Masante are highly recommendable for the reader 1991) constitute her primary focus. Gwyer (1973) recalls a recent analysis by Mary interested in the particular topic; however, then makes a surprising turn in a concluding Cosgrove. Both novels contain numerous I fail to understand the overall concept. We chapter on W. G. Sebald (1944–2001), who “micronarratives,” but the atmosphere find chapters on periods, on genres, and on unlike the others, had no direct contact with in both is, instead of “uncanniness,” one individual authors (of the life-and-works the Holocaust and was not Jewish. encrypted in pervasive Schrecken, or terror. type), as well as case studies. While it is easy Among Gwyer’s most valuable The case of W. G. Sebald is altogether to see why there is a chapter on the Don observations is exposure of Theodor different, and its inclusion in this volume Quixote, there is no explanation for why Pío Wiesengrund Adrono’s self-warranted is as surprising as it is altogether welcome Baroja is the only twentieth-century author postulation, “To write poetry after Auschwitz and convincing. How does a non-Jewish who deserves his own chapter. This approach is barbaric, eroding the recognition as to why it writer with no direct connection to the also produces some redundancy and, more has become impossible to write poetry today,” Holocaust figure in an analysis of encryption? importantly, gaps. E. Michael Gerli, for as oxymoronic. The enthusiastic critical By creating work which is “in a category instance, writes about the ‘Novel before the response accorded has led to constructions unto itself ” (207), venturing into “wholly Novel,’ that is, the rich tradition of Spanish such as thinking the unthinkable, imagining the uncharted territory” (208). The result is “an romance (chivalric romance has a separate unimaginable, or speaking the ineffable. The eloquent spokesman of the Holocaust and an chapter, supposedly because it was more problem with such fantasies, Gwyer notes, is effective guardian of its traumatic memory” important to Cervantes); Howard Mancing the relegation of the Holocaust to someplace (208). He was barely a year old when the summarizes this in his description of ‘Spanish outside any possible exegesis. Many regarded war ended and grew up largely ignorant Fiction of the Seventeenth Century.’ There the novels of H. G. Adler, who spent two of its consequences. Family photographs, is a whole chapter on María de Zayas, a years at Theresienstadt and another two in documentary films, and newsreels from the SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 2016 d 19 period, however, began to have a cumulative to working collaboratively to produce and chronologically by topic to offer close effect. He fell under the shadows of nicht promote works by, for, and about women. readings of important second-wave texts. erlebten Schrecknissen [unperceived horrors], In the process, they shone a light on taboo Jill E. Anderson examines alternative never able to emerge from underneath them. subjects, radical theories, and experimental natures in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing In Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001), the narrator forms of literature often dismissed as inferior and The Edible Woman, while Lisa Botshon encounters Jacques Austerlitz, whose Czech by mainstream publishers, editors, and literary explores how Anne Roiphe challenged parents sent him as a tiny child to Wales. In his critics. The result – a diverse feminist literary patriarchal conceptions of motherhood in sixties, Austerlitz returns to Prague, seeking canon – is their legacy to us. Up the Sandbox!. Jay Hood complicates our to find traces of the family left behind. There Taken from Robin Morgan’s pivotal understanding of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying are very few left, and he suffers a nervous Sisterhood is Powerful (1970), this volume’s in his close reading of representations of breakdown after visiting the Theresienstadt title underscores the revolutionary power the body, while Jaime Cantrell focuses on concentration camp. Sebald’s writing of second-wave print culture. Volume the performance of lesbian hypervisibility in features the digressions, sudden revelations, contributors from the fields of women’s and Jane Chambers’s lesbi-dramas. In “Creating illogical conclusions, and other strategems gender studies, English, Medieval Studies, a Nonpatriarchal Lineage in Bertha Harris’s characteristic of other authors in this volume. queer studies, and librarianship document Lover,” Laura Christine Godfrey takes a Sebald’s accessibility sets him apart from the how activists from the 1960s to the early critical look at Harris’s use of epigraphs others. His prose is not tortured but almost 1980s adopted feminist business practices about female saints to create “a more transparent; his narrator listens empathically to produce “the distinctive feminist culture imaginatively realized community of women and responds to Austerlitz’s account. While of letters that emerged with the reawakened who successfully live outside the confines of the narrator cannot overcome a sense of women’s movement in the late 1960s and early patriarchal society” (203). Phillip Gordon’s “belatedness” (222), he nevertheless becomes 1970s” (2). By fostering the production of piece argues that The Color Purple became a “postmemorial witness” (217) committed experimental forms of literature, including the first American AIDS narrative. The final enough to Austerlitz and his search for poetry and genre fiction, feminist editors and essay, by Charlotte Beyer, reappraises Sara scattered memories, but “belated enough to publishers enabled a diverse literary output Paretsky’s portrayal of feminism in Indemnity preserve what minuscule traces of Austerlitz’s to flourish at a time when a patriarchal and Only, arguing that narratives about strong ineffectual life are left.” capitalist publishing establishment often women like V. I. Warshawski facilitated the Sebald’s strategy of breaking through dismissed women’s words as inferior. transmission of second-wave feminism into the unrepresentability of the Holocaust This Book Is an Action is organized into two mainstream culture. conflicts with the insistence among some sections. Part I addresses the structures and Readers seeking a nuanced exploration of scholars that any attempt to “normalize” systems of production and distribution. In feminist publishing and key texts produced Hitler would be tantamount to rehabilitation. “Feminist Publishing/Publishing Feminism: during second-wave feminism will find This Kirstin Gwyer’s book neither normalizes nor Experimentation in Second-Wave Book Book Is an Action a valuable addition to their demonizes; it decrypts perceptions which to Publishing,” Jennifer Gilley uses two case libraries. date have often remained inchoate and even studies – the publication of Sisterhood is impenetrable. Powerful and This Bridge Called My Back – to Joanne E. Passet explore the role of class and race in efforts to Indiana University East William Grange interject feminist politics into the economics c University of Nebraska of book publishing. In her study of feminist c newsletters and newspapers of the 1970s, Thomas Haye and Johannes Helmrath, Agatha Beins documents the critical role eds. Codex im Diskurs. Wolfenbütteler Mittelalter- Jaime Harker and Cecilia Konchar Farr, ephemeral publications played in linking Studien 25. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, eds. This Book Is an Action: Feminist Print Culture feminists and ideas in an era before the 2014. 272 p., ill. ISBN 9783447102551. and Activist Aesthetics. Urbana: University internet and social media. Julie Enszer’s €62.00 (hardback). of Illinois Press, 2016. ix, 250p. ISBN essay, which analyzes how feminists created 9780252081347. US $28.00 (paperback). Women in Distribution (1974–1979) to This volume of tightly focused essays aid small lesbian and feminist publishers in German consists of papers that were The 11 essays assembled by co-editors in circulating their books and journals to originally presented at the second of three Jaime Harker (University of Mississippi) wider audiences, highlights a critical question conferences on the history and theory of and Cecilia Konchar Farr (St. Catherine confronting feminists of the 1970s – is it the medieval manuscript book at the Herzog University) in This Book Is an Action: Feminist possible to create an economically sustainable August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. Print Culture and Activist Aesthetics affirm business “to support and nurture feminist As a whole, it addresses the question of how the significance of print culture as a form revolutions” (13)? In the final essay of this medieval and early modern scholars and of activism within second-wave feminism. section, Yung-Hsing Wu counters the notion authorities thought and expressed themselves Viewing print as a revolutionary form of self- of close reading and feminism as antagonists, about codices. The program, organized by expression, feminists built a communications arguing that “reading, because it involved the library’s Medievalist Working Group, network – authors, illustrators, typesetters, identification, [crystalized] a consciousness was dedicated to the manuscript culture of editors, publishers, distributors, bookstore women had not possessed before” (88). the era, its materiality and codical practice, owners, reviewers, and readers – dedicated Part II consists of seven essays arranged and its key differences from the world of the 20 c 2016 SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 printed book. The group pursued its topic same time, one is conscious that the realities human skulls, cemented in the twilight of the well beyond the more familiar texts to include herein contained have corresponding roles at Empire, the Noakhali riots, and the Partition. well-established historians of different fields, times in the present-day world of the printed In a world of a million political Gandhis, and literary and linguistic specialists. There book. The religious text manufactured on a therefore, and a million other possible are quotations in Latin, medieval German, press may likewise elicit a transcendent or Gandhian simulacra that exist with or and medieval French. magical experience in the reader, and the without reference to the complex nature In terms of theory, the studies address student who uses a printed monograph may of the Gandhian corpus, the person who the book on three dimensions: the codicality also add his own glosses in the margins, even appears in Hofmeyr’s book, thankfully, and or materiality of the text, with its visual as these practices steadily escape from their without any associations of guilt or pain, and tactile aspects; the ‘aura’ of a book, its traditional places onto electronic tablets, aural has a strong element of nostalgia about distinctive quality or essence; and finally recording devices, and the cloud. him. Here Gandhi is a young Gujarati lawyer the hermeneutical, the meaning of the text at work in South Africa, experimenting itself, the theory and methodology of text Dennis C. Landis with a Tolstoyan farm, and trying to run a interpretation. Topics of discourse such as John Carter Brown Library periodical meant for a primarily Gujarati ownership marks, glosses and colophons, readership, the Indian Opinion. And there, the forms of production, and the history c perhaps, lies the principal charm of this of systematic codicology were woven into Isabel Hofmeyr. Gandhi’s Printing Press: book. Without the exclusivist focus on the consideration in an effort to form a European Experiments in Slow Reading. Cambridge, MA evolution of Gandhian politics, and with overview through the prism of the history and London: Harvard University Press, 2013. little interjections on the debates surrounding of the book. 218p, ill. ISBN 9780674072794. US $24.95 the later iconic stature of Gandhi, Hofmeyr The broad scope of the essays includes the (hardback). tries to contextualise the strange corpus of literary (Minnesang in the Codex Manesse) and early Gandhian writing by offering a vision prophetic mystical texts with their existential Can we really ignore a man whose face of a man who takes his slow reading very and metaphorical book epiphanies (Book keeps appearing on every banknote printed seriously, and the processual beginnings of Revelation, Hildegard of Bingen, and in the Republic of India during the last 69 of an imagined ‘Indian nation’ existing as Mechthild of Magdeburg), as well as the years? More importantly, given Gandhi’s a “virtual entity some four thousand miles codices of pragmatic scribality, such as the known hostility to the Western ideals of distant.” This imagining wouldn’t have been administrative records of towns (Regensburg politics and technological progress, can possible, Hofmeyr argues, if Gandhi was city books) and the founding records of we ignore the nature of contradictions not caught up in the production cycles of universities (Freiburg im Breisgau). There inherent in his use of the printing press as an this expat bilingual Gujarati newspaper in are lessons in how the discourse with experimental device for political and spiritual the colonial Indian Ocean world of the late manuscripts expanded with the Renaissance communication? nineteenth century. Humanists, who celebrated their intimacy If printing, according to McLuhan, The usual eyes and eyebrows would be with texts, using ownership as a tool for was a ditto device which first outlined the raised at this point: those that practise severe personal development (Petrarca). contours of the West-European idea of practical criticism by squinting closely at the The collection offers detailed explanation ‘nationalism,’ the ubiquitous Gandhi face typographical device called hyphen (which of how the scribality of the Humanist on the Indian banknote is an important someone famously deployed to link the university teachers was rendered into orality reminder of the fact as how that idea was words ‘print’ and ‘capitalism’) while being in the classroom, then to be transmuted appropriated, reinterpreted, and powerfully oblivious to the fact that the hyphen might again into scribality with varying results reinforced by the medium of print in non- not have been inserted at all if the compositor by the individual early scholars, who in Western societies. The iconic representation had been in more of a hurry and the proof- turn accompanied their lecture notes and of Gandhi on the banknote as the ‘Father reader a little less intent on reading page quotations with further glosses from their of the Indian Nation’ often makes us forget proofs. For those Sauronian eyes, therefore, solitary reading. The most ambitious scholars the Nandalal Bose linocut of a pensive Bapuji and particularly for those who dismiss any often became collectors of texts and notes leading the Dandi March in 1930, a powerful efforts to study the interconnections between by others, sometimes contributing these in image that too had been endlessly replicated material processes of textual production and time to the universities that fostered them. in print to drive home the idea of Gandhi the intellectual dispositions of an author It is striking how the eventual separation of as anti-colonial liberator who favoured encountered in print, Hofmeyr’s book will print and manuscript was delayed by their village-based decentralized democracies be another instance of the ‘technologically shared functionality in the oral practice of over what was to follow: a centralized deterministic’ vagaries of academic life. the university. Nehruvian welfare state. Still lesser known For others, however, this might serve as This volume, with its several thoughtful is Ramkinkar Baij’s powerful portrayal of an important eye-opener. Dealing with an essays, has made an essential contribution to another Gandhi, mostly because it’s fairly author as complex as Gandhi, Hofmeyr the study of the manuscript culture of the impossible to technologically replicate its makes her points very strongly about the medieval and Renaissance eras, preeminently desolatory feel – sculpted in the isolation of interconnectedness of print to the processes in central Europe but with valuable forays into stone, the pensive Bapuji of the Nandalal of textual production. Does it shock us, or France and Italy, and with likely applicability linocut reappears in Baij’s 1947 work as a horrify us, that as a believer in Ruskinian to the wider field of European studies. At the self-absorbed figure stepping on a heap of and Tolstoyian ideals, Gandhi continued to SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 2016 d 21 identify Africa as an unproblematic non- to “news” clippings to highlight his ethical the questions raised are highly relevant to existent zone while contesting ideals of white visions and also to outline the rough but the histories of authorship, reading, and civilisation in print? How is one supposed to rigid contours of a continuously re-imagined publishing. read his reliance on cheap African labour at moral, the ‘Indian nation.’ The collection consists of an introduction Phoenix, Natal, employing “four hefty Zulu Hofmeyr’s efforts in identifying a followed by 18 chapters divided into six girls” (in Millie Polak’s words) to substitute Gandhian theory of reading (of “The parts: 1. ‘Curricular Histories and Key the donkeys which worked as engines of a Reader as Satyagrahi”) exclusively founded on Trends’; 2. ‘Organizing Curriculum decrepit mechanical press? (66–7) contextualizing the Hind Swaraj, in the textual Through Transatlantic Lenses’; 3. ‘Teaching Hofmeyr’s book builds its arguments environment of the Indian Opinion, is where Transatlantic Figures’; 4. ‘Teaching Genres around a simple proposition: in order to retrospective (and nostalgic) judgement in Transatlantic Context’; 5. ‘Envisioning seriously understand M. K. Gandhi’s early weighs most heavy. Hind Swaraj (1909) is one Digital Transatlanticism’; and 6. ‘Looking forays in the realm of political philosophy and of the most iconic political pamphlets written Forward.’ In their introduction, Hughes and his later expositions on satyagraha, we need to by Gandhi, but also one of his weakest. Robbins position transatlantic seminars and locate his role as a publisher, experimental There isn’t much by way of explicit politics teaching within a larger context of “global editor, anthologist, and proprietor of a of satyagraha as anti-imperial resistance in learning” and “globalized” higher education. South-African periodical called Indian Hind Swaraj, in fact, in what we have of a They focus on the nineteenth century as a Opinion. To a later self-reflexive Gandhi, resistive ‘Indian-ness’ in the fictional world critical time period, because intercultural the Indian Opinion experience constituted of Bankim’s Anandamath (1882), nothing to and transnational exchange accelerated almost a medicinal exercise towards spiritual show quite how Gandhi’s views of political due to rapid developments in travel and discipline, where his passion for long resistance might be evolving, if they were, communication, while national identities took expositions fought an engaging battle against during the time he was writing it for the on growing importance in the literary market. his soul’s commitment to remove the weeds Gujarati readers of Indian Opinion. The volume is most distinctive for its of superfluity and exaggeration in writing, Apart from this small inconsequential embrace of collaboration and multiple resulting in direct ethical benefits: the practice issue, this book is largely successful in perspectives. Hughes and Robbins make of self-restraint. Hofmeyr, however, situates communicating the understanding that a compelling case for thinking beyond this with the contingencies of running a Gandhi’s involvement in the periodical disciplinary boundaries, for team-teaching, periodical journal in South Africa which business in South Africa can indeed be for team-thinking, team-writing, and team- made its niche by, and its identity largely connected to his later emergence as an editing. The book includes texts by over dependent upon, translational summary of important political journalist and thinker 30 individual contributors, from graduate texts and ‘news’ from diverse periodicals: a in the Indian subcontinent. Unlike Prince student research assistants to well-established previously-ignored matrix in which Gandhi’s Albert’s efforts to popularize homoeopathy scholars. For instance, Meredith L. McGill’s writing style had been largely forged. It was in Victorian England, the practical and chapter on “Genre and Nationality in during these experiments, observes Hofmeyr, medicinal benefits of exercising spiritual Nineteenth-Century British and American that the plain prose style so characteristic restraint in response to the fixed print space Poetry” argues that a transatlantic perspective of Gandhi’s later writings, the mode of mosaic of a periodical were in this case, as requires the reorganization of existing composition where “not one word more was we’ve retrospectively come to know, quite knowledge, critical approaches, and literary necessary,” took shape. This juxtaposition of ecumenical. periodization. Although her discussion begins ethical “exchanges” next to “news”, created a with her own experience teaching a course in new textual reconfiguration, which Hofmeyr Deeptanil Ray 2012, she includes a condensed version of an argues, “redefined both genres, making Jadavpur University internet conversation with six students whose ethical discourse ‘news’ and slowing down c feedback she invited after the course was news reports to the pace of philosophy” completed. The book also offers engaging (71). Hence, the beginnings of Gandhi’s Linda K. Hughes and Sarah R. Robbins, examples of professional memoir. Susan experiments in “slow reading”: the rejection eds. Teaching Transatlanticism: Resources for M. Griffin’s chapter, “On Not Knowing of the “deinstrumentalization of time” Teaching Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Any Better,” traces her slightly haphazard across specialized “uneven” reading surfaces Print Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh professional development in relation to of the Indian Opinion, in opposition to the University Press, 2015. xix, 268p. ISBN transatlantic studies. This chapter is mirrored fast-paced information pouring out of other 9780748694464. £29.99 (paperback). Also by the closing reflections of four former “macadamized” newspaper surfaces (91). available in hardback, epub and PDF. graduate students who attended the first Indeed, by the time one has finished transatlantic seminar co-taught by Hughes reading this book there is a growing awareness This new collection of essays, edited by and Robbins. In their poignant contributions, that the textual dispensation of Gandhi’s Linda Hughes and Sarah Robbins, offers they consider the influence of transatlantic condensed prose writings acquires newer a cornucopia of material for teachers reading (and indeed thinking) on their work significances once we locate its important and students of transatlantic studies. The and self-identification as academics. moorings in a periodical past which sought volume focuses mainly on transatlantic Another of the volume’s strengths is the to create ethical “exchanges” by abridging, literary history: in general, authors and texts variety of approaches to the topic. Some summarizing, and extracting texts from form the basis for analysis. Publishing and chapters (e.g. Daniel Hack’s “‘Flat Burglary’? across the world, and juxtaposing them next printing history are less prominent, although A Course on Race, Appropriation, and 22 c 2016 SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2

Transatlantic Print Culture”) make suggestions day. Marian Thèrése Keyes and Áine for entire courses on transatlanticism, while With so much scholarly territory covered McGillicuddy, eds. Politics and Ideology in others (eg. Kate Flint’s “The Canadian within its pages, this book’s title almost Children’s Literature. Dublin: Four Courts Transatlantic”) recommend case studies for too modestly represents its contents which Press, 2014. 191p. ISBN 9781846825262. individual lessons. Flint’s essay offers a step- transcend the book in the Low Countries. €49.50 (hardback). by-step plan for teaching the special case Arranged chronologically, the first five of Canada within a transatlantic seminar, contributions explore topics as diverse as the Children’s literature became an established focusing on the writers Susanna Moodie manuscript and early book trade in the Low area of scholarly and critical attention in the (born in Suffolk, England; emigrated to Countries, typography of seventeenth- and 1980s, a time when academic enquiry and Canada) and Pauline Johnson (Canadian- eighteenth-century theatre programs, the analysis were particularly focused on the way born). In addition, there are three chapters publication of academic theses and almanacs texts of all kinds are bound up in ideology. examining the potential of digital humanities in the Low Countries in the seventeenth The role of writing and illustration for methods and instruments for this developing century, and the fin-de-siècle Boer book trade children and young people in transmitting, field. in South Africa. The concluding two essays challenging, or subverting the dominant The collection ranges widely and offers shift focus from the book trade and types ideology and normative assumptions was a hands-on, pragmatic approach to teaching of publications to reader attitudes towards regularly scrutinised. The insights from transatlantic literary history. The range of e-books and literary publishing in a global those years continue to inform critical work pedagogic approaches and unconventional marketplace. One might argue that the latter in the field, but there have been few studies forms of knowledge exchange and essays do not seem to belong in a volume specifically dedicated to the political and collaborative writing are inspiring on ostensibly devoted to the history of the ideological work of writing for children over a meta-level. The companion website book in Flanders and the Netherlands, yet the last ten years or more. The introduction includes rich materials for teaching and is the preceding contributions lay compelling to this volume does some welcome reprising a work-in-progress – readers, students, and groundwork to support these later pieces, of earlier scholarship before its contributors scholars are welcome to contribute. Materials leaving the reader with an overall impression embark on fresh analyses. have been posted regularly, although the about how present-day attitudes about the The contributions all began as papers discussion threads (“Conversations”) have significance of books and reading are rooted at a conference on the subject organised been dormant for some time. In any case, in the ways books were created, traded, and by the Irish Society for the Study of SHARPists are certain to make ample use of treated in the past. Children’s Literature (ISSCL). It is the sixth Teaching Transatlanticism as a valuable resource The Book in the Low Countries represents yet set of ISSCL conference proceedings to be for courses on nineteenth-century authorship, another commendable volume in Merchiston published by Four Courts, who have done reading and, to a lesser extent, publishing. Publishing’s Books about Books series. While an attractive job of presenting the book. its title may seem specialized, its contents are The editors had a challenging job since the Corinna Norrick-Rühl relevant to anyone researching European 13 essays cover a wide range of work from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz book history and readership. One of the several periods, about different genres, using c outstanding features of this collection is a variety of approaches. The texts discussed its exploration of scholarly and popular range from Edward Lear’s limericks to W. A. Kelly and G. Trentacosti, eds. literature production, and how attitudes nineteenth-century juvenile periodicals, First The Book in the Low Countries. Edinburgh: about textual reception are reinforced by World War stories, the young adult novels of Merchiston Publishing, 2015. viii, 182p., ill. the printer’s art as well as the sometimes Eilís Dillon, and a French cinematic retelling ISBN 9780956613622. Price not available brutal cunning of publishers. Another aspect of the Bluebeard story to The Hunger Games. (paperback). reinforcing this volume’s relevance and To impose an internal order, the essays usability is the sheer number and exceptional are divided into four groups: ‘Ideology The Book in the Low Countries features seven quality of illustrations reproduced in it. and Subversion,’ ‘Utopias and Dystopias,’ essays elaborating on topics and themes All in all, The Book in the Low Countries is an ‘Experiences of War and Exile,’ and ‘Gender discussed at a Scottish Centre for the Book important contribution to book studies. It is Politics.’ seminar held in April 2010 at the National sure to be a widely-consulted resource for The contributors represent a number of Library of Scotland. With support from European book scholarship for decades. nationalities, language groups and disciplines, the London-based Culture Department giving a sense of how the subject has evolved of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Greg Matthews since the 1980s. Perhaps because several Netherlands, this seminar broadly addressed Washington State University Libraries of the original conference papers were Flemish and Dutch book history from c fragments of or spin-offs from doctoral the manuscript era to the present day. The research and so were more fully developed contents of this volume, however, treat elsewhere, the quality of the contributions to specific aspects of book production and trade this volume is uneven. A few have not entirely in the Low Countries that have impacted succeeded in turning a talk into a published European book history in general, as well essay. There are, however, several strong and as the evolution of reading habits and text original essays. Brief summaries of these, in containers and transmission in the present the order in which they appear, give a sense SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 2016 d 23 of their arguments and coverage. Richard Kirwan and Sophie Mullins, eds. The numerous illustrations of early modern Victoria de Rijke’s biopolitical analysis of Specialist Markets in the Early Modern Book woodcuts and engravings are reproduced in children’s fables provides both a historical World. (Library of the Written Word: Vol. 40; black and white, which is reasonable given overview of the genre and some careful close The Handpress World: Vol. 31.) Leiden and the medium. The contemporary maps and reading based on Michel Foucault’s discussion Boston: Brill, 2015. xix, 414p., ill. ISBN graphs are legible. All the illustrative materials of biopolitics, meaning the way the living 9789004288102. €145.00 / US $188.00 are identified after the table of contents body is subject to vectors of knowledge- (hardback). and captioned within the text. There are no power. Ciara Ni Bhroin’s discussion of color illustrations. Footnotes for each article homecoming is particularly redolent at a time When we think of printers in early provide resources for future investigation of when the collapse of the Celtic Tiger has modern Europe, we assume they all printed the topics by readers. stimulated Irish migration, though her topic is just about anything. This informative volume The essays expose new fields for the way fantasy novels by earlier generations of essays for the specialist academic audience scholarship including new uses of the digital of migrants have tended to create imaginary, sheds light on those printers who focused humanities (including digitized searchable mythic homelands and communities. Using as on smaller, specialized markets throughout indices and texts). Many articles discuss a case study the work of Irish-born Canadian Europe. the role of the printer in selecting materials O. R. Melling, Ni Bhroin shows that the The authors presented their papers at of publication, as well as a firm’s financial dynamics in such fantasies are often more the 2012 conference Specialist Markets in risks incurred while filling an ever-growing complex than they initially appear. Jessica the Early Modern Book World held at the demand for printed materials in scientific D’Eath provides a detailed and insightful University of St. Andrews in Scotland. and philosophical inquiry, music, and discussion of the way members of the Fascist Some of the chapters contained therein are most especially, news about events across regime used children’s literature to inculcate parts of larger projects (theses, dissertations, neighborhoods and continents. Taken as a their values and rehabilitate the grotesque and monographs). The underlying themes whole, Specialist Markets broadens the study of behaviour of the squads who took it upon include: the economics of printing for book markets throughout the western world. themselves to punish those they believed had smaller markets; patronage and readers; This collection is not for a general offended the regime. Marian Keyes makes a the distribution of works published in one audience or even undergraduate students but contribution to publishing history with her country for external markets (as was the case for scholars and graduate students interested discussion of the paratexts and self-portraits for Spanish-language materials, and earlier, in the specific topic of book printing history associated with the nineteenth-century English-language books, printed in the in early modern Europe. Specialist Markets writer and editor Anna Maria Fielding Hall. Netherlands); distribution networks and new could be used in a seminar on the history The volume closes with perhaps the most readers; and printers who used non-Roman of the book or in a course where various overtly political contribution: Marion Rana’s alphabets, as well as specialized typefaces research techniques are explored. discussion of the way a spectrum of YA and symbols. novels treat sexual violence against females as These 19 case studies draw on printed Miriam Kahn a rite of passage which reinforces traditional items of permanent and ephemeral Kent State University sex-role stereotyping and gender roles. nature found in repositories throughout Taken together, these essays give a Europe. Some studies focus on compiling c sense of how children’s literature criticism descriptive, analytic bibliographies by Megan G. Leitch. Romancing Treason: The has begun to re-engage with the ways in verifying information about materials that are Literature of the Wars of the Roses. Oxford: which writing for children is bound up with scattered and poorly identified in public and Oxford University Press, 2015. x, 230p. ISBN ideology, and some ideas about the widening private collections throughout Europe, and 9780198724599. £55.00 (hardback). nature of the discipline. Beyond children’s on examining the printing of illustrations, literature specialists, book historians and be they woodcuts, engravings, or etchings. This book is a sophisticated scholarly those with interests in the environment and Several articles examine the printing of music study of English prose romances – for gender will also find some relevant material (of both lyrics and scores). Newspapers, that the most part – in the period 1437–1497, in the contributions. elusive ephemeral resource, are the subject spanning the era of civil war known as the of several essays, as are books in foreign Wars of the Roses. The author argues that Kimberley Reynolds languages, including Latin, Greek, Russian, in this period the romance genre shifted to Newcastle University Hebrew, and Arabic. All the articles are in manifestation mostly in prose as opposed c English, which means that the collection to poetry. These prose romances were filled will appeal to a broad audience within book with the language and the rhetoric of treason history. in a way that their sources and predecessors The introductory essay sets the stage for were not, which does not seem surprising in this collection of articles derived from the the context of concurrent political events. conference, which is divided into four parts: The same was true of contemporary private high-risk speculation, demand and supply, correspondence, chronicles, and poetry, as print on demand, and not for profit. Kirwan’s demonstrated here. introduction pulls together current thinking In examining the fifteenth-century social and provides some contextual background. anxieties provoked by civil war, this study is 24 c 2016 SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 quick to emphasize that late medieval society the translator, or the contemporary political In the course of reading this work, we was held together not only by vertical social context. Looking at Caxton, the author learn important information concerning relationships but also by horizontal ones. And argues that he was concerned to emphasize the subject, who was born in 1888 in the wars and treason were threatening to both, the effects of treason and resulting political town of Shadrinsk. After completing only but perhaps most alarming in their effect turmoil on the horizontal relationships of four years of school, he is hired as a clerk on horizontal social bonds. The notion that this society that were of primary importance in the Shadrinsk Zemstvo Administration, the Wars of the Roses primarily affected to the merchants and “rising gentry” who where he begins a life-long program of self- the top most vertical levels of English purchased most of the books he printed and education. By 1905, he is a member of the society, because those classes were the main of which he was a part. But through most of SRs (Socialist Revolutionary Party), which participants in and beneficiaries of the the book, the position is that it was political will haunt him for the rest of his life. This conflict, has been in the historical discourse events that informed and shaped the prose causes a break with his family, the loss of his for a while. Those would also seem to be the romances rather than the other way around. job, and begins a decade of constant moving. classes where horizontal relationships were The romances offered a morality lesson He supports himself by being a journalist. In most vital – or were they? Here the author for socio-political relationships, integral to 1911, he enrolls in the Shaniavskii Moscow argues that horizontal social relationships social cohesion and political success, but City People’s University, where he completes were emphasized during civil war, but not the argument here does not consider what a degree in socio-history in 1915. It is here in preceding or succeeding periods. After impact these romances had on readers. Were that several prominent professors interest 1500, for example, the concern returns to contemporaries compelled to act in particular him in bibliography. His first prison term is treason that upset the vertical hierarchy. Does ways socially and politically during the Wars in 1912 for political radicalism. In Moscow, this sharper focus on the horizontal then of the Roses because of what they read in by 1922, he finds work as the Deputy head mark them as the site of most social anxiety these romances? of the Trade Sector of the Государственное during the Wars of the Roses? One important издательство [State Publishing House]. His difference between earlier romances and the Sabrina A. Baron job is to guide the transition from the Tsarist war-era ones noted here is that the latter, University of Maryland book business to the new Soviet model, focused more on treason and its dangers, do c and he is allowed to select and save books not have happy endings, as was more often and periodicals slated for destruction. The the case in the previous iteration of the genre. Mikhail Panteleevich Lepekhin. Zdobnov 1920s were the high point of his career. He is The book is very well researched and and His History of Russian Bibliography. Edited recognized as a bibliographical scholar, works the argument is logical and convincing. It is and translated by William E. Butler. Idyllwild, closely with the Russian Bibliographical heavily based in the surviving manuscripts CA: Charles Schlacks, 2014. viii, 198p. ISBN Society at Moscow State University, serves of the prose romances in question as well 1884445837. US $20.00 (paperback). as the executive secretary of the bimonthly as the printed versions and an expansive journal Северная Азия [Northern Asia], starts secondary literature. It is also clearly a text Not only is Nikolai Vasil’evich Zdobnov work on a dictionary of Siberian writers, and for specialists in literary criticism. Quotes (1888–1942) a leading figure in the history undertakes many other activities. From 1932 are given in Old English, which is their and study of Russian bibliography, but the to 1937, he is engaged in several large-scale original form, but which is also a language author of this study, Mikhail Panteleevich bibliographical projects on regional history, that is not easily decipherable for the non- Lepekhin (a senior research associate at the most of which are never completed. As a new specialist. Modernizing the quotes in a parallel Russian Academy of Sciences Library in St. leading specialist, he is appointed to several parenthetical format, as was done for French Petersburg), and its editor and translator, executive positions. translations, would make the text much more William E. Butler (John Edward Fowler Chapter six discusses the three editions widely accessible. An appendix includes a Distinguished Professor of Law and of Zdobnov’s IRB/RHB and is interesting brief comparative chronology of political International Affairs, Dickinson School for the importance given to Nikolai’s wife events and publication/circulation of prose of Law, Pennsylvania State University), are and the people who helped her. It is a romances, although a more detailed political equally illustrious and bring an exceptional reflection of the whims of political life in chronology would have been helpful. aura to this publication. Although other the Soviet Union. The USSR Academy of While this volume presents an interesting biographies of Zdobnov exist, Lepekhin and Sciences brought out the second edition, argument that is deeply researched and well Butler provide what should now become the and in 1955 the third edition was published. constructed, it makes limited contribution to definitive biography. The seven chapters in this The final chapter ends with a 1988 jubilee the study of print culture. There is an entire book provide the following information: an celebration of Zdobnov’s birthday held at the chapter devoted to the romances printed by extensive review of Zdobnov’s publications; Moscow State Institute of Culture. His legacy William Caxton, especially over the decade an account of his life (1888–1921); a continues to grow in importance across the of the 1480s, but it considers Caxton as discussion of the Moscow years (1922–1931, country, as various conferences on his work translator, author, and editor, more than 1932–1937, and 1938–1941); details on the are organized and articles about his life are as printer or publisher. The argument – three editions of his История русской published. Lastly, there is a discussion of the throughout the book – does engage with the библиографии до начала XX века [History numerous locations of Zdobnov’s archives. conundrum of who determines the meaning of Russian Bibliography – hereinafter IRB/ During his entire life, Zdobnov worried of texts – the reader, the social classes that HRB]; and reactions to his work and his place about not having a proper education, but bought books, the author, the publisher, in present-day Russian bibliography. one cannot say that this really mattered due SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 2016 d 25 to all of his accomplishments. Anyone who Kate Loveman. Samuel Pepys and His Restoration news media play their role: has taken a course on Russian bibliography Books: Reading, Newsgathering, and Sociability, printed Gazettes (which Pepys collected), and/or who works in a Slavic/Russian 1660-1703. Oxford: Oxford University Press, manuscript newsletters and the “economy collection has to make use of Zdobnov’s 2015. xviii, 318p., ill. ISBN 9780198732686. of obligation and information” (87) they IRB/HRB almost immediately. Among £60 (hardback). invoked, and the oral news that made him his many publications are a dictionary of one of the best-informed men in London. Siberian writers, a bibliography of Buriat- The main title of Kate Loveman’s book The chapter on history and politics shows Mongolia, an index to a bibliographical suggests that it must surely be another how Pepys’s reading strategies were shaped textbook about the Urals, as well as an index study of Samuel Pepys’s personal collection, by the well-read friends he conversed with to articles in Северная Азия [Northern Asia] resting today in his own bookcases at the in taverns, coffeehouses, and privately. He (1925-1929). Readers of this study will gather Pepys Library at Magdalene College in also read novels and romances, but so did that Zdobnov’s life mirrors the political women like Elizabeth Pepys and Mary North events of his time and understand how this Cambridge. Not at all; it’s the subtitle that who might entertain others with stories turmoil affected the world of publishing, tells us what Loveman is really interested bibliography, book chambers, and the in: the information network within which memorized from currently popular romances. book trade in general. The study contains, Pepys’s enthusiastic book-collecting and Loveman describes the high-end booksellers moreover, useful biographical information reading took place, and his use of his reading whose shops were also a place for meetings on people who worked with Zdobnov. He to rise in status from son of a London tailor and the exchange of information: choosing studied librarianship and/or bibliography to Secretary of the Admiralty. His nearly a book, shop layout, making and closing a with such prominent revolutionaries as three thousand books, housed in their own sale, and the market for illicit publications. We Zhdanov, Vegman, and Azadovskii, who room at Magdalene, are the end product of a see Pepys’s striving for advancement when provided crucial support during difficult lifetime’s reading and re-reading, borrowing, we meet with his circle, with its carefully times. We learn, for example, that Vladimir buying books, and selectively disposing of calibrated etiquette of gift-exchange, books Ivanovich Nevskii, a devoted Bolshevik, who them. Loveman has much to say about all due and services rendered, and in Loveman’s was made head of the Lenin Library in 1925, of these, but it’s her acknowledgement of account of the scholarly and governmental acted as Zdobnov’s patron until he was shot Pepys’s broad range of contacts, and his networks of prime importance to his work in 1937. wily exploitation of them to increase his at the Admiralty. Pepys made conscientious There are, however, some issues that need knowledge both of literature and current efforts to examine his religious position, to be pointed out. Since Lepekhin’s goal was affairs, that distinguishes her book. In the best covered in a chapter employing neglected to give a definitive account, it would have sense of the word, she’s writing about gossip, manuscript evidence. Finally, ‘Libraries and been useful to reprint the excellent list of a factor in seventeenth-century London, Closets’ describes the politic arrangement of all of Zdobnov’s publications as listed in indeed European, life that any student of the books in libraries and closets such as Pepys’s the 1959 biography by Mashkova (99–123). period is wise not to ignore. that were intended as spaces for display. While the index of names is beneficial, a list In just under 300 pages, Loveman The riches of Loveman’s book will be of abbreviations would have been equally evident to anyone studying Pepys, and useful (e.g. AKB BAN is often cited, but is investigates and maps (quite literally – there’s particularly anyone – a student, a scholar from this Arkhiv Biblioteka RAN, Akhiv kollektsii a useful map at the beginning) the patterns bibliografov, or Assotsiatsiia kraevedcheskoi of reading revealed by the great Diary, and another field – encountering seventeenth- bibliografii?). Unfortunately, Zdobnov’s how Pepys educated himself for climbing the century book history for the first time. I name is misspelled [Zdodnov] on the flyleaf, ladder of rank. Loveman’s meticulous inquiry have only two reservations: the book has its title page, and verso of title page. There are begins with an account of Pepys’s career and longueurs; there is almost too much material, a few translation quibbles: on p. 7, ft. 40 the four principal groups of sources on his and in seeking comprehensiveness Loveman “fondakh Biblioteki” [funds of the Library] life-long reading: the Diary, letters official sometimes drives a point past the boundaries generally is translated as fond(s) or collection. and personal, the Rawlinson papers in the of reasonable explanation. The second is “Kraevedenie,” translated here as local history, Bodleian, and the library itself at Magdalene. the narrowness of its perspective on Pepys. is just as often rendered as regional studies. Her approach is interdisciplinary, “organized No one familiar with life among the upper On p. 55, “annex” is used for “Prilozhenie,” to take account of the ways seventeenth- echelons of Restoration society can possibly usually called a supplement or appendix. century readers and booksellers thought deny how fiercely its members competed for It is commendable that the translator about genres and the ways they associated advancement. But in focusing entirely on that generally provides English translations for different kinds of text” (17). She attends to competition Loveman needs to remind us of the Russian titles, but sometimes he forgets places of reading (and their status), shared the almost novelistic way in which Pepys sees (e.g. p. 34, “Siberian bibliography” of Mezhov reading (important for Pepys, with his eye himself, and how much that unself-conscious should be Sibirskaia bibliografiia [Siberian problem), literacy as a social construction, the self-portrayal is a vital aspect of his vaulting bibliography]). Furthermore, there is no need to justify book-buying as “good use,” ambition. source listed for the photo on the cover. and the disconnect between modern generic While some imperfections are noteworthy, classifications and seventeenth-century ones. Germaine Warkentin this remains, nonetheless, an important University of Toronto contribution to research. We learn about Pepys’s student reading at Cambridge, and (a continuing theme in all Patricia Polansky the chapters) politic conduct and the role of Hamilton Library University of Hawaii reading and books in social advancement. 26 c 2016 SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2

James Loxley, Anna Groundwater, and encountered, and the processes and thought “contemporaries,” Macdonald and Singer Julie Sanders, eds. Ben Jonson’s Walk to Scotland: that had to go into undertaking such a walk. open up the space between 1880 and 1930 An Annotated Edition of the “Foot Voyage.” Three essays to the back of the edition to place late nineteenth-century and early Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, provide some useful context. In “The Genres twentieth-century literature in the context a 2015. xvii, 237p., ill. ISBN 9781107003330. of a Walk,” the account of Jonson’s foot number of intensive cultural shifts between £65.00 / US $99.00 (hardback). voyage is compared to other famous walking the Victorian and Edwardian eras, as the narratives, such as the pamphlet of John middlebrow emerged in relation to and As many readers will know, Ben Jonson’s Taylor, who walked to Scotland just days after alongside the avant-garde. Sharing Williams’ narrative accounts of his 1618 “foot Jonson. In “Jonson’s Footwork,” his walk is sense of an urgent need to correct the view voyage” from London to Edinburgh, well evaluated through a discussion of typical of retrospectively-applied cultural hierarchies documented as side notes in the anecdotal topography: the types of inns, roads, and and categories that often misrepresent the writing of Jonson and others, seemingly fields that Jonson would have encountered. fluidity of culture in transmission, Macdonald met their demise in his 1623 study fire, or, The essay also looks at how such geography and Singer attend to “the transitional unsurprisingly, were lost to history. One is known to have impacted his work, directly elements of culture(s), their perception, and particularly appealing glimpse into what or otherwise, in texts such as Underwood most importantly their production” before stories might have been found in these 53. Finally, in “Scenes of Hospitality,” the “respective authors, genres, magazines and documents comes from William Drummond, account of Jonson’s walk is analysed for its publishers are allocated their places, their who hosted Jonson on his travels and spoke, numerous references to the names and titles cultural functions and their critical merits” in his remarkably stilted way, of some of of the people who in some way interacted (1). By drawing attention to the period the poet’s encounters. But for centuries the with him, whether acting as host, serving as “that brought forth the avant-garde and full content of Jonson’s travels remained escort, or simply appearing as unexpected consolidated a new taste for middlebrow unspoken and unread. encounter. reading” (2), this edited collection seeks In 2009, however, one such manuscript The text of the account itself is to identify transitional texts, authors, and account – damaged by water, bookworms, modernised, in part due to the high number cultural producers to better understand how and mice – was identified in among the of difficult passages in the account that the literature of the early twentieth century papers of the Aldersey family of Aldersey are elliptical, abbreviated, and compressed. was positioned, regarded, and transmitted Hall in Cheshire, which had been deposited However, much of the text’s orthographic in its day. by a family member in the Record Office variance, such as that made in an effort to In Kristen MacLeod’s “What People at Chester in 1985. Composed as a prose express pronunciation, has been justifiably left Really Read in 1922: If Winter Comes, account, in the past tense, and by a single unaltered. Detailed annotations are presented the Bestseller in the Annus Mirabilis of hand other than Jonson’s, the 7,000-word in two columns and discuss the usual: names, Modernism,” the bestselling novel of the document appears to have been written at a places, and objects, as well as obscure, arcane, numinous year of modernism’s genesis is date later than the voyage, by a companion and archaic words or variants of words, and used to test the anxiety about commercial who accompanied Jonson on the journey, and textual and bibliographic interpretation. All success in discourses of the middlebrow in the form of a re-written, non-holographic in all, this is a careful edition of a long-lost that scholars have heretofore assumed. draft. Nonetheless, to date it is the closest, account that documented a notable time in MacLeod observes how important factions and longest, extant account of Jonson’s Jonson’s life. of middlebrow culture modulated the voyage, and possesses merit in that status typically pejorative British attitudes toward alone. Natalie Aldred the concept of the bestseller and how film This account forms the basis of the Independent Researcher adaptations also won a place in “respectable annotated edition produced by Loxley, c middle-class entertainment” (18). In addition Groundwater, and Sanders. Its introduction to considering the novel in relation to is divided into a discussion of the manuscript Kate Macdonald and Christoph Singer, commercial culture, MacLeod places the and its provenance, the Aldersey family, the eds. Transitions in Middlebrow Writing, 1880- middlebrow in dialogue with the highbrow, manuscript’s possible connection to families 1930. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. x, “noticing their interdependent antagonism” in north Wales, and tentative suggestions 272p., ill. ISBN 9781137486776. US $95.00 (30). The derision that highbrow critics cast about its authorship. In truth, very little (hardback). upon the publication is noted alongside is known about the manuscript, and the the ways in which securely avant-garde editors take care to stress that many of their Macdonald and Singer’s 2015 collection publications embraced equivalent themes. remarks are based on conjecture. But this is Transitions in Middlebrow Writing offers a Opening Part I, on the market, Frost’s to be expected in an edition of a document productive intervention in ways of framing chapter “Public Gains and Literary Goods: only recently discovered, and therefore middlebrow scholarship by focusing on A Coeval Tale of Joseph Conrad, Rudyard missing the bulky scholarship that arises from the interactions between avant-garde and Kipling and Francis Marion Crawford” those interested in establishing content and middlebrow cultures as they developed. reveals how these authors’ works at first sat textual history. Instead, the editors point to Taking their cue from Raymond Williams’ alongside each other in a market replete with the manuscript’s importance in its insights identification of the period between 1880 colonialism, only to be later differentiated in into the character of Jonson, the landscape and 1914 as an “interregnum” between the aftermath of critical evaluation. Louise through which he walked, the people he established “masters” and modern Kane’s chapter on the magazine To-day is SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 2016 d 27 an excellent case study of how a magazine middlebrow culture calcified in Britain. It prisons, official publications and presses, mass repositioned itself to a changing market re-emphasizes the very provisional nature readers, official discourse, and a wide range of between the years 1883 and 1919 as high of middlebrow, particularly in its emergence. different publishing products (schoolbooks, modernism and middlebrow tastes emerged. Perhaps its greatest strength is the way in paperbacks, comics, newspapers, magazines, Rebecca Sitch’s chapter examines the career which the collection attempts to open up literary editions, illustrated books, bestsellers, of Charles Marriott and the important role he dialogue between modernist scholars and books for children and young adults, played for the British public in mediating the middlebrow studies; in addition, the edited women’s magazines, Catholic books, religious aesthetics of modern art and the emergence collection offers fresh insights to historians magazines, academic books, encyclopedias, of the mass market. of reading, reception, and publishing, and to dictionaries, library catalogues, bibliophilia, In Part II, middlebrow reactions to periodical scholars alike. etc.). modernism are explored in chapters by Alison It is also difficult to make objections Hurlburt, Emma Miller, and Samatha Walton. Victoria Kuttainen about this work. Chapters could have been Hurlburt’s chapter looks at Galsworthy’s James Cook University ordered differently, some aspects of Spanish relation to modernism in The White Monkey, publishing might have been missed, and some before turning to examine the novel’s c chapters could have been longer and some endorsement of sentiment. Emma Miller Jesús A. Martínez Martín, ed. Historia de la shorter, but none of these possible objections also considers the complex relationship to edición en España 1939-1975. Madrid: Marcial detracts from the volume’s achievements. The both high modernism and the middlebrow, Pons, 2015. 997p., ill. ISBN 9788415963554. only quibble about this volume or, perhaps in this instance in a case study of H. G. Wells’ €42.00 (hardback). better, this collection, is the surprising The Sea Lady. Walton’s chapter focuses on chronological gap between 1936 and 1939 the evolutions in the Scottish kailyard genre Historia de la edición en España 1939- already noted by some scholars. Martínez to examine how transitional and modernist 1975 is the second volume of the history Martín explains the reasons behind this writers engaged, in complex ways, with its of publishing in Spain edited by Jesús A. decision in his introduction to the volume central trope: the woman in the home. Martínez Martín. The first volume was and argues that scattered references to Part III, ‘Cross-Pollinations,’ investigates published in 2001 by the same publisher, those years can be found in some articles several key texts and agents that crossed and covered the period from 1836 to just of both volumes. He also explains that borders, languages, and cultural hierarchies before when the Spanish Civil War began the Spanish Second Republic and national in their transmission, translation, and in 1936. However, as the editor notes in publishing coexisted between 1936 and consolidation of middlebrow reading and his introduction, the scope of this second 1939. It is well known that historical periods tastes. Chapters by Juliette Atkinson and volume is much more ambitious than that of are not independent compartments and that Birgit Van Puymbroeck examine French the first, despite sharing the same methods some dynamics of the Second Republic and English readerships, observing how and covering a much shorter period, the 36 did not disappear in 1939 nor some of translations deliver texts to different audiences years of Franco’s dictatorship. Historia de la the dictatorship in 1975. I think, however, and literary categories. The final two chapters, edición en España 1939-1975 goes far beyond that overlooking the Spanish Civil War and the first by Koen Rymenant, and the second a mere descriptive history of the book. The reducing it to a few references in some by Mathijs Sanders and Alex Rutten, analyse volume considers the political, economic articles pays a rather poor tribute to those the role of prominent critics who served as and social factors in publishing, and the role three relevant years. Certainly, republican and arbiters of taste to shape the perception of that publishing, books and reading played national publications coexisted between those the British middlebrow across borders. It in Spanish social and cultural environments years, but it is also certain that both kinds of must be noted that while the book opens up from 1939 to 1975. publications played important roles in their transnational dimensions for middlebrow The volume is composed of 32 articles respective areas of influence. scholarship, its international outreach is divided into three large sections: ‘La politica Despite this fact, it should be noted that limited to cross-channel perspectives. The del libro, el estado y la edición’ [book policy, Historia de la edición en España 1939-1975 marks project would be clearer if its title signalled state and publishing], ‘La economía del libro. a milestone in the history of publishing in its limited focus on transitions in British La industria editorial’ [book economics and Spain. The volume is highly recommended middlebrow writing and culture. Truly the publishing industry], and ‘La cultura both to scholars and to anyone interested in international perspectives on other forms of del libro. Los géneros y la especialización the recent history of Spain. This monumental the middlebrow, such as manifested in Canada editorial. Los públicos lectores’ [book culture, work opens, in an enjoyable manner, a or Australia, are absent from this volume. genres, publishing specialization and readers]. myriad of new fields of research about Yet, while middlebrow culture in Without simply making a mere list, it is how editorial practices changed and evolved Britain in the interwar period is now well difficult, if not impossible, to summarize in in Spain during Franco’s dictatorship and understood, Transitions in Middlebrow Writing a few lines the many topics and aspects that allows one to observe how publishing was succeeds in opening up new frameworks. By this work studies: censorship, intellectual reflecting the contradictions of the regime examining the period before the taxonomies property, large and small publishing houses, and a gradual cultural change. The pioneering of avant-garde or middlebrow were well authors, agents, commercial strategies, exiled work of studying the multifaceted publishing established, this collection productively publishers, distribution networks, publisher’s history of Franco’s regime, the assembling reveals interactions, crossovers, and shifting dissent and modernity, international markets, in a single volume of important and original aesthetic categories in the half-century before libraries, library policies, readers and books in contributions, the valuable information 28 c 2016 SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 provided, the often unpublished primary him all his life. Not only this, though, but also as ink, fish bait, and sealing wax. The book sources mentioned, and the numerous lines that what these quotations suggested to him provides a thorough contextual analysis of of research that the articles open make this was “the interplay between present freshness Hanson’s miscellany, in a somewhat unusual book highly commendable. and immediacy in poetry, and the dependency structure, analysing each thematic section of of such moments upon earlier versions of the manuscript as a distinct topic, rather than Benito Rial Costas the words presented” (4). This, Matthews simply recreating chronological accounts or Asociación Española de Bibliografía says, “goes to the heart of his poetry” (4). the entire manuscript verbatim. c Eliot’s early discovery of the significant value After a detailed introduction, the themes of what his famous essay “Tradition and the of the miscellany are presented in five distinct Steven Matthews. T.S. Eliot and Early Individual Talent” calls the “historical sense” chapters: firstly, a detailed description of a Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University may certainly account for the allure, invitation mid-fourteenth-century feud between two Press, 2013. vii, 222p. ISBN 9780199574773. and testamentary witness which the concept local families, the Eland and the Beaumont £50.00 (hardback). evokes from him in that essay and – variously families, which takes up approximately a third and under other forms too – in the rest of of the manuscript (26). The feud is analysed Steven Matthews’s book offers a his work. Frequently in some sense concerned using two contemporary pieces of writing comprehensive account of one of the with being haunted, Eliot’s poetry is haunted transcribed by Hanson (a prose narrative and most important critical issues in the work by literature; and his criticism tells us why this a long ballad), which give different versions – poetic, critical and theatrical – of T. S. must be so. Matthews’s treatment of allusion of events. Secondly, a similar discussion Eliot: his relationship to and absorption of in Eliot is responsive to this and, he claims, is follows of two ballads about the defeat of an inheritance from the literature of what to be distinguished from the approach taken the Armada, also transcribed by Hanson, he called the ‘Elizabethan’ or ‘Renaissance’ by other critics. both of which now only survive in this and period, of what Matthews, in the correct Whether this is exactly so or not, one other Stanhope family manuscript (107). scholarly style of today (or perhaps of Matthews’s readings of Eliot’s criticism and Two subsequent chapters follow on “other” almost-yesterday) calls the ‘Early Modern’ – poetry are spiritedly parti-pris and take stock texts transcribed and used by Hanson. The the period from 1580 to 1630. Because this is of a wide variety of response to it. The book third chapter focuses on printed sources so significant a relationship in Eliot, it is also is scholarly in resourceful, disciplined ways that appear in his miscellany, drawn from highly significant in the subsequent history of and both strenuous and exacting. If one at least five other printed sources, only one literature in English, because Eliot has been misses anything of Eliot’s own feline stealth of which was owned by Hanson (146). The so important to that literature as both poet of argument and wit, this is not necessarily fourth chapter focuses on manuscript sources and critic. Whether Eliot actually ‘invented’ to disparage the work of a scholar (which utilised by Hanson, including some which the Early Modern for modernity, as has often Eliot was not), but I do wish Matthews are proved to have been widely circulated, been thought by critics, is therefore an issue would refrain from using the word “across” and others which now only survive in his at the heart of the book. so frequently and with what seems to me a miscellany. The book is finished off with a Matthews considers such relevant wholly personal connotation. brief section on the aforementioned recipes elements of the relationship as the following: and other utilitarian items, including rare Eliot’s development of ‘dramatic lyricism’ Neil Corcoran recipes for coloured ink, the “stink bait” from Early Modern literature, and especially University of Liverpool which gives this work part of its title, and from his engagement with the work of John other items which draw attention to Hanson’s Donne; his translation of ‘Metaphysical’ c work as a professional scribe and legal sensibility and conceit into a revolutionary Steven W. May and Arthur F. Marotti, eds. clerk for residents of his village. A detailed modern, or modernist, idiom; and the Ink, Stink Bait, Revenge, and Queen Elizabeth: conclusion that draws together the many cultural critique consistently, if not always A Yorkshire Yeoman’s Household Book. Ithaca: threads and different uses of this book is effectively, implied by it. Grounded in a great Cornell University Press, 2014. xii, 272p., ill. also included. deal of contextual material that uncovers ISBN 9780801456565. £16.47 / US $24.95 May and Marotti’s work has much to Eliot’s impressively extensive reading not (paperback). commend it. As the authors themselves point only in Early Modern literature itself but in out, to draw attention to Hanson’s household contemporary critiques of it, and taking stock The focus of this book is the manuscript miscellany is to highlight a valuable (and of Eliot’s immersion in the literary politics household miscellany of a literate Yorkshire often overlooked) part of early modern life of his time, Matthews’s book will advance gentleman, recently uncovered in the British – that for the vast majority of those who knowledge of his topic and prove a valuable Library (Add. MS 82370). The text features were literate, it was still an inherently scribal resource for academics and postgraduate several hands, but was predominantly culture (239). The household miscellany students of modern literature. compiled by one John Hanson of Rastrick, book at the centre of the analysis is a rare Matthews strikingly proposes that “The Yorkshire (1517–1599), most likely in the survivor, particularly as it is the work of a Assignation,” a short story by Poe, had early 1590s, and highlights a broad range of literate yeoman of the emerging middle class, great impact on Eliot as a child and that he interests from local feuds over land, poems who was not based in London, who was not discovered in it quotations from the Early about events of national and international a member of the gentry or the aristocracy, Modern poet Henry King and playwright significance (like the Spanish Armada), and and who was writing for his own small George Chapman that remained important to recipes for common household goods such household and surrounding community in SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 2016 d 29 rural North England. Despite this, Hanson’s Natasha Moore. Victorian Connections: Allinghams’ early connections, links with the miscellany demonstrates how well connected The Literary and Artistic Circles of William and Pre-Raphaelites, their Irish and American the average literate householder was to events Helen Allingham from the Collections of Grolier connections, their relations with other artists of both local and national, and in some cases Club Members. New York: The Grolier Club, and writers, their family bonds, and inclusion international, significance. Although Hanson 2015. Distributed by Oak Knoll Press. 62p., of their work in publications after they never set foot outside of Yorkshire, his ill. ISBN 9781605830599. US $25.00. passed away may be studied in the entries. household book highlights a keen awareness The exhibit catalog’s author, Natasha Moore, of the politics of his day, and the authors From its location in New York City, has also written a recent monograph on this make a convincing case for moving away the Grolier Club fosters the collecting and time period, Victorian Poetry and Modern Life: from the London-centric view of this era that appreciation of books and works on paper, The Unpoetical Age (2015). According to our has previously dominated our understanding as well as the study of their art, history, catalog record for this work, she is a research of scribal culture. production, and commerce, partly by holding fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity in One thing that would have benefited the quarterly exhibits, offering educational Australia. I recommend Victorian Connections analysis is a more detailed discussion of the programs, and producing books and exhibit for academic and public libraries, or special religious influences behind the miscellany, catalogs. From March 15 to May 25, 2015, libraries in the humanities, with in-depth which would have surely been an important the Grolier Club mounted an exhibition interests in Victoriana and, especially, the factor in the day-to-day lives of Hanson with the title Victorian Connections: The Literary book arts of the Victorian period. and his family. The authors briefly discuss and Artistic Circles of William and Helen the question of religious allegiance and the Allingham from the Collections of Grolier Club Agnes Haigh Widder religious politics of the time, dismissing the Members, for which the title under review Michigan State University possibility that Hanson had any Catholic is the exhibit catalog. Works in the exhibit, c leanings (19-20), concluding that by putting principally centered around William and a pro-Armada poem into his own collection Helen Allingham as suggested by the title, Mark O’Brien and Felix M. Larkin, eds. “Hanson in effect signalled his religio- came from the collections of Grolier Club Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth-Century political loyalty to the crown” (183). However, members, which are largely devoted to books Ireland: Writing Against the Grain. Dublin: the presence of other works, such as the and the graphic arts. William Allingham Four Courts Press, 2014. 240p. ISBN poems of Lord Vaux (170–72), the epitaph (1824–1889) was an Anglo-Irish poet, diarist, 9781846825248. £47.38 (hardback). of the earl of Pembroke (d. 1570) (163–69) and editor; his wife, Helen (1848–1926) was and an awareness of key figures of the lay one of her age’s most successful women This book is a selection of essays on Catholic network such as the Talbots (175) artists. Some of their own work was in the Irish periodicals and magazines in twentieth- hint that, at the very least, Hanson had a Grolier Club show, both individual pieces century Ireland, and it is a valuable resource more nuanced awareness of the religious and their collaborations with other writers for anyone interested in the public sphere politics of his time than he has perhaps been and artists. On display were, for example, in this country. The introduction makes the credited with, and that there may be more to William Allingham’s commonplace book point that “there is no genuine freedom be discovered here. (containing a transcription of the first letter of expression in the public sphere unless The transcription of the wide range of from D. G. Rossetti to Robert Browning), the a wide variety of outlets is available to ballads and other sources in the volume is Allinghams’ copies of works by Percy Bysshe accommodate those with something to particularly valuable, offering a rare glimpse Shelley and Walt Whitman, the baby book for say” (9). Any collection of this type is of a predominantly oral culture, as well as the couple’s son Gerald (with unpublished, bound to be selective, and one of the most casting valuable light on the importance on-the-spot accounts of Alfred Tennyson, admirable things about this book is the of circulated material amongst literate Thomas Carlyle, and George Eliot), Mark very clear statement of aims set out in the householders in the early modern period. The Twain’s annotated copy of William’s 1907 introduction by the editors Mark O’Brien transcribed rare printed material accounts diary, D.G. Rossetti’s original design for and Felix Larkin when they remark that it for about a quarter of the contents of William’s Day and Night Songs, watercolors and “lays no claim to be a definitive selection the miscellany, and lays significant ground a sketchbook by Helen, rare photographs by of the ‘best’ or ‘most important’ Irish and scope for future research. Overall, the Julia Margaret Cameron and Lewis Carroll, periodicals of the Twentieth Century; it is book is a detailed, interesting, and valuable and drawings by Kate Greenaway, Edward merely a representative selection with a clear contribution to our understanding of early Burne-Jones, and John Butler Yeats. Items focus on the journalistic rather than on the modern scribal culture, both locally and on display showed the persons who made literary or cultural aspects of the titles under nationally, and will be of interest to a wide up the Allinghams’ professional and social review” (11). range of early modern scholars, both literary circles. What an interesting way to study the The only word with which I would take and historical. lives of creative people! issue here is the adverb “merely,” which The catalog of the exhibit contains does not do justice to this most enjoyable Hannah Thomas paragraph-length descriptions of the and informative collection. Chronologically Durham University displayed items. There are 24 pages of structured, the book begins with Colum images, including both front and back covers Kenny’s revealing and comprehensive study of the catalog. The images are portraits, book of the editorships undertaken by the very covers, copies of text pages, and artwork. The 30 c 2016 SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2

busy Arthur Griffith The( United Irishman, Lindsay O’Neill. The Opened Letter: the constant networks existing between Sinn Féin, Éire Ireland, Scissors and Paste, Na- Networking in the Early Modern British World. (extended) families and friends within the tionality, and Young Ireland: Éire Óg) straddling Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ephemeral networks such as ones seeking the years 1899–1919. It concludes nearly 100 2015. viii, 264p., ill. ISBN 9780812246483. social assistance or contractual relationships years later with Kevin Rafter’s near contem- US $47.50 (hardback). – O’Neill’s vast archival material indicates porary study of the place of Magill in the that these networks often overlapped. Irish public sphere from 1977 to 1990. Rafter Diana G. Barnes. Epistolary Community She makes an argument that possibly the devotes a subsection to each of the editors in Print, 1580-1664. Farnham, Surrey: classification of epistolary networks into voluntary, contractual, and institutional – Vincent Browne, Colm Tóibín, Fintan Ashgate, 2013. Material Readings in Early associations would have been increasingly O’Toole, Brian Trench and John Waters – all Modern Culture. xii, 250p., 11 ill. ISBN more useful for the middle to the end of of whom have been significant presences in 9781409445357. US $99.95 (hardback). the eighteenth century where the public and shaping the Irish mindset. While capturing private overlapped on different and complex both the importance of the magazine and the The myriad of personal papers surviving levels. These interpersonal, social and sense of excitement that it could generate, his outside the archives of official power, in economic associations “nurtured communal essay notes the many journalists who worked homes, in the forms of diaries and letters, ties as much as a sense of individual identity” there: “it was a teaching hospital for young have informed historical, cultural, social, and “tied together informal networks that journalists” (228). and literary works over the recent years. Part stood outside state or institutional control” Journals of the Gaelic and Celtic revival of this resurgent interest, particularly for (8). The end of the period under investigation – An Claidheamh Soluis and Fáinne an Lae – the early modern period and the eighteenth then saw the rise of institutional and feature along with more political ones like century, was a particular attentiveness to the contractual networks that however were still James Connolly’s The Worker, D. P. Moran’s materiality of letters, on the one hand, and based in some ways in personal associations The Leader, and the proto-feminist Irish Citizen, on the other, the importance of epistolary but grew geographically beyond the local a journal “small in size but large in heart and networks. Whilst the latter have been boundaries. The more the world grew hopes” (62). The line of opinion-forming explored in some detail in the context of geographically, the more correspondents work is traced from The Irish Bulletin, The Irish literary and social networks, wider epistolary relied on letters. The changes that O’Neill Statesman, and Dublin Opinion, through The Bell, networks that link the local and the global, identifies clearly and carefully are the Hibernia, and Hot Press. The Capuchin Annual and the constant and the ephemeral, have not changes of style in letters. Whilst letter- and The Furrow trace more religious concerns. been studied carefully. writing manuals informed contractual and The scholarship and information given are In The Opened Letter, O’Neill investigates institutional epistolary exchanges in some of a very high quality, but it is the readability convincingly how various kinds of networks ways, the feminized language of friendship became increasingly important, in particular, and the connections made between these in the British world were established and as “bonds of friendship also implied bonds eclectic texts and their contexts that make maintained during the late seventeenth of service” (152). the chapters both informative and enjoyable. and early eighteenth centuries. Network The achievement of the book lies in One leaves this book with a different sense of theory, technologies of communication and the very careful but lively stylistic analysis what was happing in Ireland at this time, as transport, stylistics, and socio-geographical of letters and in an impressive mapping the journalistic perspective embodied in these analyses provide the underpinning of of various epistolary networks connecting magazines and journals shines through these O’Neill’s analysis of over 10,000 letters. the local Yorkshire to the global colonies. essays. There is very much a sense of being The letters were by John Perceval, 1st Earl The choice of archival material from a caught in the present of each period, and this of Egmont (1683–1748), William Byrd I mainly elite and male section of society is makes the book valuable to the academic and (1652–1704), Sir Hans Sloane, 1st Baronet problematic though and should have been general reader. (1660–1753), Cassandra (1670–1735) and addressed as such in the premise of the To close this review I would return to the James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos study. Nevertheless, this is an important book’s introduction. The editors note that (1673–1744), Nicholas Blundell of Little and well-written study that will inform a connecting strand of these journals is the Crosby (1669–1737), and Peter Collinson literary, historical, and sociological studies factor that, by “providing an outlet for those (1694–1768). of the period with new insights and detailed writing against the grain of mainstream Irish Whilst the case studies are socially analyses. society,” they “made freedom of expression homogenous, they unveil a useful range of the Diana G. Barnes pays attention to the a reality in Ireland” (10). For this alone, they “meta-phenomena” of networking in British idea of feminisation of epistolary exchanges are worthy of study, and this book does that society at the time. These letters, read and re- in her book by looking specifically at the theme full justice. read, transcribed and copied into letter books figure of the Secretary, at the stylistics of and finally archived, reveal the complexities Charles I’s The Kings Cabinet Opened (1645) and Margaret Cavendish’s Sociable Letters Eugene O’Brien of networks that studies on epistolary and Philosophical Letters (1664) but comes to Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick communities have hitherto underestimated. a different evaluation. In opposition to the O’Neill identifies (and visualises) overlapping eighteenth century, Barnes suggests that the and connected networks based on social and seventeenth-century feminine epistolary economic exchange (grounded in self-interest discourse was seen as “a differentiating and and interdependence) across local and global specifying term in a public discourse” (75). socio-economic worlds. She integrates SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 2016 d 31

Public, not private, then implied gossip and Gill Partington and Adam Smyth, eds. about books’ materiality? They can hardly political controversy (see chapter four), a Book Destruction from the Medieval to the have been more sanguine than the twen- label that Margaret Cavendish, for instance, Contemporary. New Directions in Book History. ty-first-century manager of the book shred- sought to contravene by contributing with Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. xi, ding plant we meet in the opening pages of her epistles to contemporary philosophical 216p., ill. ISBN 9781137367655. £58 / US the introduction, who has no interest in the and scientific debates: “She uses epistolary $95 (hardback). content of the books he destroys: “Can’t read form to represent the conjunction between them,” he says, “They send me to sleep.” (1) letters as the refinement of civilised speech, This lively book helps inaugurate As the editors say, the moment when writing and well-ordered society.” (195) Palgrave’s series New Directions in Book a book is destroyed is one in which “[its] Similarly to O’Neill, Barnes understands History, the raison d’être of which is to publish complex nature…becomes especially visible, letters as community-building forms of “monographs that employ advanced methods and when the fraught relationship between communication, though her material is not its insides and outside – its materiality and restricted to manuscript letters. In fact, the and open up new frontiers in research” “new republics of letters” were based on (i). Rather than showcase an innovative its semiotic content – is most urgently felt” and created by epistolary exchanges in print. methodology or rethink a hackneyed subject (9). Book destruction is a topic, therefore, Letters, even the familiar letters, in Barnes’ area, Partington and Smyth broach a neglected resonant with much current work in book study then have concrete political and social topic, suggesting that squeamishness about history on the relationship (or absence functions particularly when printed and book destruction has hindered the study of relationship) between materiality and thus widely disseminated. “The familiar of a range of artistic, literary and cultural meaning. The essays in this book open up letter was,” argues Barnes, “a recognised site practices. Contemporary art bulks large: a rich seam. Future work – there are many for thinking about civic codes, civility and there are interviews with Ross Birrell, Nicola types of book destruction not mentioned in appropriate social behaviour” (2). Whilst Dale and a hilariously uncooperative Tom this book – will perhaps want to distinguish the familiar letter changed in style, form Phillips, a clever piece by Partington on more sharply than Smyth’s and Partington’s and tone, it remained across the period John Latham, and a vivid survey of other authors do between such things such as the under investigation, a genre embedded in artist book destroyers by Kate Flint. Adam destruction of unique texts (Ben Jonson’s an “inherently sociable discourse” (202). As Smyth entertainingly discusses the “quasi- holographs, for example) and the destruction these “new republics” were imagined and editorial” (43) blaze which destroyed Ben of individual copies of texts that continue to often virtual, they were also exclusive: “each Jonson’s library, and Heather Tilley and the exist elsewhere (such as the printed books republic of letters imagined holds unfamiliar late and much lamented Stephen Colclough destroyed by Latham, Birrell, Dale, and others at bay” (202). Barnes’ study precedes write subtly on Victorian fiction: the former Phillips). But there is much to admire and O’Neill’s in chronology. Perhaps it is possible on Our Mutual Friend, the latter on Vanity Fair enjoy in this collection, the quirkiness and to concur that the globalisation of the world and Wuthering Heights. Two essays are outliers. scholarliness of which bode well for future and republic of letters moved increasingly In the lead piece, the only chapter to focus volumes in the series. towards the cosmopolitan? on a historical episode of book destruction The wide scope of epistolary material Jonathan Gibson poses a methodological problem which is motivated by censorship, Heike Bauer re- not really addressed. Indeed, Barnes looks examines the survival of some items from The Open University the Nazis’ destruction of the archive of at model letters, fictional letters and actual c correspondence ranging from the Caroline Berlin’s Institute of Sexual Science. Anthony court to the Restoration and closes with Bale’s valuable discussion of ownership S. J. Perry. Chameleon Poet: R. S. Thomas Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She also inscriptions in medieval manuscripts seems and the Literary Tradition. Oxford: Oxford does not theorize the idea of community as tangential to the volume’s theme. He does, University Press, 2013. x, 312p., ill. ISBN such, which for the early modern material however, provide in the same piece a handy 9780199687336. £55.00 (hardback). that she has chosen is crucial, particularly overview of book destruction across the because there was a difference in epistolary Middle Ages as a whole. Smyth does much S. J. Perry’s Chameleon Poet: R. S. Thomas communities created and maintained the same for the Renaissance in his Jonson and the Literary Tradition rests its arguments through the circulation of manuscripts or essay and Colclough includes in his piece a on two principle claims: first, that R. S. printed letters (see the work of Michelle fascinating account of the book destruction Thomas’s life and work have too often been O’Callaghan). that was a necessary part of the activity of considered in light of his insistent Welsh These reservations aside, Epistolary mid-Victorian circulating libraries. nationalism when in fact his poetry, which Community in Print, 1580-1664 is a thorough Some essays explicitly attempt to grows out of a much more hesitant, shifting study for students and academics interested demystify book destruction, to reclaim it sense of self, is better understood as a series in the early modern letter-writing tradition. from what the editors estimate is its current of chameleonic reactions to writers from Barnes is especially good at looking at taboo status. Smyth suggests that: “Today, non-canonical material and contributes England, Scotland, Ireland, the United we’re inclined to see the loss of old books States, and elsewhere; second, that Thomas’s lucidly to the debate on the “gendering” of as unfortunate, or even tragic, but early epistolary discourses and communities in the most significant poetic debts – and those modern bibliophiles were quite happy for seventeenth century. that have been least explored – are to the most texts to go the way of the pie dish, English poetic tradition, especially to an Nicole Pohl or the privy, or the vegetable market.” (48) “English line” of poetry that extends from Oxford Brookes University Were people in the past really more sanguine William Wordsworth to Thomas Hardy, 32 c 2016 SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 then through Edward Thomas to Philip assessments are almost always convincing, to prove a boon to those whose research Larkin. Perry borrows this idea from Samuel as are Perry’s discussions of English writers and teaching interests pertain to commercial Hynes, who has argued for a “genetic” line of – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example – and colonial expansion in India in the inheritance in English poetry. Even Thomas’s when considered within this context. But seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The nationalism, Perry argues, owes at least as Perry’s determination to see R. S. Thomas works included range from narratives of much to his reading of English poetry and as the inheritor of an “English line” – most the East India Company’s first voyages in English cultural criticism as it does to any conspicuous, perhaps, in his unconvincing the early seventeenth century, to the public, Welsh source. Thus, Chameleon Poet is, on attempt to compare him to Philip Larkin – is political, and commercial interventions one hand, a study in poetic response and, at odds with the best parts of his book. regarding the nature, role, and future of the on the other, an argument for an ‘English’ Rhetoric surrounding a reified “English Company that characterised debates over R. S. Thomas. tradition” has been used to marginalize the ‘India Question’ in the late eighteenth As a study of poetic response, Chameleon or exclude too many Anglophone poets, century. Key developments in the intervening Poet is very good. While many of the including, ironically, R. S. Thomas, who decades are charted through official and influences Perry examines – including Patrick puzzled and frustrated English critics unofficial publications, some printed at Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger and the poetry when his philosophical proclivities and the behest of the Company itself, others of W. B. Yeats, Edward Thomas, and Ted experimental prosodies led him beyond the produced independently by its supporters Hughes – have been discussed elsewhere, small, Welsh, rural plot they afforded him. and detractors alike. Perry mines them more deeply, and he It could be argued that S. J. Perry releases Types of material inventoried include considers poetic models that others have Thomas from that narrow furrow by further official publications, parliamentary debates, overlooked, including Alfred Tennyson, excavating his significant debts to English speeches at East India House, travel Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, authors, but as thorough and nuanced as his narratives, histories, books, pamphlets, and George Herbert. However, as he arguments are, Perry takes us a step backward tracts, and petitions – indeed the only major illuminates Thomas’s multi-layered responses by insisting on the very idea of tradition that type of printed material omitted are articles, to these and other writers, Perry’s efforts has allowed some critics and reviewers to letters, and editorials in newspapers and to give primacy to English influences seem limit the breadth of Thomas’s achievement. periodicals. These, though important, are misplaced. While he is right, for example, Rather than attempting to show how R. S. simply too voluminous to be included in a to begin with the impact of F. T. Palgrave’s Thomas fits within “the literary tradition,” work of this kind. The works included have Golden Treasury on the schoolboy R. S. a better end to this useful and thoughtful been penned by Company officials, “old Thomas, there is no reason to conclude that study would have been to fully embrace the India hands,” independent merchants, and the English poets anthologized therein were “archipelagic” model it offers and to show social commentators in Britain and India. It any more central to his development than how the chameleon-like, mask-wearing R. is an Anglo-centric view of the Company, the Scottish and Irish writers he devoured S. Thomas, whose conflicted identity and enumerating works written primarily by soon after, among them Fiona Macleod, polyphonic poetry shifted and evolved so Britons, and mostly in English. Indeed, as William Butler Yeats, Austin Clarke, Patrick much over time, challenges the very concept Pickett herself acknowledges, there is a Kavanagh, and Hugh MacDiarmid. This is of such a tradition. relative “paucity of material relating directly to say nothing of the many Welsh influences to India” (viii), because the focus of many that, given his focus on “the literary tradition” Daniel Westover of the writers included was on the impact (an exclusive, politicized, Anglocentric term), East Tennessee State University of the East India Company’s activities at Perry disregards. c home, rather than on conditions on the Perry is most convincing when he adopts Catherine Pickett. Bibliography of the subcontinent. That said, those interested in what he calls an “archipelagic” model that East India Company: Books, Pamphlets and early colonial India will still find plenty to refuses to define identity along national Other Material Printed Between 1600 and 1785. get their teeth into in its coverage of topics lines. He employs both Keats’s notion of London: The British Library, 2011. xvi, 304p. ranging from the East India Company’s the “chameleon poet” and Yeats’s theory of ISBN 9780712358446. £50.00 (hardback). treatment of local Indian rulers, to its trade the mask to demonstrate how R. S. Thomas monopolies and interests, to its administration “inhabited” the lives of diverse writers, his The product of several decades of of justice and the governance of the three poetry emerging from a quarrel with them painstaking research, this magnificent Presidencies. Key moments in the story of as much as a quarrel with himself. Perry bibliography contains details of over 1,500 the East India Company’s transition from takes this discussion beyond the British printed works relating to the East India commercial enterprise to territorial power, archipelago to include American poets, Company, between its formation in 1600 such as the Black Hole of Calcutta or the including Robert Frost, William Carlos and 1785, when the passing of Pitt’s India Anglo-Mysore Wars, are recorded, but so too Williams, and the various voices Thomas Act (1784) bought the organisation more are the less sensational but equally important encountered through his relationship with firmly under Parliamentary control. This developments in colonial knowledge and the journal Critical Quarterly. And, in his comprehensive, detailed and informative strategies of rule epitomised by the mapping discussion of Seamus Heaney’s Death of a collection is of immense value, both of the subcontinent, or the acquisition of Naturalist, Perry also shows how other poets as a reference tool and as an important ‘oriental’ languages. benefited from their own quarrels with R. scholarly work in its own right, and is sure Each entry contains publication details, S. Thomas. These archipelagic and global a brief description of contents and, where SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 2016 d 33 appropriate, some editorial explanation. The texts. Through this comparison, the echoes from the popular and the accessible. The reader is guided through the bibliographic between each literary moment emerge: each fact that electronic literature uses the media entries, arranged chronologically, by concise has a similar definition of newness; each is platforms developed for mass media does not and helpful commentary that contextualises fundamentally about media. Chapter three translate to a permeation of the popular into the information provided by offering an most convincingly achieves this argument the elite anymore than the populist history of overview of the important events and in its comparison of newness, aesthetic the novel renders contemporary novelistic key developments of the relevant year. As difficulty, and media-saturated aesthetic high art popular. Hugh Bowen points out in his preface, strategies in Young-hae Chang Heavy Despite my criticisms, I recommend the arrangement and presentation of Industries’s Dakota and Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Pressman’s book – it is particularly timely. the material elevates the work above a Chapter five diverges the most from the Pressman is explicit that her study fits into “functional finding aid” (vi) and enables structure of the book, comparing modernist the scholarly contexts of modernist studies scholars to use it to “analyse the changing linguistic movements like Esperanto and and New Media studies. A third context, nature of the East India Company as well as Ezra Pound’s explorations of the Chinese the digital humanities, occupies very little the alterations that occurred to its position ideogram to contemporary representations of Pressman’s explicit attention, but it is an in English/British public life” (vi). In all of computer code as a universal language. important one. To contextualize Pressman’s then, this extensive compilation represents In addition, this chapter’s central literary book within digital humanities is to align it both an impressive work of scholarship, a text, Eric Loyer’s digital novel Chroma with a current scholarly zeitgeist. In the last treasure trove for the serious researcher, and (2001), exposes how “universality” can few years, the maturity of digital humanities a key reference tool for those interested in mask an exclusionary specificity. For Loyer’s methodologies has combined with the recent the East India Company and its relationship characters, racialized bodies remain racialized release of modernist text from copyright. to both Britain and India more generally. even in cyberspace; for computer code, the In the resulting flurry of scholarly activity, cultural dominance of English is inscribed an account of the shared genealogy of Andrea Major in the history and substance of computer modernism and the digital is invaluable. University of Leeds languages. The book has already allowed me to make c Despite its impressive breadth, I frequently my own insights into the digital humanities: Jessica Pressman. Digital Modernism: found myself frustrated by the way in which in its preoccupation with newness, media Making It New in New Media. Oxford: Oxford Pressman’s study sidesteps certain cultural specificity, and reading practices, the digital University Press, 2014. xiv, 224p., ill. ISBN critical contexts. Chief among these is the humanities may itself provide another strand 9780199937080. UK £65.00 (hardback). book’s engagement with seriousness and in the trajectory of modernism’s rootedness canonicity, to which I add an additional term, in media. Jessica Pressman’s Digital Modernism: ‘prestige.’ Pressman’s account of modernism Making It New in New Media is an impressive as an aesthetic movement is canonical, which Emily Christina Murphy accomplishment. Pressman deftly handles also means that it is male. The maleness of Queen’s University this version of modernism is important modernist, New Critical, and contemporary c electronic literature contexts. Her central here, as maleness has been, even if only argument that a strain of contemporary incidentally, central to the development of James Raven. Bookscape: Geographies of electronic literature relies on the same literary prestige and seriousness. Pressman’s Printing and Publishing in London before 1800. mechanism of newness and tradition as argument hinges on both the scholarly The Panizzi Lectures, 2010. London: The modernist literature is compelling and creation of the canon and artistic reworking British Library, 2014. xv, 208p., ill. ISBN convincing. Both literary movements, she of canonical literatures. Her observation that 9780712357333. £50.00 (hardback). argues, are “centrally about media” (4), digital modernists wish for their art to be about serious literary production, and serious and difficult is a key aspect of these This important work, which has its origins about “renovating the past through media” artworks’ definition asmodernist . But without a in the Panizzi Lecture series delivered by (original emphasis, 4). Digital modernism critical engagement with canonicity, concepts James Raven at the British Library in 2010, communicates “newness” by updating like seriousness and difficulty likewise go is densely stuffed with fact: names, addresses, and reworking the canonical literary past uncriticised, as do the gendered aspects of dates. The work of a major book historian, it in a way that is particularly concerned these concepts. paradoxically verges on being book history with media. This argument extends to I do not think that Pressman’s project without the book. Raven explains that his Pressman’s defense of close reading as her should have also been one of feminist concept of a “bookscape” takes its cue not methodology: she skillfully demonstrates recovery. However, I am surprised that the from “the representation and use of the how the project of literary seriousness book did not undertake a more thorough object (the book)” but from “its place of demands deeply attentive reading in both engagement with questions of canonicity, production, based primarily on topographical print and digital media. seriousness, and prestige. In fact, the book’s resources” (5). His aim, accordingly, is to The monograph contains an introduction introduction touches on how “modernism plot the shifting contours of the London and six chapters, most of which compare was in fact deeply permeated by the lowbrow book trade of the late seventeenth and historical modernist literary texts with and mass media” (9) in order to note that early eighteenth centuries by means of a contemporary digital modernist literary scholarship has moved beyond the “great detailed analysis of early modern tax returns, divide” of high and low culture described documents produced by inspectors who 34 c 2016 SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 made an annual record of the ownership a basic grasp of London topography and a context of other Victorian female writers. and the rental valuation of each property reasonable competence in eighteenth-century While the essays most frequently discuss they visited. Raven is alert to the challenges publishing history. Things are not helped by North and South, Gaskell’s novels, short fiction, of using this material (chapter two is a cool- some awkwardnesses and slips in production: letters, and even Greek songs, all receive some headed masterclass on “The Evidence”) black and white and colour images appear in attention. The approaches to Gaskell’s works and scrupulously correlates it with trade different parts of the book but in the same represented here are also diverse; essays of directories, names and locations in imprints numbering sequence; the running head for general interest to the reader of Gaskell and contemporary topographical images. The Chapter two is, erroneously, the same as are presented alongside more specialized picture he reveals is at variance with many for chapter one; the caption for the cover studies of Gaskell and empire, emigration, of the findings of past scholarship. Raven image has been swapped with the caption ethnography, meteorology, and ekphrasis. highlights in particular “the plasticity of for another illustration; and the typeface is Considering the broad range of methods occupied space” (69): it turns out that most punishingly small for old eyes. and perspectives, the view of Gaskell London booksellers, publishers, printers presented in these essays is surprisingly and stationers were leaseholders rather Jonathan Gibson unified. The collection, which originally than freeholders and that these book trade The Open University developed out of a meeting at the professionals held surprisingly short-term British Women Writers’ Conference in 2012, leases, frequently migrating for short periods c overwhelmingly presents Gaskell as an author to new premises, often nearby. As Raven who transcends boundaries; Gaskell is, the points out in one of his many illuminating Lesa Scholl, Emily Morris, and Sarina editors note, “global . . . fluid, complex, and asides, the sign was a more valuable identity Gruver Moore, eds. Place and Progress in the open” (3). This point is an important one, but marker than the street number (66). Works of Elizabeth Gaskell. Farnham: Ashgate, it also means that the limitations of Gaskell’s An introductory chapter pans across 2015. xiii, 231p.. ill. ISBN 9781472429636. vision are rarely acknowledged or addressed. the landscape of contemporary theoretical UK £60 (hardback). Mary Mullen alone, in her essay “In Search approaches to space and place, from Pierre of Shared Time: National Imaginings in Nora to Bruno Latour. This stimulating tour The title of this collection of essays places Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South,” draws d’horizon raised expectations in this reader that it squarely amidst a tradition of criticism that attention to Gaskell’s role in policing certain the following chapters did not bear out. There considers Elizabeth Gaskell in terms of her boundaries, arguing that even as Gaskell is little use of these theoretical perspectives contribution to regionalist representations represents the diversity of the nation’s in the rest of the volume. Raven does touch of both city and country. The contents of present, she pointedly excludes the Irish on major trends and wider contexts, but only the volume, however, shift critical focus from her vision of its future. The collection fleetingly. The book’s focus throughout is to Gaskell’s representations of blurred also rarely describes Gaskell in relation to rather on the details of property occupancy boundaries and liminal spaces. Gaskell, the the print culture of the period. Julia M. and length of publishing careers, topics on editors contend, uses movement between and Chavez, in her essay “Reading ‘An Every- which Raven has much new information to within places to think about the possibilities Day Story’ Through Bifocals: Seriality and offer. A brilliant searchlight is shone on the for social, economic, and temporal progress the Limits of Realism in Elizabeth Gaskell’s publishing activity in a sequence of different both within and among persons. In this sense, Wives and Daughters,” offers one exception, parts of London: the heart of the trade in Gaskell is a novelist less of static places than reading Gaskell’s serially published novel in Paternoster Row and St Paul’s Churchyard; of dynamic places. its original context in the Cornhill Magazine. Little Britain, in decline as a book centre The fifteen essays are grouped into four Further consideration of the print medium by the mid-eighteenth century; the Cornhill sections: ‘Home Geographies,’ ‘Mobility as a space of literary engagement would and Exchange district, as concerned with and Boundaries,’ ‘Literary and Imagined have enhanced the collection’s general aim small job printing or “commercial-assistance Spaces,’ and ‘Cultural Performance and of demonstrating Gaskell’s engagement with activity” (102) as with book publishing; and Visual Spaces.’ The finest of these essays social and political issues of contemporary the maze-like alleys and courts around Fleet offer important contributions to Gaskell importance. Street. criticism by charting unseen connections This collection of essays reenergizes There are a healthy number of illustrations, across persons, spaces, and time. Katherine critical discussion about Gaskell’s signature maps, and tables. The book forms a part of Inglis, for example, describes in “Unimagined emphasis on place by suggesting a wide range the ongoing Mapping the Print Culture of Community and Disease in Ruth” how the of dynamic new approaches to the subject. Eighteenth-Century London project, in the online spread of typhus undermines distinctions Far from being a simple observer of city and manifestation of which, presumably, pictures, between the pure and the impure, suggesting country, Gaskell, as these contributors show, maps, and tables will bulk larger and be more “the real interconnectedness and broad uses place as a means to illuminate Victorian easily searchable, and in which a completer scope of a fallen woman’s community” (68). economic, social, temporal, and personal picture of publishing in the capital will be Josie Billington, in “Gaskell’s ‘Rooted’ Prose forms of progress. given. Within the necessarily linear structure Realism,” traces the momentary intrusion of a monograph, Raven does his valiant of past memories and future eventualities – Laura Forsberg best to give us as much detail as possible. often within parentheses or between dashes Concordia University Texas Partly because of this, however, Bookscape – into the persistent present of Gaskell’s is not an easy read. It requires a reader with realism and places this approach in the SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 2016 d 35

Mary L. Shannon. Dickens, Reynolds, and and satisfied their compulsive need to Philip A. Stadter, ed. Plutarch and His Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture establish “some order” on everything around Roman Readers. Oxford: Oxford University of a Victorian Street. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, them. The book is divided into six chapters, Press, 2015. x, 394p. ISBN 9780198718338. 2015. xviii, 261p., ill. ISBN 9781472442048. the four middle chapters into: morning, UK £80.00 / US $111.00 (hardback). £65.00 (hardback). afternoon, evening, and night. Each section manages to do something very complex. Plutarch and His Roman Readers is an As someone who designs guidebooks for ‘Morning’ on Wellington Street discusses outstanding interdisciplinary work at the different UK cities (in the Art Researchers’ Charles Dickens and his work editing crossroads of classics, political philosophy Guide series), and who studies Victorian book Household Words. ‘Afternoon’ covers Reynolds and literary studies. The book is a reliable illustration, I appreciate this well-researched and his works like The Mysteries of London, but and solid collection of essays, a valuable volume by Mary L. Shannon on different also Reynolds’ mentions in the press related summation of an entire life dedicated to levels. Shannon writes a social history of a to Chartism and working class movements. the inquiry into the legacy of the ancient specific part of London and Melbourne told ‘Evening’ illuminates Mayhew and his time historian by their author. The articles are through key figures of nineteenth-century working on Punch magazine, but ties that into gathered in this anthology by Eugene H. Falk, literature and publishing. She not only records the local theatre district and the construct under the pseudonym of Philip A. Stadter, where the likes of Charles Dickens, G. W. of a writer/editor as showman. Finally, the and focus on the Parallel Lives, a series of 22 M. Reynolds, and Henry Mayhew worked, chapter ‘Night’ reaches out into the British book-length pairs, each setting side by side socialised, and went to be entertained, but she Empire, analysing the print network’s the lives of two statesman, one Greek and also maps a typography of invisible networks structure on Collins Street in Melbourne one Roman – Alexander and Caesar, Aristides that encompass Britain’s print culture and comparing and contrasting that with its and Cato, Lysander and Sulla, to give only a intersecting a greater Empire. Like any role model established on Wellington Street few examples. To his contemporary readers, useful guidebook which gives you a flavour in London. As we, the readers, move “in and Plutarch wished to present leaders from these for the journey you are about to undertake, out of days” across time and space, Shannon traditions as models for the government this work has illustrations, street plans, as ties together all the threads she has revealed to action of his own day. His main purpose was well as photographs, and its text speaks in a us – threads we need to navigate an intricate to examine the moral issues and decisions distinctive and entertaining voice. This guide labyrinth. involved in politics, in order demonstrate helps visitors see overlooked artefacts and The guidebook metaphor aptly describes that virtue and greatness are possible when half-hidden geographical features, with the this work. Yet it can also be extended reason directs and guides passion instead of aim of preparing readers to explore a specific to contain the personal experience of historical circumstances and conditions. time period and its worldview. Destination: being hosted by a physical tour guide with Part I, ‘Two Worlds – or One?,’ examines 1843–1853. encyclopaedic knowledge leading us around. Plutarch’s easy-going social encounter with During this decade, in addition to 13 There is drama in human interaction. Is the his friends, elite Romans who held prominent booksellers and book publishers, more than guide who is narrating our journey through military and administrative positions, as 20 periodicals and newspapers were based dens of criminals, drawing rooms of nobility, depicted in Table Talk. The author partially on Wellington Street. Among them: the sites of prostitution, and the workspaces of revises and refines the conclusions of recent Examiner, Anthenaeum, Punch, The Morning the working-class poor, the Resurrection Man studies into patronage during the reigns of Post, Puppet Show, the Literary Gazette, The whom we should not trust? Or a benevolent the Flavian emperors and their successors, Railway Chronicle, and Spectator. Shannon cites reformer who wants to improve the lot Nerva and Trajan. In the process, he displays and provides examples from an exhaustive of those around us? The noble hero who a vast knowledge of ancient history and its list of nineteenth-century primary sources wants us to understand and help, and not sources. His critical narrative draws a carefully including: post office directories, maps, gawk at the misfortunes of others? The fact delineated picture of the social and political newspaper articles, biographies, plays, novels, that Shannon’s book can paint such a vivid context. The subsequent chapters deal with, letters, and of course popular guidebooks. picture of the nineteenth century, on human amongst other subjects, the sanctuary of She makes an overwhelming case for why terms as well on a geographical scale, marks Apollo in Delphi (where Plutarch was a priest Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew were able it as highly engaging book, and as a work of for many years), the dinner parties attended to write with insight about the plight of the excellent scholarship. by the philosopher, and the socialite pleasures poor and the darker side of human nature experienced in the symposia. – because they witnessed and participated Rose Roberto Part II, ‘Writing for Romans,’ is devoted in the vibrant social milieu of Wellington University of Reading to a reflection on how the biographer born Street, which throbbed with political passion, c in Chaeronea challenged the mind-set of with the creative energy of the entertainment Trajanic Rome. His approach to Roman and district, and the animated ‘masses’ who went Greek history was thoroughly innovative about their daily lives near them. Physical in that he compared two nations and two proximity to diverse groups of ordinary cultures separated by geography and language people greatly influenced our writer-editors but under strong reciprocal influence. Greek and their literary output. literature and culture formed an essential part The structure of Shannon’s book is of Roman life in that day. Both peoples were precise; it would have delighted Victorians bound at the time not only by conquest but 36 c 2016 SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 also by a common paradigm, based ultimately Ryan Szpiech. Conversion and Narrative: He begins with a discussion of the transition on Greek philosophy since Rome had been Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic. from “authority (auctoritas)” as the primary Hellenized. Moreover, these essays explore Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania basis of religious argumentation – that is, Plutarch’s competence in reading Latin and Press, 2013. xiv, 314p. ISBN 9780812244717. appeals to the claims of venerable past figures a wide range of topics related to ideologies US $59.95 (hardback). – to authority paired with “reason (ratio)”. As and political science. a result, the very notion of auctoritas was up Part III, ‘Statesmen as Models and Ryan Szpiech wants us to think about for re-definition and expansion, and Szpiech Warnings,’ calls attention to important “religious conversion” differently. Since the argues that the convert, as a kind of rhetorical transversal threads which reverberate across birth of the disciplines of anthropology, figure, was able to be construed as a new the pairs in sets of lives, such us the nature psychology, and sociology over a century ago, kind of authority because of his “association of kingship, the empty pomp of power, and scholars have been interested in explaining with the otherness of the unconverted the tragedy of its ultimate inability to inspire why and how individuals have dramatically infidel and his status as one faithful to the goals and impermanence as a metaphor of upended their lives by “converting” from goals of Christian discourse” (90). The third rule. The historical drama of Parallel Lives one religion to another. What psychological chapter serves as a sort of interlude, in which warns of the pitfalls intrinsic to statecraft and processes go into such a movement? When Szpiech presents the way in which conversion of the unavoidable, rather than unexpected, can a conversion said to be final – or can functioned in medieval Jewish sources. The fate. Falk wittily endorses the idea that the it ever be said to be? What of those who infrequency of conversion narratives in these noblest human act is to govern well. In convert under duress? Can they even be said sources helps him to buttress his argument Plutarch’s lifetime there had been, likely, more to have converted? These, it should be said, that conversion is a “particularly Christian spectacles in imperial politics than genuine are not Szpiech’s questions. Following the theological category” (92). leaders, as it happens in some ways nowadays. insights of the medievalist Karl Morrison, He resumes his argument about Christian Part IV, ‘Post-Classical Reception,’ he argues that conversion is not a general representation of conversion in the fourth investigates the treatment of Plutarch and human phenomenon or a label well-suited to chapter by transitioning to the thirteenth his works in Joseph Addison’s tragedy Cato describing change in any time and place, but century, in which emerges a new emphasis and Alexander Hamilton’s paybook. The is instead “a placeholder for other protean on “foreign language as a marker of former was an early representative of the concepts and paradigms that explain and authenticity” (120). In the writings of English Enlightenment who contributed qualify change of religion in different ways” Dominican polemicists, particularly Ramon to a new form of citizenship and code of (16). Martí, the Talmud and the Quran became manners by advancing a rational vision of Szpiech’s questions in this book are authorities in their own rights, even as society in a number of works published rather different, and they focus intently on they were “flawed” to a certain degree, between 1709 and 1714 in the Tatler and the the literary representation of conversion. which could be used against the religious Spectator. The latter listed the payments to He wishes to understand “what place such communities that produced them (124). the soldiers and other expenses while serving first-person [conversion] stories had in the This effected a “displacement,” in which as captain of the New York Artillery until discourse of religious apology and polemic” the convert’s authority was transferred to May 1777. The author brilliantly elucidates (3). He has uncovered a connection between the one possessing linguistic expertise (141). revealing statements on which Addison and medieval Christian apologetic/polemical In the fifth chapter, Szpiech shows how the Hamilton drew from Plutarch on economy, literature, on the one hand, and narratives of emphasis on the personal experience of political arithmetic, education, legal thinking, conversion to Christianity, on the other, and the convert and on expertise in languages governmental institutions, slavery abolition, his aim is to explain this link. In his view, the converges in a single late medieval figure: civil religion and sex. connection between conversion and apology Abner of Burgos, who took the name A book such as this one is more than a for Christians is “most evident in their Alfonso of Valladolid upon his conversion laudable compilation. It is a major academic shared arguments concerning individual and from Judaism to Christianity. Abner/Alfonso achievement. Even though rulers of collective identity, arguments that, in turn, writes in Hebrew and in a manner that is exceptional quality are rare at all times, share a fundamentally narrative structure” (4). highly sympathetic to the Jewish religion we should always search determinedly for In the first chapter, Szpiech sets for from which he converted; for Szpiech, the those who have in some measure honesty himself the ambitious task of showing distinction between “selfhood and otherness” and integrity as well as that impartiality and both that the fourth-century North African which lay at the heart of the discourse of objectivity which come from the prevalence theologian Saint Augustine (particularly conversion began to be blurred (173). But of intellect over emotion, for the sake of through his reading of the Apostle Paul) these two were never fully conflated, and liberty, happiness, and prosperity. established a paradigm of conversion that the supersession of Judaism by Christianity would endure through the medieval period remained the paradigmatic focus of medieval Ramón Bárcena and that this paradigm came to be radically conversion narratives. Universidad de Cantabria transformed in the twelfth and thirteenth The final chapter represents yet another centuries, as a result of the turn towards departure, this time to consider conversion c scholasticism. The second chapter picks in Islamic sources. Szpiech demonstrates up this topic, with Szpiech’s claim that the that accounts of conversion to Islam, like paradigm of conversion was changing due their Christian (but not Jewish) counterparts, to the rediscovery of Aristotle’s philosophy. dramatize “a general plot of soteriological SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 2016 d 37 history” (213). They are fundamentally …new geopolitical forms” (126) as well as copied into commonplace books. Exploiting narrative, but the theology that they new generic ones. He interrogates Hobbes’ the full range of such resources might depend represent is understandably different from translation of Thucydides as a veiled defense on the participation of book historians Christian conversion narratives: “Islam is not of the colonial Virginia Company in which among the scholars Warren has invited to characterized as an ironic inversion of what Hobbes was a stockholder. He reads Grotius’ join him in the production of “a new literary went before … but as the cancelling of all little-studied play Sophompaneas with Milton’s history of international law” (30). previous faiths” (213). Samson Agonistes and Paradise Lost as steps This is a stimulating book that due to its toward the recognition of the international Robert O. Steele breadth of source material will appeal to a legal personality of the individual across Jacob Burns Law Library wide range of readers. Moreover, Szpiech’s sovereign boundaries, a tendency that has The George Washington University theorization of conversion as a literary culminated in today’s concern with human phenomenon will undoubtedly help enrich rights and international humanitarian law. c the longstanding scholarly conversation about For Milton, as Warren shows, the rights of Seth Whidden. Authority in Crisis in French the nature of religious identities. the people against a tyrant, an invasion to Literature, 1850–1880. Farnham, UK & succor an oppressed foreign population, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. viii, 200p. Karl Shuve and the legalization of divorce were all ISBN 9781472444264. £60 (hardback). University of Virginia remedies necessary within the “secondary c law of nature and nations” after the Fall; French literary history has long had a later developments in international law which problem with authority. What is the core Christopher N. Warren. Literature and the have “de-emphasized the nexus of so-called of the French canon? Who is the greatest Law of Nations, 1580-1680. Oxford: Oxford private concerns … contracts, commerce, French author? The most influential? University Press, 2015. viii, 286p., ill. ISBN family law, criminal law, and torts” (203) The most revered? Unlike many national 9780198719342. US $99.00 (hardback). have, according to Warren, impoverishing literatures, French literature provides no contemporary debates. clear answers to these questions. Whereas As Christopher Warren amply Warren’s concluding chapter reveals the England finds Shakespeare at the centre of its demonstrates in his new book, “early impetus behind the complex and nuanced national theatre, France sees Racine, Molière modern poetics remains present in the investigations in his book. “Scholarship in and Corneille. The Italians claim Dante as a modern structures of international law” international law” is a source for the law national poet, but France has diverse poets (229). Reading literary works by Sidney, itself, a principle enshrined for example in the of similar stature in its own history (e.g. Shakespeare, Milton, and others alongside Statute of the International Court of Justice Ronsard, Labé, Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, international law classics by Grotius, Gentili, (229). Ignoring the full range of texts that have Mallarmé, etc.) Exploring this unease with Hobbes, and Selden allows him to trace participated in international legal debates may literary authority, Seth Whidden’s new book Renaissance debates about colonialism, have devastating real-world consequences. provides many convincing arguments about diplomatic immunity, sovereignty, and human Warren cites the example of John Yoo, whose why authority is so fraught in French literary rights across generic boundaries. introduction to a 1997 edition of Gentili’s history. Following Roland Barthes, Whidden Early modern theoreticians of the law De Legationibus claimed that in this author’s finds in the late nineteenth century “the of nations often drew their materials from time non-state actors were not afforded the first attempt to undermine the prestige and ancient histories or epic poetry, as did protection of international law, thus ignoring authority that modern society traditionally Renaissance playwrights and poets; both the complexity of the Renaissance debate bestows upon an author” (3). While Barthes groups participated in the same political, across genres. Yoo, it turns out, was one of considers Mallarmé to be the first writer moral, and legal debates. Warren traces issues the advisors who helped justify the torture of who was preoccupied with lessening literary of political representation and treatment of Al-Qaeda suspects under George W. Bush. authority, Whidden makes the case for prisoners through Gentili’s reading of the For Warren, repositioning early modern a similar weakening of authority in the Aeneid in his De Jure Belli and Sidney’s figure thinking about international law within its previous generation. His analysis focuses on of the captive princess in the New Arcadia, larger context - philosophical, literary, and the works of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, issues played out historically in the execution ultimately humanist - might help avoid such Verne and the rest of the Cercle des poètes of Mary Queen of Scots. He reads The Tempest chilling oversimplifications. Zutiques, among other authors of the Second against period legal cases involving piracy Warren’s detailed and tightly-reasoned Empire (1850–1870) and the Commune and maritime law to play comic recognition book aims primarily at an expanded (1871). For Whidden, the crisis in authorial scenes against the recognition of the rights intellectual history, an enterprise in which it authority (which he terms “auctority”) was of migrants and conflict of inheritance is hugely successful; its interest in recovering achieved primarily through poetic innovation, laws against conflict of legal venues in the traces of contemporary legal debates within but it also occurred in prose (notably in the private or comic mode of international law. literary and non-literary texts leads it to a narrative techniques of Jules Verne). He examines border and genre crossing in reconstruction of early modern sense-making The 1870s was a time of great political the tragicomic Winter’s Tale in the context which sometimes borrows methodology upheaval, most notably the Commune of of the mixed public/private legal issues in from the history of reading. Warren’s sources 1871, which takes a central place in Whidden’s the English-Scottish borderlands, arguing for excavating buried meanings include study. This period encompasses the end that the play “offered ways to think about annotated copies of early texts and passages of the classical Parnassus and the brief 38 c 2016 SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 formation of the Zutistes. For Whidden, But a corresponding literary iconoclasm is The concept spreads out an impressive the crisis of literary authority is part of by no means the only response to political gathering of documents, books, sculptures, broader literary and social movements, anarchy. photographs, oil paintings, and other artifacts the breakdown of the Second Empire and In the aftermath of the Commune, related to the genius. Many pieces come also the beginnings of café culture, which literary authority emerged as stronger than from the holdings of the national library, Whidden traces back to the end of the July ever. Whidden’s conclusion echoes André the main document centre on Hispanic Monarchy. His central historical question Gide’s quip that France’s greatest writer written, graphic and audio-visual heritage. is: “At what point did poets like Rimbaud, is “Hugo, alas.” That is, despite Hugo’s The collection includes other objects granted Verlaine, and their friends imagine themselves sentimentality and bombastic style, he is the by most important international archives and to be a cenacle, out of the ashes of the best representative and arbiter of literary institutions – Archivo General de Simancas, Commune and the groups that led up to it?” authority in France. Hugo’s rhetorical Archivo Histórico Nacional, Archivo General (39). The answer leads backwards from the denunciation of political authority through de Indias, Real Academia Española, Museo Cercle Zutique through the Café Riche and literature ultimately triumphed in France, del Prado, Bibliothèque Nationale de France the Divan Le Peletier, much earlier than many despite many alternatives. In Whidden’s (BNF), and British Museum, amongst others. accounts of the rise of poetic circles in café words: “After the Second Empire and the Entering the exhibit room the audience is culture (39–41). Paris Commune, auctority will reserve for welcomed by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra The Zutistes are an interesting choice itself, and itself alone, the spaces in which himself, who introduces the structural for a case study. Unlike the members of the these issues can be played out,” for “only an axes of the experimental experience. The more classical – and longer-lived – Parnassian author can propose and destabilize authority preluding space opens by placing the figure, Movement, Rimbaud and the Cercle Zutique with any success” (171). of noble origin but impoverished – he was attacked both literary and political authority: This book is highly recommended for an hidalgo –, his military and political career “Rimbaud continued his attack against graduate students and researchers in French at the very heart of the Monarquía Hispánica paradigms of authority as he proceeded to literature and culture. It is a fine study of and his literature in the context of the dismantle the authority of French verse, the period with implications for modern Golden Age. The visitor gets spontaneously in a meticulous manner that could only be literature in general. Specialists of the period a sense of who the man of letters was when carried out by the most knowledgeable” will appreciate the fine-grained readings of discerning between real and false autographs, (18). Whidden’s readings of texts – from the a wide range of texts. Researchers in other researching into administrative files or well-known to the obscure – are historically periods will appreciate the deft movement studying the first works, his novelistic and and formally sophisticated. He moves deftly from politics to poetry and back, as well as theatrical production, or the last imprints. from observations of how individual works the discussion of authority as it relates to The successive sections make the viewer privy fit into an author’s oeuvre to broader social authorship, which has implications far beyond to the soldier and the captive, the collector of concerns. The first chapter considers how French poetics. ballads and the traveler, while paying attention the culture of collaboration affected literary to substantial matters – the genres which he authority, taking the Café Riche society, the Melanie Conroy cultivated, his relation with contemporaries, “Vilains Bonhommes,” and other poetic University of Memphis or the rapprochement to religious orders. circles associated with Symbolism as its As it is widely known, Cervantes did not get central case study (39). Whidden’s portrait in life the recognition which he deserved xhibition eviews of Baudelaire as a creature of the cafés, E R as the best writer of all time in the Spanish influenced by and influencing the style of the language. Unfortunately, he passed by alone Café Riche, is particularly notable and well Miguel de Cervantes: de la and was buried anonymously. Further, the argued (38). Later chapters explore poetic vida al mito (1616-2016) carefully delineated itinerary gives insight to parody, multiplicity in Rimbaud, and narrative Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid the Battle of Lepanto, the captivity in Argel, authority in Verne. 4 March–22 May 2016 and the different stages on which the events Whidden sees the crisis in literary authority of his existence took place, such as Valladolid as related to the intense political crises of The exhibition has been put together or Madrid. The centerpieces are allegedly 1870–1, at least initially, but to his great credit jointly by Biblioteca Nacional de España the certificate of baptism lent by the City he does not posit any simple, one-to-one (BNE) and Acción Cultural Española Council of Alcalá de Henares and a libro de parallels between political and aesthetic crises. (AC/E) within the framework of a difuntos [book of the deceased] loaned by the Rather, “the notion of what it means to be programme of activities held throughout the Convent of Barefoot Trinitarians. Of course, an author is fluid and evolving, responding year to commemorate the fourth centenary a privileged interest is addressed to the Quijote to changes in the equally fluid and evolving of Cervantes’s death. The focus on the – how could it be otherwise. cultural, historical, and national context” (2). prominent author encompasses a three-fold The wonderful and suggestive materials True, the Zutistes were, for the most part, perspective. The man, the personage, and show, to end the route, the symbolic against both political and literary authority, the myth are presented with the purpose of construction of a complex and multifaceted in keeping with the anarchic atmosphere providing the spectator with a global vision personality. We can witness to a rich variety of the Commune, and this absence of of the impact of his legacy in the western of portraits representing the author – judged “auctority,” in Whidden’s telling, leads into world, where his imperishable memory veritable from the description he made of the aesthetic experimentation of Mallarmé. remains associated to the culture of Spain. himself in the Novelas Ejemplares in 1613. SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 2016 d 39 Engravings in the English editions of the magnum opus of 1738 recall that England was a pioneer to acknowledge his mastery, time in 1555 for casting horoscopes about obsidian mirror used by Aztec priests in the publishing a biography written by Gregorio Queen Mary I. In 1564 he published his Monas new world for divination, and an inscribed Mayans y Siscar, a major representative of Hieroglyptica, an investigation of the mystical magical disc of gold employed by his scryer the first Enlightenment in Spain together world, a subject he would continue to pursue Edward Kelley in attempts to communicate with Benito Jerónimo Feijoo. Later, the for the rest of his life. In 1566 he settled at with angels. Hispano-Moroccan War (1859–1960) and the Mortlake, which today is in Richmond on On the top gallery both evidence of his Crisis of 1898 would contribute crucially to Thames, where he amassed one of the largest afterlife and a major reason for his notoriety turn Cervantes and his creation, Don Quijote, libraries of sixteenth century England: more were exhibited. Meric Casaubon in his into lasting and enduring representations of than three thousand books and one thousand London 1659 work A true and faithful relation Spain. Last but not least, we are still invited to manuscripts. He even had suggested to Queen of what passed for many years between J Dee and investigate the material presence of this giant Mary that his collection become a national some spirits accused Dee of Satanism. Thomas of the art of writing in Madrid, embodied in library. Upon leaving on a European trip Arnold’s Observations on the nature, kinds, causes, the statue erected in front of the Congress of of occult discovery in 1583, however, Dee’s and prevention of insanity (London, 1705) Deputies in 1835 and the monument raised brother-in-law reportedly sold almost all of argued that Dee, even though the greatest in Plaza de España in 1929. the books. Some 117 have survived and, with polymath of his age, was in fact insane. A While the beauty and merit of this exhibit some 43 books that might have been part of wood engraving for The Tempest, Act IV, lies probably in the pertinent selection and his collection, are now in the library of the scene i, by Duncan C. Callas (London, 1893) exquisite execution, what makes it particularly Royal College of Physicians, after passing displays Dee as Prospero, for whom he was valuable is the delicate and refined curating, through several hands. seen by some, as the model for Shakespeare’s blossoming in a flowing journey on the life In a case on the first level one sees his copy character. And finally, the album of Damon and works of Cervantes. Notwithstanding, of Quintilian (Gryphius 1539–40) opened to a Albarn’s rock opera Dr. Dee (released by a more risky and innovative approach going page showing his extensive annotations, cross Parlaphone in 2012) brings John Dee almost beyond the conventional manners of central references, and his hand-drawn manicules up to date. agencies would have surely been highly pointing to several passages. On the page of That Dee strayed from scholarship, appreciated not only by scholars but also by Cicero’s De natura deorum (in Estienne’s Opera as we acknowledge it, and science, as it the general public. of 1539-40) Dee had made an exquisite small was developing, is in part the cause of drawing of an Elizabethan galley departing the odium and suspicion directed toward Ramón Bárcena from shore which he placed directly opposite him. In his copy of Guillaume Postel’s De Universidad de Cantabria the lines Cicero quotes from Accius on a originibus (Basel, 1553) Dee made notes shepherd’s first sight of a ship: on the Cabala, Hebrew letters, and the tanta moles labitur Book of Enoch. His friend Edward Kelley c fremibunda ex alto ingenti sonitu et spiritu; claimed and demonstrated, at least to Dee’s prae se undas volvit, vertices vi suscitat, satisfaction, that he could see, converse Scholar, Courtier, Magician: ruit prolapsa, pelagus respergit reflat. (II. with, and transcribe the language of the The Lost Library of John Dee xxiv.89) angels through the guidance of the angels The Royal College of Physicians, [so huge a bulk / glides from the deep Gabriel and Nalvage. Dee recorded Kelley’s London with roar of whistling wind: / waves roll conversations with angels on their trip to 18 January–29 July 2016 before, and eddies surge and swirl; / hurtling Poland on 23 May 1584. (The manuscript of headlong it snorts and sprays the foam.] Little his conversations, Mysteriourum libri quinque, At the Royal College of Physicians, the could Dee have realized how fortuitously is in the British Library.) Dee thus tried to oldest medical college in England, founded emblematic of the course of his future life understand the universe through knowledge in 1518 by a Royal Charter from King those lines would be. of the language of God and his angels. He Henry VIII and now located across from In 1570 Dee wrote a 50-page preface, thought, in Kenneth Knoespel’s words, that the southern boundary of Regent’s Park at covering the history of geometry and more, “numbers and letters are signs representative 11 St. Andrews Place, London, there is a to Henry Billingsley’s first English translation of universal structure.” brilliant exhibition on the public and private of Euclid’s Elements, which in itself is a All of the exhibits are carefully arranged life of John Dee examined through his remarkable work with its template sheets to thematically, well lighted, and for the most books, works, and artifacts. In the College’s be cut out for assembling three dimensional part accompanied by succinct informative modern multi-tiered exhibition halls the life figures. Among his alchemical and astrological captions. For a few of the more obscure of John Dee (1527–1609) as student, scholar, books on display are his annotated copy (Dee works, an explanatory sentence might have courtier, mathematician, astrologer, magician, was an extensive annotator) of the Introductio in been helpful to some visitors. For example, and interpreter of the language of the angels divinam chemiae artem integra attributed to Petrus Dee’s note “Hic nihil de quo Troiano equo” is surveyed. Dee graduated from St. John’s Bonus (Basel, 1572), Girolamo Cardano’s on his copy of the Belli Troiani (Basel, 1573) College in 1546 and became a founding Libelli quinque (Nuremberg, 1547), the Epitome of Dictys Cretensis perhaps could have had member of Trinity College, Cambridge, in totius astrologiae of Joannes Hispalensis a fuller explanation. the same year, entered the Royal Court of (Nuremberg, 1548), and many more. A If the attractively printed 15-page handlist Edward VI in 1551, and was arrested for a case at the end of the gallery displayed an of materials on display in the exhibition alembic bottle, Dee’s crystal ball, his black together with other items belonging to Dee 40 c 2016 SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 was produced by the curator Katie Birkwood deposit in both Britain and the United business acumen, to learn about early and the library’s rare book librarian Sarah States, often simultaneously. He negotiated nineteenth-century publishing, illustration, Backhouse, they both are to be further royalties and controlled residual copies of and printing business contracts, and a little congratulated. This free exhibition opened his works. The ‘Manuscript to Print’ section about how authors edited their manuscripts. Jan. 18, 2016, and runs through July 29, 2016. includes edited or rather proofread pages The site’s resources could be used to teach or manuscript pages of many of Cooper’s editing and transcription of manuscripts. August A. Imholtz, Jr. publications, including The Red Rover, Jack Art historians might be interested in the two Beltsville, MD Tier, The Sea Lions, and The Prairie. Students of examples of illustration. SHARP members printing and publishing history can explore will find this exhibition encompasses E-Resource Reviews these primary sources to learn more about Cooper’s authorship, his reading public, negotiations and collaborations between and his publications. The site will be useful James Fenimore Cooper: Shadow & authors and publishers in the early nineteenth for teaching printing history, history of the Substance. The American Antiquarian Society. century. book, early American literature, as well as the of Tony and Alfred Johannot illustrations and intellectual property protection. from 1834. These earlier engravings were The American Antiquarian Society produced in France for European editions Miriam Kahn launched a new digital exhibition, James of Cooper’s works. F.O.C. Darley drew and Kent State University Fenimore Cooper: Shadow & Substance. The engraved the second set of illustrations online exhibition revolves around the for publications printed between 1850 and c writings, records, and illustrations of JF 1860. There are also some engravings by Cooper’s work along with records from Alfred Jones of Darley’s illustrations. These The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. the Cooper Edition project editor James engravings help readers and historians Emory University: 2013. exhibition focuses on three aspects of the The exhibition includes comparisons of the Sponsored by Emory University, the massive Cooper Edition project: reading two sets of illustrations and selections from National Endowment for the Humanities Darley’s business records. This section of the and exploring the manuscript materials (NEH), and the Hutchins Center for exhibition provides a glimpse into pre-1860 including contracts, business records, and African and African American Research correspondences; examining illustrations of illustration production techniques, including at Harvard, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Cooper’s work; and identifying and describing engraving and lithography. Database offers an intuitive interface for the edited works. Exhibition curator Ashley The third section of James Fenimore researchers seeking both quantitative and Cataldo also includes a list of helpful primary Cooper: Shadow & Substance focuses on qualitative information about the slave trade and secondary sources. the edited editions of the author’s work. in Spain, Uruguay, Portugal, Brazil, Great Historians of the early nineteenth- Using a cleverly designed page, viewers Britain, the Netherlands, the United States, century American Literature know Cooper can hover over spines of early editions and Denmark, and the Baltic. The content covers as an astute business person; he held modern edited versions of Cooper’s work. A the very beginnings of the Atlantic slave tightly to his copyright and intellectual description of the contents or theme of each trade in the sixteenth century through the property, and scrutinized returns from his title is displayed when clicking on the older nineteenth century. Providing a significant writings and investments. He left behind edition spines. A briefer description of the amount of easy to access and to interpret correspondence, business records and edition accompanies the modern editions data, the database is of considerable use contracts, and manuscript corrections of published by the State University of New to anyone teaching or researching in the galley proofs. York Press. Best of all, each title is linked to fields of history, literature, social sciences, The exhibit is the perfect supplement the American Antiquarian Society’s catalog geocriticism, and other academic discipline to courses taught in history and American records, descriptions, and call numbers. related to the Atlantic slave trade. literature, and most especially, the history of The introductory paragraph for the ‘Editing The resource is divided into three main the book and publishing. The first section Cooper’ section includes a link to reflections sections that appear on the home page of the site: the ‘Search the Voyages Database,’ the ‘Manuscript to Print’ includes examples by the editorial team members Hugh Egan, ‘Examine Estimates of the Salve Trade,’ and from James Franklin Beard’s collection James P. Elliott, Wayne Franklin, Keat the ‘Explore the African Names Database.’ Murray, Anna Scannavini, Lance Schachterle, of business records and manuscripts. The Each of these sections provides searchable Matthew W. Sivils, and Jeffrey Walker about business records provide excellent examples fields and allows queries of the entire span of Cooper’s efforts to protect his intellectual the editing process and importance of the of the Atlantic slave trade. The useful property from unscrupulous publishers and project. documentation includes instructions about unauthorized printers. He purchased the If you want to know about Cooper’s how to use the databases and information electroplates and the paper, self-published, writings and reception, this is not the website about how the databases were created. The and often controlled the number of copies for you. Check out the Cooper Society at ‘Voyages’ section, for instance, includes of each edition distributed for sale. Mindful http://external.oneonta.edu/cooper/. James details about how the site builds on data and of the lack of international copyright law, Fenimore Cooper: Shadow &Substance is aimed archival research that began in the 1960s, and Cooper arranged publication and copyright at those who want to understand Cooper’s it also provides a lengthy list of documentary SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 2016 d 41

sources organized by country of origin it blends into the main homepage’s body adopted with regard to the presentation, and lists both scholarly, academic sources graphics a bit much, and the bottom frame form, and scope of the project. in addition to archival materials from the containing sponsors and affiliations appears The user can search by printer, author, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth a bit cluttered and could possibly use a bit of or collection, and also by the standard tune centuries. The most impressive part of attention. But for the kind of information as given on the ballad itself (thus there the site is that a user can select a relatively the site provides, the site is overall extremely are two ballads in the archive to the tune small set of variables (date range, country, user-friendly compared to other similarly of “Buggering Oats prepare thy Neck”). and even variables such as captain and crew technical searchable databases, and anyone Multiple exemplars of some ballads, such names), to generate both a still map that looking for information about the Atlantic as “The Cripple of Cornwall,” often with traces the oceanic path of slave ships in slave trade would find it very inviting and easy different cuts and other variations, will allow addition to an animated map that illustrates to use with very little learning curve. for comparative studies. Album facsimiles the oceanic movement of the ships. are included where possible as well as ballad The ‘Examine Estimates of the Salve facsimiles, along with facsimile transcriptions Dan Mills Trade’ portion of the site provides and text transcriptions. The album facsimiles University of Georgia quantitative information about the number serve usefully to indicate particular copies’ of slaves transported per nation and by c provenance and demonstrate how they have year. It allows searching by nation and by historically been preserved and displayed. embarkation and/or disembarkation, with UCSB English Broadside Ballad Archive. Each individual ballad copy in the archive a choice date ranges, individual years, and University of California at Santa Barbara. has been given a unique EBBA ID. regions. After selecting search criteria, The old-fashioned-looking black and the site will generate and allow the user white pictures from digitized microfilm that to download a table in MS Excel format. There are few forms better suited than represent the Pepys ballads are perhaps a This section also includes brief essays that the ballad to the multifarious possibilities bit disappointing in comparison with the provide an overview of the Atlantic slave of the digital archive. The ballad brings wonderfully crisp more recent images of trade and cover the slavery process from the together high and low cultures; its subject some of those from the Houghton Library, initial capture and enslavement, to racial and matter encompasses the sensational and the which can show the minutest details of ethnic fallout, and finally to the abolition sentimental, the national and the historical, uneven inking, wormholes from original movement. The ‘Explore African Names’ the folkloric and the supernatural; it weds woodblocks, faint water stains, and wrinkles link leads to the African Origins website visual images to text and text to oral and tears at the edges of the paper. In many , also performance; it is both an authentic folkway of the newer digital images, individual fibres sponsored by Emory, the NEH, and the and a Grub Street phenomenon. The in the paper can even be discerned. On the W. E. B. Dubois Institute at Harvard, and broadside ballad is hard to anthologize in other hand, the Pepys citation records are provides three fields to begin a search: a print, because it is extraordinarily difficult often more detailed in terms of metadata name field, a list of countries to select, to choose representative examples and not such as the size of the album page. Not all the and gender. very useful to edit them: the ballad’s value citation records give the size of the surviving The top frame of the home page for scholars lies precisely in its multifarious artifact or at least of the text block, so that provides links to lesson plans and other forms, repetitions, hasty composition, and it’s sometimes hard to tell the actual scale of educational resources, and images of doggerel verse. the original artefact from these images alone. nineteenth-century archival materials, such We therefore have little or no need Keyword tags can sometimes be a little as maps, ship registers, and paintings. This to establish definitive single ‘editions’ perplexing, as when a theme like ‘folklore’ is section has scanned versions of original of each ballads, but on the other hand used rather broadly, stretching from Robin handwritten registers listing African slaves a comprehensive open-access archive Hood to the judging of “The Wanton Wife by year and vessel, and a variety of scans of like the University of California at Santa of Bath” at the gates of heaven. However, maps spanning the trans-Atlantic slave trade Barbara (UCSB)’s English Broadside Ballad these keywords do offer wonderful latitude in several languages. The site also includes Archive (EBBA) is exactly what is called for browsing, as in the clever topics from a section with introductory maps and a for. The long list of partner institutions, contemporary popular culture suggested and timeline/chronology, and the entire site is and the even longer lists of collaborators, linked on the front page (“‘Deadliest Catch’: available in both English and Portuguese. Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) editors, Amazing Creatures of the Deep”). Similarly, This resource is aesthetically pleasing as cataloguers, transcribers, specialist scholars, being able to search the Pepys collection (and, well, carefully designed to facilitate use technicians, singers, and instrumentalists, if you wish, other collections) by Pepys’s own and to welcome a user to spend time with suggest that this archive is well on its way categories offers another interesting potential its various resources. The site’s navigation to becoming the definitive source for the strategy, one that responds usefully to the is also very effective, as the pages are not history of the ballad, and an enormous historical organization of the material archive cluttered and the designers have made boon for researchers and teachers working itself. Woodcuts can likewise be searched moving from section to section very in the history of Early Modern popular print for by keyword. One hopes that eventually easy without getting lost. The main title culture. The archive’s copious supplementary the re-use of woodcuts in different ballads graphic in the top left of the page might matter is wonderfully clear and informative will also be able to be traced. This might be have been made a bit more prominent, as about the decisions involved and practices done by traditional legwork, although image 42 c 2016 SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 recognition software may soon be able to do online exhibition is an introduction rather Yale Indian Papers Project. Yale University: this work as well. than a comprehensive guide and as such it 2016. Finally, the inclusion of song recordings functions beautifully. She has grouped the is a logical extension of the subject matter, characters selected for the exhibition into The Yale Indian Papers Project, based at Yale’s and as one not trained in musicology, I often the ‘Tropes’ of the Brokenhearted Wife, the Divinity School in New Haven, CT, is a an learned a lot about how I had misjudged the Independent Woman, the Indians’ Captive, online collection of letters, legal documents, relationship between ballad text and tune. the Ruined Woman, and the Sundered Lover. photos, and maps that preserve tribal history The ambition to “provide sound recordings She provides examples from the featured from in the New England area. These digitized of every ballad for which there is a known novels, including plot summaries, excerpts, primary sources came from local museums tune” is impressive. James Revell Carr’s notes and explanations. She includes some of the and libraries, as well as tribal holdings. The on the practices adopted for the recording characters in more than one trope as dime site offers a concise understanding of the of songs for the archive illuminate the novel characters may encounter several holdings and detailed explanations of how complexities involved in the reconstruction perilous plot twists before the close of the to review the material in The Project History of historical performance. novel. and Editorial Methodology pages so that So far the collection’s greatest ambition The website is well designed, with a users get the full value of this collection. is to include every extant ballad from the navigation bar across the top that will take Headed by Paul Grant-Costa, Director and seventeenth century (the figure currently the reader to the 11 novels Bychowski has Executive Editor, and Tobias Glaza, Assistant stands around 65%). Through a series of sampled, the women, and the tropes. Also Executive Editor, this collection reflects the grants from the National Endowment for the included is a helpful ‘About’ section, which dedication needed to bring New England Humanities and other institutions, the EBBA contains titles of scholarly works for further tribal documents together in one easily has gradually built its corpus through the information about dime fiction and the accessed site. useful strategy of archiving and cataloguing American Antiquarian Society’s collection of Much like history, the site is a work whole collections in succession: first the them. The fonts are clean and easily readable, in progress; however, there are complete Pepys Collection, then the Roxburghe, the and the title font is evocative of the frontier entries to review. Grant-Costa suggests Euing, and so on. This incremental strategy theme of many of the novels. The graphics a search on “Occom Death Mohegan” holds out the possibility of further expansion show illustrations from the covers and inside (under ‘Collections’) which has full data along the same lines, and so Victorianists the novels; they are high quality scans. Each and annotations on documents such as an can perhaps hope that the EBBA might novel’s page includes a cover scan, tags, a account of the death of a Christian Mohegan someday turn its attention to collections brief description, and is cross-referenced Indian and notes on mourning customs of like the nineteenth-century ballads printed with hyperlinks to the tropes and female the Narragansett. An open search of “Long by “Jemmy” Catnach and others, now at the characters referenced in the description, as Island” on the home page turns up 31 St. Bride Library. As it stands, however, the well as the applicable subject headings. Her documents complete with bios and locations. EBBA is already exemplary, and we can only cataloging training has stood her in good There is even a ‘Sort by relevance’ option wish it long life and continued expansion. stead, as the exhibition is easily browsable that offers the parameters of dates, title, and and the hyperlinks seamlessly take the reader creator. Searches from the main ‘How to Yuri Cowan to the various parts of the site. Search the Collection’ page can be narrowed Norwegian University of Science and Technology Even a casual reading informs one of by dates, people, topics, places, and tribes. the strict roles women were assigned in The goal of the site is to make the material c nineteenth-century American fiction. The as accessible as possible, says Grant-Costa. Women and the World of Dime Novels. exhibition begs for more research and Also included on the ‘Collection’ page is a The American Antiquarian Society. examination of the novels selected and the link to The New England Indian Papers Series is what it is intended to do. The only thing and historical societies. The ‘Editorial that a researcher could wish for is digitization Methodology’ background proves quite Women and the World of Dime Novels is of some of the novels. It is possible to search useful when reviewing the translations of an online exhibition curated by Brenna the dime novel collection and links to it are the documents. Bychowski, a cataloger at the American provided, but if the online exhibition whets A more geographic search is under Antiquarian Society. The exhibition serves a viewer’s appetite, she will have to make the ‘Toolkit.’ This page contains (m)Apps, an as an introduction to some of the female trip to Worcester. interactive map that shows the location of characters from the Society’s collection various documents in the East Coast to of approximately 1,000 dime novels. The Robin Henry mid-West. collection includes imprints from Beadle Clovis Community College Small red buttons identify documents, and in some cases, there are a few documents and Adams, George Munro, Elliot, Thomes c & Talbot, Hilton & Co., Richmond and from that area. (Please note: (m)Apps opens Company, and R. M. DeWitt. Many of the to Michigan, with a document in Wisconsin titles in the collection are scarce or unique. as the farthest West placement at this time, Ms. Bychowski explicitly writes that the but the map can be dragged easily to the East to reveal many red dots.) In each box SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 2016 d 43 is a list of identifiers (year, month, day, tribe, Mikita Brottman. The Maximum Security Book Publisher, ISBN 9781930732650 (vol 1). town) as well as the local record listed. At Club: Reading Literature in a Men’s Prison. New Deborah O’Keefe. Good Girl Messages. this time, there are 250 documents available York: Harper, 2016. ISBN 9780062384331. [S.l.]: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. ISBN in (m)Apps, with more added throughout Faith Cook. And So I Began to Read: Books 9781474286831. the year. The map brings visual relevance to That Have Influenced Me. Welwyn Garden City: the location of these documents and people, EP Books, 2016. ISBN 9781783971459. Africa providing the viewer with a closer connection Thierry-Marie Courau and Fabien to the documents’ contents. Vandermarcq. Libraries at the Heart of Abdelfetta Benchenna. Industries culturelles et The site credits the partners who gave Dialogue of Cultures and Religions: History, entrepreneuriat au Maghreb. Paris: L’Harmattan, permissions for the manuscripts to be Present, Future. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: 2016. ISBN 9782343085913. published and helped with the identification Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. ISBN Ruth Bush. Publishing Africa in French: process under the ‘Collaboration’ link. These 9781443890595. Literary Institutions and Decolonization 1945- partners include the Tribal/First Nation G. Estraikh, Kerstin Hoge, and Mikhail 1967. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Partners The Mohegan Elders Council, Krutikov, eds. Children and Yiddish Literature: Press, 2016. ISBN 9781781381953. Eastern Pequot Tribal Council, Hassanamisco From Early Modernity to Post-Modernity. Coming of Age: Strides in African Publishing Band of the Nipmuc, Schaghticoke Women’s Cambridge, UK: Modern Humanities Research Essays in Honour of Dr Henry Chakava at 70. Group, and scholars from Shinnecock, Association, 2016. ISBN 9781909662339. [S.l.]: East African Educational Publishers, Mashpee and Aquinnah Wampanoag tribes, Cassandra Falke. The Phenomenology of 2016. ISBN 9966561846. as well as Yale and Harvard department Love and Reading. New York: Bloomsbury support, among others. Grant-Costa credits Academic, 2016. ISBN 9781628926484. Argentina the involvement of the tribes with getting this Frank Felsenstein, et al. Print Culture project started, noting that that the use of Histories Beyond the Metropolis. Toronto; Buffalo; Craig Epplin. Late Book Culture in Argentina. “Indian” in the site’s title is native generated. London: University of Toronto Press, 2016. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. “We’ve been working with many of these ISBN 9781442650626. ISBN 9781501318276. tribal communities for 30 years,” he says, “and Thomas C. Foster. Jiao Ni Du Dong Wen many of the elders prefer ‘Indian,’ that was Xue De 27 Tang Ke. Xinbei Shi: Mu ma wen Australia their request for the title of the site.” hua shi ye gu fen you xian gong si, 2016. ISBN The Yale Indian Papers Project is a worthy 9789863592167. Jennifer Byrne, ed. Reading Pleasures. tribute to the ongoing process of preserving Valerie Estelle Frankel. Adoring Outlander: Canberra: A C T National Library of primary documents. The site will supply Essays on Fandom, Genre and the Female Audience. Australia, 2016. ISBN 9780642278968. historians and those with Native American Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016. ISBN Joan Fenney. Rays of Light: Ginninderra connections and interests the chance to 9781476664231. Press: The First 20 Years. Port Adelaide: [South immerse themselves in a valued and little Kazuhiro Fujihara and Chong-a Ko. Australia]: Ginninderra Press, 2016. ISBN discovered history. Ch’aek Ul Ingnun Saram Man I Son E Nonnun 9781760411435. Kot: Insaeng Ul Sara Kanun Te P’iryohan Tokso Elizabeth S. Leik Ui Him. Soul-si: Pijunisu Puksu, 2016. ISBN Belarus Loyola University, Maryland 9791186805220. Peter Gemeinhardt. Zwischen Exegese und Biblioteka Radzivillov Nesvizhskoi Ordinatsii: Religiöser Praxis: Heilige Texte von der Spätantike Katalog Izdanii Iz Fondov Tsentral’noi Nauchnoi Bibliography bis zum Klassischen Islam. Tübingen: Mohr Biblioteki Imeni Iakuba Kolasa Natsional’noi Siebeck, 2016. ISBN 9783161532290. Akademii Nauk Belarusi Xix Vek 1801-1830 General Annette Gilbert and Hannes Bajohr. V 2 Knigakh = Library of the Radziwills’ of Publishing as Artistic Practice. Berlin: Sternberg Nesvizh Ordynation Catalogue of Publications Jodie Archer and Matthew Lee Jockers. Press, 2016. ISBN 9783956791772. from the Stock of the Yakub Kolas Central Science The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Anthony Grafton. Canonical Texts and Library of the National Academy of Sciences of Novel. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2016. Scholarly Practices: A Global Comparative Belarus Xix Century 1801-1830 in 2 Books. ISBN 9781250088277. Approach. New York: Cambridge University Minsk: Belaruskaia navuka, 2016. ISBN Susan Bauer. The Well-Educated Mind: Press, 2016. ISBN 9781107105980. 9789850819581. A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Susan Hawthorne. Bibliodiversité: manifeste Had. New York: Norton, 2016. ISBN pour une édition indépendante. Paris: France China 9780393080964. Éditions Charles Léopold Mayer, 2016. ISBN Heidi Brayman. Book in History, the Book 9782843771972. Junbao Chen. Pin Shu Xiang: Xinjiapo as History. [S.l.]: Yale University Press, 2016. Jonathan A. Hill, comp. Science Lost and Hua Wen Du Shu Hui Fa Zhan Te Ji = Chinese ISBN 9780300223163. Regained: A Rediscovery through Old Books: From Reading Clubs in Singapore. Xinjiapo: Tui guang Bartholomew Brinkman. Poetic Modernism the Collection of Albert Libchaber. New York: Hua wen xue xi wei yuan hui, yue du yu xie in the Culture of Mass Print. Baltimore: Johns [privately printed], 2016. zuo zu, 2016. ISBN 9789810991715. 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Fuzhou Shi: Fujian jiao yu chu ban she, 2016. Italy Oru Nulakaviyalalarin Parvai. Kolumpu: ISBN 9787533470098. Kumaran Puttaka Illam, 2016. ISBN Michael Gibbs Hill. Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation Matteo Billeri. Blasting Publications: The Books 9789556595116. and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture. New of Italian Futurism at the UW-Madison Libraries. York: Oxford University Press, 2016. ISBN Madison, WI: Parallel Press, University of United Kingdom 9780190278281. Wisconsin--Madison Libraries, 2016. ISBN 9781934795712. G. E. Bentley, Jr. Thomas Macklin (1752- Egypt Kathleen M. Comerford. Jesuit Foundations 1800), Picture-Publisher and Patron: Creator and Medici Power, 1532-1621. Leiden; Boston: of the Macklin Bible (1791-1800). Lewiston, Michael Allan. In the Shadow of World Brill, 2016. ISBN 9789004284517. NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2016. ISBN Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt. Barbara Jatta. The Promise of the Vatican 9781495504532. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, Library: May 8-May 22, 2016, Milly and Fritz Matthew Bradley and Juliet John. Reading 2016. ISBN 9780691167824. Kaeser Mestrovic Studio Gallery. South Bend, IN: and the Victorians. London; New York: Ikhlas Ata Allah. Maktabat al-Iskandariyah Snite Museum of Art, 2016. Ashgate, 2016. ISBN 9781409440802. Dhakirat al-Insaniyah. al-Qahirah: al- Laura Lepetit. Autobiografia di una Femminista Claire Cock-Starkey and Violet Moller. Majlis al-A`lá lil-Thaqafah, 2016. ISBN Distratta. Roma: Nottetempo, 2016. ISBN Bodleianalia: Curious Facts About Britain’s Oldest 9789779205595. 9788874525874. University Library. [S.l.]: Bodleian Library, Hoda A. Yousef. Composing Egypt: Reading, 2016. ISBN 9781851242528. Writing, and the Emergence of a Modern Nation, Korea Julia Bolton Holloway. Julian among the 1870-1930. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Books: Julian of Norwich’s Theological Library. Press, 2016. ISBN 9780804797115. Hangyol Kattoe. Nallo Saeropke: Ch’angbi [S.l.]: Cambridge Scholars Pub., 2016. ISBN 50-Yonsa. Kyonggi-do P’aju-si: Ch’angbi, 9781443888943. Europe 2016. ISBN 9788936472825. Hugh Jones and Christopher Benson. Publishing Law. London: Routledge, 2016. Marcia Abreu and Ana Claúdia Suriani Lebanon ISBN 9781138803787. da Silva, eds. The Cultural Revolution of the Nineteenth Century: Theatre, the Book-Trade, and Hala Auji. Printing Arab Modernity: Book United States Reading in the Transatlantic World. London; New Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth- York: I B Tauris, 2016. ISBN 9781784531775. Century Beirut. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2016. Kenneth A. Breisch. The Los Angeles ISBN 9789004309999. Central Library: Building an Architectural Icon, Germany 1872-1933. Los Angeles: Getty Research Middle East Institute, 2016. ISBN 9781606064900. Wolfgang Barthel. Kleist-Ddr: Der Kleinere Shawn Anthony Christian. The Harlem Deutsche Beitrag zur Kleist-Rezeption: Ein Ami Ayalon. The Arabic Print Revolution: Renaissance and the Idea of a New Negro Reader. Verzeichnis, 1949 bis 1990: Mit Ergänzungen. Cultural Production and Mass Readership, 1800- Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, Heilbronn: Kleist-Archiv Sembdner, 2016. 1914. New York: Cambridge University 2016. ISBN 9781625342003. ISBN 9783940494689. Press, 2016. ISBN 9781107149441. Jeremy B. Dibbell. “The Best Bibliograph Cornelia Briel. Die Bücherlager der I Have Met With”: George Ticknor Visits Reichstauschstelle. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Scotland Monticello, 1815. Cambridge, Mass.: Ticknor Klostermann, 2016. ISBN 9783465042495. Society, 2016. Gesammeltes Gedächtnis Konrad Peutinger und Peter V. Davies, et al., eds. The University Pat Doyle. The Public Library and Jacksonville: die Kulturelle Uberlieferung im 16. Jahrhundert: of Glasgow Library: Friendly Shelves. Glasgow: Duval County, Florida 1864-2015. Jacksonville, Begleitpublikation zur Ausstellung der Staats- und The Friends of Glasgow University Library in FL: [publisher not identified], 2016. Stadtbibliothek Augsburg Anlässlich des 550. association with the University Library, 2016. Istvan Hargittai and Magdolna Hargittai. Geburtstags Konrad Peutingers. Luzern: Quaternio ISBN 9780993518508. New York Scientific. A Culture of Inquiry, Verlag, 2016. ISBN 9783905924480. Knowledge, and Learning. Oxford: Oxford Michael Knoche. Auf dem Weg zur Spain University Press, 2016. ISBN 9780198769873. Forschungsbibliothek: Studien aus der Herzogin Jaime Harker and Cecilia Konchar Farr, Anna Amalia Bibliothek. Frankfurt am Antonio Castillo. Leer y Oír Leer: Ensayos eds. This Book Is an Action Feminist Print Culture Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2016. ISBN Sobre la Lectura en los Siglos de Oro. Madrid: and Activist Aesthetics. Urbana; Chicago: 9783465042785. Iberoamericana, 2016. ISBN 9788484899570. University of Illinois Press, 2016. ISBN Angelika Königseder. Walter De Gruyter: Luis García Montero. Un Lector Llamado 9780252039805. Ein Wissenschaftsverlag im Nationalsozialismus. Federico García Lorca. Barcelona: Taurus, 2016. Donal Harris. On Company Time: American Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016. ISBN ISBN 9788430617814. Modernism in the Big Magazines. New York: 9783161543937. Columbia University Press, 2016. ISBN Sri Lanka 9780231177726. William E. Jones. True Homosexual En Celvaraja. Ilattin Tamil Veliyittup Peruveli: Experiences: Boyd Mcdonald and Straight to Hell. SHARP News Vol. 25, no. 2 2016 d 45

Los Angeles, CA: We Heard You Like Books, 2016. ISBN 9780996421812. Suzanne Juhasz, ed. Emily Dickinson: A Celebration for Readers. London; New York: Routledge, 2016. ISBN 9781138672086. Steve Weinberg. A Place of Visions: One Hundred Years of the University of Missouri Libraries, 1915-2015. Columbia, Mo.: MU Libraries, 2016. ISBN 9780692659960. c