Reconfiguring the national canon: The Edinburgh edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield

This paper looks at how the new two volume edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, edited by Gerri Kimber and Vincent O'Sullivan, helps us to reassess the creativity of Katherine Mansfield. Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson’s essay on the four-volume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield makes clear how in recent years Mansfield has been ‘brought home’ to New Zealand by way of establishing her reputation as a writer of world significance. Those mid twentieth-century years of cultural nationalism, when Frank Sargeson could write that ‘Mansfield imposed this feminine thing on New Zealand’, and Allen Curnow in the Introduction to his milestone Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse could suggest that Mansfield has ‘something like shame for her country’, have long gone. Mansfield has been (re)instated as the country’s foremost writer; her proto-feminism is seen as one of her many qualities, and her in-between location as both a New Zealand writer and an Anglo-European modernist as a defining strength. Mansfield was a diasporic writer; so too for a number of years was Janet Frame. Both Mansfield and Frame are the most innovative and experimental writers New Zealand has produced. And both, of course, were women. The relation between these elements common to both writers, and their significance for New Zealand literary history, is something that still remains to be fully explored

Ariel - Volume 3 Number 7

Editors Richard J. Bonanno Robin A. Edwards Associate Editors Steven Ager Tom Williams Lay-out Editor Eugenia Miller Contributing Editors Paul Bialas Robert Breckenridge David Jacoby Mike LeWitt Terry Burt Michael Leo Editors Emeritus Delvyn C. Case, Jr. Paul M. Fernhof

Fiction selection: an AI at work?

Considers the historical dimension of the treatment of fiction in libraries and concludes that, if fiction is regarded as a resource, library users are entitled to enhanced access to it. Notes that enhancing access to fiction is widely regarded in the profession as unacceptably labour-intensive, but suggests that readers are favourably impressed by an expert system which requires relatively little input effort on the part of the library staff. Describes the idea of a user profile and its restricted implementation in a prototype system. Describes plans for further development of the prototype system

The Implementation of Story Mapping Strategy in Increasing Students' Reading Comprehension

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk meneliti bagaimana meningkatkan kemampuan pemahaman siswa SMPN 2 Trimurjo dalam pembelajaran membaca menggunakan strategi Story Mapping. Penelitian ini adalah penelitian tindak kelas. Data diperoleh dari pre-test, post-test, lembar pengamatan, dan kuisioner. Sampel dari penelitian ini adalah 25 siswa SMPN 2 Trimurjo dari kelas VIII B. Data dianalisa menggunakan uraian deskripsi. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa siswa yang mencapai target nilai minimum adalah sebanyak 88% siswa di cycle II. Hasil pengamatan menunjukkan bahwa 84% siswa terlibat aktif dalam pembelajaran membaca setelah menggunakan strategi Story Mapping. Ini dapat disarankan bahwa penggunaan strategi Story Mapping dalam membaca dapat membantu meningkatkan kemampuan pemahaman siswa.This research was aimed to explore the implementation of Story Mapping strategy to foster the students' reading comprehension achievement at the second grade of SMPN 2 Trimurjo. This research was classroom action research. The data were obtained from the pre-test, post-test, observation, and questionnaires. The samples of this study were 25 students of SMPN 2 Trimurjo from the class VIII B. The data were analyzed using the descriptive analysis. The result of this research showed that the students who achieved the target of minimum score were 88% at the cycle II. The results of the observation showed that 84% students were actively enganged in reading class after the implementation of Story Mapping strategy. This suggests that the implementation of Story Mapping strategy in reading helps the students to improve their comprehension achievement

'We are here because you were there': minority ethnic genre fiction in UK public libraries.

This paper presents findings of ongoing doctoral research into the reading of, and engagement with, minority ethnic genre fiction in public libraries, with a particular focus on Black British and British Asian authors. The research context is first briefly summarised, looking at the nature of minority genre fiction, and at public library provision and readership of materials for ethnically diverse communities. An empirical study is then presented, for which a general survey was conducted of the reading habits and attitudes of library users in the East Midlands region of England. The large sample population of 1,047 public library users enabled both qualitative and quantitative analyses, considering readers’ preferred location for selecting books, their usual reading choices, material that they would not consider reading, and any factors affecting their choice. Finally, a brief comparison is made of libraries of different types, in terms of community, ethnicity or class. The findings indicate that certain respondents appeared to have an increased openness to read from a wide range of genres, even an increased reading confidence as a result of reading books written by minority ethnic authors. It is concluded that promotional activity can play a role not only in offering wider reading choices but also, potentially, in reducing fear and prejudice and celebrating cultural diversity

Reader and author gender and genre in Goodreads

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by SAGE Publishing in Journal of Librarianship & Information Science on 01/05/2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1177/0961000617709061 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.There are known gender differences in book preferences in terms of both genre and author gender but their extent and causes are not well understood. It is unclear whether reader preferences for author genders occur within any or all genres and whether readers evaluate books differently based on author genders within specific genres. This article exploits a major source of informal book reviews, the Goodreads.com website, to assess the influence of reader and author genders on book evaluations within genres. It uses a quantitative analysis of 201,560 books and their reviews, focusing on the top 50 user-specified genres. The results show strong gender differences in the ratings given by reviewers to books within genres, such as female reviewers rating contemporary romance more highly, with males preferring short stories. For most common book genres, reviewers give higher ratings to books authored by their own gender, confirming that gender bias is not confined to the literary elite. The main exception is the comic book, for which male reviewers prefer female authors, despite their scarcity. A word frequency analysis suggested that authors wrote, and reviewers valued, gendered aspects of books within a genre. For example, relationships and romance were disproportionately mentioned by women in mystery and fantasy novels. These results show that, perhaps for the first time, it is possible to get large scale evidence about the reception of books by typical readers, if they post reviews online

Washington University Magazine, Winter 2003

https://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/ad_wumag/1165/thumbnail.jp

Fiction access points across computer-mediated book information sources: A comparison of online bookstores, reader advisory databases, and public library catalogs.

One of a librarian's more difficult jobs may be helping patrons in an elusive search for a "good book." A variety of online sources are now available to help readers and librarians in their search, but the descriptive capabilities of the resources vary widely. Library and information science (LIS) literature has suggested many schemes and access points for fiction classification. This study compared the records for identical books in a variety of computer-mediated book information sources (CMBIS) in order to find out which resources utilized the access points identified in LIS literature. Results from this study suggest that online bookstores may be effective tools for librarians helping patrons find "good" books, due to their increased use of access points. However, reader advisory databases, which contain reviews and subject headings, are occasionally more effective than online bookstores for identifying books published prior to the 1990s.Post-printIncludes bibliographical references