Reading Between the Lines
Reading Age and Gender in Georgian Britain
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Allan
The functions of gender and age in constructing reading are poorly understood. Yet these concerns have always profoundly structured people’s experiences with texts. This paper will use a case study approach to explore some of their interactions in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, focusing on two women in particular. The first is Melesinda Munbee, a young English girl who in 1750 began documenting her reading: this was probably produced under the influence of adult supervision and also specifically written for her father’s pleasure, circumstances which allow us to see how the selection of texts and the appreciation and appropriation of reading materials could be used to define and strongly reinforce conventional identities (not least Melesinda’s allotted roles as a daughter and a child). The second revolves around Hester Lynch Piozzi, an elderly Welsh woman and one-time member of London’s literary set who in 1813 prepared a record of her own favourite encounters with books which she intended to be given after her death to her nephew John Salusbury: here too considerations of gender and age interacted with the reading strategies employed in the search for authority.
Henry James and the Great American Novella
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Edward Morgan Day Frank
This paper examines a prominent but largely under-scrutinized literary form: the novella. My argument is that the novella’s critical neglect in Anglo-American scholarship speaks to something fundamental about its relationship to institutions more broadly, its tendency to slip through the academic and publishing structures that administer most of literary production. Early practitioners of the novella in the US were acutely aware of its slipperiness as a genre. In the preface to "Daisy Miller," Henry James described his story as “essentially and pre-eminently a nouvelle,” a form “foredoomed at the best, in more cases than not, to editorial disfavor.” Herman Melville’s editorial adviser at Putnam’s Magazine thought “Benito Cereno” was on the whole “striking & well done,” but disliked its length, lamenting “the dreary documents at the end.” In this paper I discuss the publishing conditions that surrounded the release of "Daisy Miller," seeing in this particular novella a text that self-consciously grapples with the genre’s possibilities and limitations. If the famous New York Edition of James’s collected works represented a late-career attempt to assert the value of the literary against the democratizing forces of mass publication, his investment in the novella earlier in his career suggests an altogether different conception of literary value, a conception that sees in the form of the novella itself a way of forging alternative institutional configurations, ones capable of reconciling the high and the low, the elite and the democratic.
A Plague of Books: Anxiety and Abundance in the Gilded Age
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jessica Jordan
The golden touch of rapid economic growth that characterized the Gilded Age of American history did not leave unchanged the practice of book publishing – paper and printing materials were cheaper than ever before, and new mechanization processes made printing faster and more economical. These and other changes in production and distribution resulted in unprecedented numbers of books in circulation, and, as physical books proliferated, the very meaning of the book object was transformed and fragmented – an old form colliding with a new century. Book ownership, especially of works other than the Bible, had formerly been restricted to a relatively small and elite population. With the growth of public education and the decreasing cost of printed material, reading and accumulation of books simultaneously became possible for a massively expanded audience. For readers, access to books allowed new social and cultural opportunities, but the sheer abundance of books being produced in the period was also a source of anxiety about their presence and use. By examining different facets of Gilded Age book, I hope to show how these anxieties were navigated amid attempts to define and inhabit proper bookish behavior. As books were being written, printed, and distributed in greater quantities than ever before, people had to learn what to do with them. In making my argument, source materials include A Publisher’s Confession by Walter Hines Page, Adolf Growoll’s two-volume manual on bookselling, and a variety of etiquette manuals and household guides.
On the Rims of Fiction: The "New" Self-Reflexive Novel
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Denise Rose Hansen
In the multilayered autofictions recently triumphed by Ben Lerner, Alejandro Zambra, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Julián Herbert, the novel medium itself is interrogated in gerundium – in the process of writing. This makes for works that are at once brutally honest and dishonest, as both are compulsory when exposing the artifice of writing and the performative nature of any storyteller. Like browsing through open tabs, the authors flicker between various fictions and (ostensible) non-fictions, as a way of grabbling with the human and literary impotence of never being able to seize or write the slippery present. The concern of temporality is reflected in playful approaches to form and structure. While critics name such novels “metafiction”, I find the term as anachronistic and unmeaning as “postmodern”. Rather, these are examples of the reactive “new” avant-garde novel in which the multimodal and narrative texture of writing is placed above plot. Readily able to communicate the essence and texture of a contemporary life highly marked by digitality, Lerner, Zambra, Vila-Matas and Herbert navigate the void between fact and fiction, between art and life, between materiality and ephemerality, and capture that distance through literary technique and poetic prowess.
