Paul Youngquist (ed.), Race, Romanticism, and the Atlantic

By Anthony Mandal ‘British Romanticism’, writes Paul Youngquist in Race, Romanticism, and the Atlantic, ‘is white’ (p. 91). Youngquist’s volume interrogates this ideology of whiteness, critiquing its systematic erasure of the violence in and across the Black Atlantic in the early nineteenth century. The collection brings together nine essays, organised into sections on ‘Differences’, ‘Resistances’ and ‘Crossings’. As […] …read more

Source: http://www.romtext.org.uk/reviews/paul-youngquist-ed-race-romanticism-and-the-atlantic/

Paul Youngquist (ed.), Race, Romanticism, and the Atlantic

By Anthony Mandal ‘British Romanticism’, writes Paul Youngquist in Race, Romanticism, and the Atlantic, ‘is white’ (p. 91). Youngquist’s volume interrogates this ideology of whiteness, critiquing its systematic erasure of the violence in and across the Black Atlantic in the early nineteenth century. The collection brings together nine essays, organised into sections on ‘Differences’, ‘Resistances’ and ‘Crossings’. As […] …read more

Source: http://www.romtext.org.uk/reviews/rt21_r10/

James Hogg, Highland Journeys, edited by H. B. de Groot

By Anthony Mandal In 1802, James Hogg embarked on the first of three excursions into the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. The young Border shepherd hoped to advance himself by leasing a farm and thereby joining the increasing number of farmers from the South profiting from the introduction of hardy Lowland sheep to the region. The journeys described […] …read more

Source: http://www.romtext.org.uk/reviews/james-hogg-highland-journeys-edited-by-h-b-de-groot/

George C. Grinnell, The Age of Hypochondria: Interpreting Romantic Health and Illness

By Anthony Mandal Hypochondria is a highly suggestive topic for Romantic criticism, as well as for the period itself. The study of how minds and bodies might get entangled in all things psychosomatic (a coinage of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s, of course) should offer challenges and rewards in Romanticists’ continued struggle to balance the significance of ideal or intellectual […] …read more

Source: http://www.romtext.org.uk/reviews/george-c-grinnell-the-age-of-hypochondria-interpreting-romantic-health-and-illness/

Evan Gottlieb and Juliet Shields (eds), Representing Place in British Literature and Culture, 1660–1830: From Local to Global

By Anthony Mandal How might it be possible, ask Evan Gottlieb and Juliet Shields in the introduction to Representing Place in British Literature and Culture, to ‘tell the whole story’ of the intersections of local, regional, national and transnational communities in Britain? This collection of essays was published in March 2013. On the twenty-first of the same month, […] …read more

Source: http://www.romtext.org.uk/reviews/evan-gottlieb-and-juliet-shields-eds-representing-place-in-british-literature-and-culture-1660-1830-from-local-to-global/

John Gardner, Poetry and Popular Protest: Peterloo, Cato Street and the Queen Caroline Controversy

By Anthony Mandal In the second chapter of his fascinating and ambitious study, John Gardner reproduces a piece of advice given by Thomas Carlyle to veteran radical and survivor of Peterloo, Samuel Bamford: ‘I own I had much rather see a sensible man, like you, put down your real thoughts and convictions in Prose, than occupy yourself with […] …read more

Source: http://www.romtext.org.uk/reviews/john-gardner-poetry-and-popular-protest-peterloo-cato-street-and-the-queen-caroline-controversy/

CfP: Northeast MLA Conference panel – Romantic and Victorian Echoes: A Transatlantic Exchange

By admin

Professor Dewey W. Hall is looking for contributors to a panel entitled ‘Romantic and Victorian Echoes: A Transatlantic Exchange’, which will take place at the Northeast MLA Conference in Toronto to be held between April 30th and May 3rd 2015. He writes:

“This panel applies a transnational approach, which is interested in links between British Romantic and Victorian authors with American writers such as (but not limited to) William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Walt Whitman, Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Wordsworth and Henry David Thoreau, etc. Papers will focus on how British writers influenced the form, content, and sensibility of American writers.

“Submit abstracts to: https://nemla.org/convention/2015/cfp.html#cfp15355 (create a user account). The deadline for proposals is September 30th.”

…read more

Source: http://www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=379

By the Book: Catching Up with the XML Tag Set

By Eric Loy

Screenshot of XML encoding

This is not a call for reform. This is not an admission of guilt.

Moving deeper into Blake’s typographic works for the Archive has presented a number of new encoding questions, particularly with how to handle potentially “secondary” text on the page, like printer’s marks, catchwords, page numbers, titles, etc.

The first kinds of questions we asked dealt with transcription display:

  • How would we handle different fonts/sizes/spacing?
  • Do we want to display “secondary text” with a specific color code?
  • How many different kinds of “secondary text” should we classify?

These are good questions to ask because a rich transcription can help users make sense of a manuscript. In the case of typographic works, it’s usually not a strain to read the text, but a rich transcription can help distinguish different kinds of texts at work on the typographic page.

We were, perhaps, getting ahead of ourselves.

Questions of transcription display are always implicitly questions about encoding. What we’re really talking about with “color code” or text classification is, behind the transcription display, XML attributions that make editorial observations (or claims) about what a particular part of the manuscript is doing. OK, so what should we do about it?

Well, in the instance …read more

Source: http://blakearchive.wordpress.com/2014/08/06/by-the-book-xml-tag-set/

Stephen Copley Postgraduate Research Awards 2014

By admin

Congratulations to the recipients of this year’s Stephen Copley Postgraduate Research Awards:

  • Emma Curran (Surrey)
  • Judyta Frodyma (Oxford)
  • Sarah Louise Lovell (Durham)
  • Ilaria Mallozzi (Royal Holloway)
  • Alexis Wolf (Birkbeck)
  • Sarah Wride (York)

BARS awards these bursaries each year to allow postgraduate scholars to access library collections and archival resources at a distance from their home institution. More information can be found on the main website.

…read more

Source: http://www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=373

Lost Letters

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By hardeepssidhu

Letter2April1804_DetailOfObject2

A few months back, I wrote a post about compiling a master list of all of Blake’s letters. The goal is to have an up-to-date bibliography of every letter that Blake ever wrote or received, along with letters by Blake’s contemporaries that have to do with him in some way.

As I’ve been putting this list together, I’ve come across a number of letters that pose a substantial obstacle to publishing them. Not only have these letters never been published before, they have never even been traced. We know about these lost letters only because of other writings (other letters, journals, logs, etc.) refer to them. For example, Blake’s letter of 2 April 1804 says that he had sent a letter to his solicitor, R. Dally, “a fortnight ago.” But the letter he refers to has never been located.

From Blake’s letter of 2 April 1804, which refers to another letter that is now lost

At present, the Blake Archive communicates information about untraced works (or at least their existence) through “Related Works” pages. For an illuminated book like Songs of Innocence and of Experience, related works include alternate copies of the same work. The related works page for …read more

Source: http://blakearchive.wordpress.com/2014/07/30/lost-letters/