“An appreciative and grateful author”: Edith Wharton and the House of Macmillan

This essay is the first piece of scholarship to examine the relationship between the expatriate American novelist Edith Wharton (1862-1937) and her chief British publisher, Macmillan and Co. Entirely original analysis draws extensively upon the author/publisher correspondence held in the Macmillan Archive in the British Library, and challenges existing readings of the firm's handling of women novelists in the period 1900-1930

[Book Review] Alaistair Fowler, <i>The Mind of the Book: Pictorial Title Pages</i>

A review of Fowler, Alastair, The Mind of the Book: Pictorial Title Pages (Oxford: OUP, 2017), ISBN 978-0-0190871766-9

Reading in the digital archive

This article provides an overview of recent developments in digitizing nineteenth-century printed and archived material, and argues that while mass digitisation offers incredible opportunities for research and scholarship, it also increases the considerable distance between nineteenth-century reading practices and our own. Digitized content implicitly privileges certain types of reading practice and use which the extant printed material does not

An Examination of Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic as a “Liminal Space”

In the space of a few weeks in 2020, the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus into a global pandemic has changed the way we work, live, interact and communicate with one another. One highly unexpected result of the massive rise in homeworking has been an extraordinary exposure of domestic bookshelves, which in the famous words of Amanda Hess, have become the “quarantine’s hottest accessory” (New York Times, May 1, 2020). Personal bookshelves had hitherto been jealously guarded, a marker for personal taste and shared only with the select few invited into their owners’ households and allowed to scan the titles on display. This physically delimited space has now been unleashed upon the world: where once few people could look at the books on our shelves, now theoretically, almost everyone can. The pandemic bookshelf has accidently been fashioned into the most ubiquitous liminal zone anywhere: it is the ostensibly private and personal backdrop for the staging of our public, digitally mediated, professional existence. Drawing upon theoretical perspectives from anthropology, psychology and literary theory, this chapter explores the many ways in which the private-public bookshelf has become the cultural liminal space par excellence during the COVID-19 pandemic

Reusing Historical Questionnaire Data and Using Newly Commissioned Oral History Interviews as Evidence in the History of Reading

Interviews, whether freestyle or structured, printed or recorded, offer historians of reading valuable insights into the practices and preferences of individual readers. Despite the potential biases that can be generated by the interview format, the reshaping of memory through the process of retelling, and the questions that can go unasked (and therefore, unanswered), the individual interview can be a richly textured source of information for historians of reading. In this article, three researchers involved in both the recently completed Reading Communities: Connecting the Past and the Present project and the ongoing historically focussed UK Reading Experience Database, 1450-1945 project (UK-RED) examine the ways in which interviews can capture individual records of reading, both in the past and the present

Introduction

The introduction provides an overview of the main issues informing current analysis of bookshelves during the COVID-19 pandemic. It starts by sketching out some of the main theoretical frameworks relevant to investigating the cultural phenomenon of bookshelves in the pandemic. It then surveys trends in pandemic reading and the rise of bibliotherapy since the start of the pandemic, before examining the ways in which lockdown induced home working has blurred the boundaries between private and public spheres. This is followed by a detailed discussion of the bookshelf as a construct of global neoliberalism which draws attention to increasing socioeconomic inequality, both between the Global North and the Global South, and within individual nation states. The introduction then outlines the contents of the volume with brief precis of the 12 chapters; summarizes areas of investigation not covered in the volume; and finishes by gesturing to research questions and issues for future consideration

Readers and Reading in the First World War

This essay consists of three individually authored and interlinked sections. In ‘A Digital Humanities Approach’, Francesca Benatti looks at datasets and databases (including the UK Reading Experience Database) and shows how a systematic, macro-analytical use of digital humanities tools and resources might yield answers to some key questions about reading in the First World War. In ‘Reading behind the Wire in the First World War’ Edmund G. C. King scrutinizes the reading practices and preferences of Allied prisoners of war in Mainz, showing that reading circumscribed by the contingencies of a prison camp created an unique literary community, whose legacy can be traced through their literary output after the war. In ‘Book-hunger in Salonika’, Shafquat Towheed examines the record of a single reader in a specific and fairly static frontline, and argues that in the case of the Salonika campaign, reading communities emerged in close proximity to existing centres of print culture. The focus of this essay moves from the general to the particular, from the scoping of large datasets, to the analyses of identified readers within a specific geographical and temporal space. The authors engage with the wider issues and problems of recovering, interpreting, visualizing, narrating, and representing readers in the First World War

@TellMeWhatUReadingbot: the Multi-modal Strategy of the READ-IT Project for Collecting Experiences of Reading

Hypertext readership has been placed under extensive scrutiny. At the same time, little to no work has been done on how hypertext systems can contribute to reading scholarship. This contribution reports on the experience of the EU Joint Programme Initiative for Cultural Heritage (JPI-CH) funded READ-IT project and the development of an interactive, multimodal system to crowdsource testimonies of reading experiences. The contribution describes articulating the research infrastructure aimed at federating research case studies across Europe in several languages and about the readership of different kinds in different periods. The infrastructure aims to broaden the understanding of reading in Europe. The infrastructure included a system to collect sources (testimonies of reading experiences) to be studied within and beyond the project. The infrastructure also provided a combination of online forms, postcards, and a chatbot to facilitate reflection on reading by members of the public. This contribution accounts for the experience of using this system in several countries and throughout a wide range of initiatives

Reading Transmedia: Re-contextualising the Written Word in Popular Web-native Genres

Like electricity leaping from point to point, the power of the written word lies in the connection it creates – however briefly. Gatekeeping historical structures of distribution and publication all but guaranteed the publication of unrepresentative works alone. Webnovels and webcomics represent two genres of mature born-digital textuality that evidences the optimistic vision of web distribution: linking communities, elevating unheard voices, creating new modes and styles of storytelling unfettered by commercial limitations. Their comparatively lengthy history (at least in web-genre terms) allows us to reflect on their affordances. What are the expectations of authorship and readership in the quintessentially transmedia space of webnovel and webcomic publishing? Absent traditional publishing, do traditional notions of genre and paratext still apply? What is the status of the written word when it experiences such perpetual and destabilising cycle of revision, translation, reconfiguration, remediation? Do they still count as “written words”? Or do they instead occupy an intermediate space between verba volant and scripta manent? What does the comparatively greater success of webcomics compared to webnovels tell us about the power of the written word versus images on the web? This panel seeks to address each of these areas and beyond. Developing topics first introduced in the SHARP 2021 panel Transmedia Beyond Definitions, it will present three case studies that interrogate the characteristics of digital-native media and their affect on the dynamics between readers, authors, and publishers. Given the theme of SHARP 2022, this panel will focus specifically on the empowering effects of web-native genres, e.g., from supporting creative work based upon non-mainstream authors and topics, to how readers take control and adapt, flex and blend reading into their activities, habits and needs

The science of musical memory: Vernon Lee and the remembrance of sounds past

Drawing upon my research of Vernon Lee’s commonplace books (1887-1900, 12vols), pocket notebooks (1926-1935, 27vols) correspondence and the marginalia in her library books (over 400 volumes), this chapter opens with a survey of Lee’s remarkably comprehensive and engaged reading in music, memory, and musical memory. She read and responded to (amongst others) the work of Ribot, Stumpf, Ebbinghaus, Semon, Helmholtz, Hering, Howes and Butler in the study of musical memory, and Bazaillas, Dauriac, Rubinstein, Prime-Stevenson, Rolland, Köstlin, Parry and de Robeck in music criticism. For Lee, who viewed music as an ‘ancestral emotion’, a key concept was the centrality of musical memory, which she explored both scientifically and aesthetically in much of her critical and fictional writing. This chapter will focus on Lee’s deployment of the potency of musical memory in two key texts – Music and Its Lovers (1932), and ‘A Wicked Voice’ (1890). Music and Its Lovers is Lee’s longest and most complex scholarly work on music, and also the most misunderstood. I offer a fresh analysis of Lee’s allegedly empirical and qualitative investigation of individual responses to music by demonstrating the importance of her distinction between ‘listeners’ and ‘hearers’, a distinction that she argued, was in part biologically demarcated, as well as discussing the importance of memory in her analysis of the appreciation of music. Lee’s exploration of the relationship between music, memory and the emotions was not restricted to her non-fictional writing. I examine Lee’s most famous fictional depiction of the potency of musical memory, the Gothic horror story, ‘A Wicked Voice’, from the perspective of her increasing awareness of the biological complexity of both mental storage and retrieval. Specifically, I look at the haunting presence of specific pieces of music (such as Hasse’s air ‘Pallido Il Sole’ and the Venetian gondolier’s aria, ‘La Biondina in Gondoleta’) in shaping this most musical of Lee’s short stories. Finally, I will also briefly demonstrate the importance of Lee’s theoretical writing on music to the rest of her relentlessly interdisciplinary work, by examining the implications suggested by her advocacy of the corporeality of aesthetic experiences