[Review of] Paul Lauter, et aI, eds. The Heath Anthology of American Literature

For years editors of standard American literature anthologies have presented undergraduates with a narrow view of the American literary experience. Their anthologies have reflected the predominant view of the academy, which has maintained a traditional literary canon denying the importance of works by women and ethnic authors. This denial has sparked controversy and gained national media attention, resulting in gradual changes in curricula at many universities, including Stanford. As the climate of the undergraduate classroom changes and reflects a wider vision, so must the anthologies used in the classroom. The recently published Heath Anthology of American Literature is just such a work. It challenges convention and invites reevaluation of the standard American literary canon

Anthology and Absence: The Post-9/11 Anthologizing Impulse

The decade after the attacks of 9/11 and the fall of the World Trade Center saw a proliferation of New York-themed literary anthologies from a wide range of publishers. With titles like Poetry After 9/11, Manhattan Sonnet, Poems of New York, Writing New York, and I Speak of the City, these texts variously reflect upon their own post-9/11 plurivocality as preservative, regenerative, and reconstructive. However, the work of such anthologies is more complex than filling with plurivocality the physical and emotional hole of Ground Zero. These regional collections operate on the dilemma of all anthologies: that between collecting and editing. Every anthology, and every anthologist, negotiates the relationship between what is present and what is missing. In light of some of the emerging and established scholarship on the history of the English-language anthology, this article reads closely the declarative paratexts and the silent but equally powerful canonical choices of several different post-9/11 poetry anthologies. In so doing, the article comes to suggest the ways the anthology’s necessary formal incorporation of absence and presence, rather than its plurivocality alone, connects collections of New York’s literature to the fraught discourse of memorialization and rebuilding at the site of the World Trade Center

The Language Perfectionist: Quotation Quota

Every few years, my friend Mardy Grothe assembles a new collection of quotations. The defining characteristic of these anthologies is that all the entries share an interesting or quirky theme

Origins and Orthodoxy: Anthologies of American Literature and American History

This dissertation examines how the new “multicultural phase” anthologies of American literature treat American history. Anthologies of American literature are more historical, more diverse, and more multidisciplinary than ever before, but they have over-extended themselves in both their historical and representational reach. They are not, despite their diversity and historicism, effective vehicles for promoting critical discussions of American history in the classroom. Chapter One outlines a brief history of anthologies of American literature, while also introducing the terminology and methodology used in this study. Chapter Two explores the role of the headnote as a vehicle for American history in anthologies by focusing on headnotes to Abraham Lincoln in multiple anthologies. Chapter Three examines how anthologies frame Native American origin stories for their readers. Chapter Four focuses on the issues raised by anthologizing texts originally composed in Spanish, and Chapter Five argues for a transnational broadening of the “slavery theme” in anthologies to include Barbary captivity narratives and texts that reference Indian slavery

"Who Gets Translated and Why? Anthologies of Twentieth-Century Greek Poetry in Poland"

The translation of Modern Greek poetry in Poland began on a regular basis at the end of the 1960s and falls into two broad categories: anthologies and the poetry of Cavafy. Cavafy’s work in Polish rendition must be seen as a separate domain: as in other countries, he has overshadowed the achievements of other Modern Greek poets. There is, however, a significant body of work by other poets available to the reader of Polish in anthologies compiled by prolific and influential translators, whose different backgrounds and motivations generate the question of who has been translated and why. This article demonstrates that the selection of poems and modes of translation are largely driven by extraliterary factors such as sociopolitical conditions, the readership, the publishing market, etc. The resultant Polish texts therefore provide a characteristic example of “rewriting” as defined by André Lefevere

Speculative practices : utilizing InfoVis to explore untapped literary collections

Funding: Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research CouncilIn this paper we exemplify how information visualization supports speculative thinking, hypotheses testing, and preliminary interpretation processes as part of literary research. While InfoVis has become a buzz topic in the digital humanities, skepticism remains about how effectively it integrates into and expands on traditional humanities research approaches. From an InfoVis perspective, we lack case studies that show the specific design challenges that make literary studies and humanities research at large a unique application area for information visualization. We examine these questions through our case study of the Speculative W@nderverse, a visualization tool that was designed to enable the analysis and exploration of an untapped literary collection consisting of thousands of science fiction short stories. We present the results of two empirical studies that involved general-interest readers and literary scholars who used the evolving visualization prototype as part of their research for over a year. Our findings suggest a design space for visualizing literary collections that is defined by (1) their academic and public relevance, (2) the tension between qualitative vs. quantitative methods of interpretation, (3) result- vs. process-driven approaches to InfoVis, and (4) the unique material and visual qualities of cultural collections. Through the Speculative W@nderverse we demonstrate how visualization can bridge these sometimes contradictory perspectives by cultivating curiosity and providing entry points into literary collections while, at the same time, supporting multiple aspects of humanities research processes.PostprintPeer reviewe

Anthologizing Sir Samuel Ferguson: Literature, History, Politics

Published Online: 2013-10-25; This content is open access.Although Sir Samuel Ferguson is generally recognized as one of the key figures of mid-nineteenth-century Irish literature, there has been no major edition of his poems since 1916, as a result of which his work tends to be known to the general reader through selections published in anthologies. The essay analyzes the selections of Ferguson’s work in anthologies of Irish literature published between 1895 and 2010 in an attempt to assess the impact of the cultural dynamics of twentieth-century Ireland on the interpretation of Ferguson’s achievement as a poet. The evidence collected demonstrates that the image of Ferguson perpetuated by most twentiethcentury anthologists, most of them Hibernocentric in approach, was that of a respectable if rather old-fashioned Romantic nationalist antiquarian, whose work focused primarily on familiarizing the Victorian reader with the ancient myths and traditions of Ireland. This interpretation of Ferguson’s achievement, motivated, it is argued, by the predominantly nationalist agenda of modern Ireland’s cultural establishment, has largely marginalized the other side of Ferguson—a political thinker committed to the unionist cause and vehemently opposed to the violence perpetrated by the emergent Irish republican movement and culminating in the Phoenix Park murders of 1882, which formed the subject of two of Ferguson’s most powerful late poems, “At the Polo-Ground” and “In Carey’s Footsteps.

Anthology of Opera Arias by African American Composers for Low Voice Singers of African Descent

Some helpful tools for opera singers today are aria anthologies. These anthologies provide music, synopsis, and translations of arias by various composers whose music represents the standard repertoire for each voice. These arias are used as a guide for both auditioning artists and potential opera professionals with hiring companies. Examples of such anthologies include G. Schirmer's group of Aria Anthologies, and G. Schirmer's group of American Aria Anthologies. One area of operatic repertoire that has not been included in such anthologies is those composed by African American composers. What I propose to do is research repertoire by some of the most prominent African American composers and group selected arias from their works into an anthology specifically for low voice, African American singers. The composers included in this anthology will be Terence Blanchard, Anthony Davis, Duke Ellington, Scott Joplin, Nkeiru Okoye, and William Grant Still