Preview the new issue of Romantic Textualities

After a lengthy and unplanned delay, the new issue of Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840 is to be published in its HTML incarnation next month. In the meanwhile, you can preview the print-optimized version of the journal as a PDF, which contains all of the items that will feature in the HTML version in one convenient publication.

Issue 20 contains the following material:

• ‘ “We’ll Wear Out Great Ones”: Maria Pickersgill, Letitia Landon and the Power of the “Improvisatrice” ’ (David Moberly): an article which provides an engaged and persuasive analysis of Pickersgill’s poetry, and its reflections on performativity and gender, through her use of orientalist framing devices, which can be contrasted with those of contemporaries such as Moore and Byron.
•  ‘Hazlitt’s Prizefight Revisited: Pierce Egan and Jon Bee’s Boxiana-Style Perspective’ (David Snowdon): an article that examines the masculine sporting culture that flourished in the 1820s, revolving in particular around the boxing world dubbed ‘The Fancy’.
• ‘Merely an Imitator? The Preponderance of ‘Radcliffe’ in Lusignan or the Abbaye of La Trappe and The Orphans of Llangloed’ (Jacqueline Howard): a lengthy report that puts forward the tantalising—and, no doubt, controversial—view that Ann Radcliffe’s career as a novelist did not stop with the publication of The Italian (1797), based on close textual and contextual analysis.
• Reviews of recent publications by Alex Benchimol, Clare Broome Saunders, Richard Hill, James Hogg, Sarah Houghton-Walker, Maria Purves and Nicola Watson.
• Books Received: a list of books relating to Romantic print culture and intertextuality available for review.

You can download the new issue, by clicking on this link.

You can visit Romantic Textualities @ www.romtext.org.uk.

Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840 is a peer-reviewed online journal that focuses on the interface between literature, book history and material cultures during the Romantic era. Romantic Textualities disseminates scholarship in a variety of forms: peer-reviewed essays, reports and bibliographical checklists, and review articles. Essays have included studies as diverse as Wordsworth and the rise of copyright, metropolitan art criticism, travel writing, pugilism, sentimental fiction and morality, Gothic bluebooks and discourses of gardening.

Visiting speaker, 15 Nov 2011: Paul Schlicke on Dickens’s Sketches by Boz

Paul Schlicke will be presenting his paper, ‘The Topicality of Sketches by Boz’, at 5.15pm on Tuesday, 15 November 2011. The talk will take place in the Cardiff Humanities Building, Room 2.48.

Abstract
Sketches by Boz is saturated with topical detail, as Dickens casts his journalist’s eye on the sights, sounds, smells, people, and events of contemporary London. His attention to ‘every-day life and every-day people’ aligns him with Reform, which was challenging elitism with democratic principle. His revisions removing indelicacy in later editions reflect changing attitudes as Victorian propriety replaced Regency raffishness, and his most extensive alterations to the sketches, for the 1850 edition, impacted on the journalism he was then writing for his new periodical Household Words.

Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility: Screening and Discussion, 29 Oct 2011

29 October 2011, 18:00–22:30

Cardiff University, Main Building, Wallace Lecture Theatre

Part of Cardiff University’s Creative Minds Festival

To celebrate the bicentenary of the publication of Jane Austen’s first novel, Sense and Sensibility (1811), join us for a screening of Ang Lee’s 1995 Oscar-winning film adaptation, starring Emma Thompson and
Kate Winslet.

Elinor and Marianne Dashwood are two strikingly different sisters. Both are in love – Elinor with respectable Edward Ferrars and Marianne with John Willoughby, attractive but very unsuitable. But when they find out
that both men are engaged to other women, the agonizing struggle between head and heart begins.

The screening will be followed by a drinks reception and then an opportunity for the audience to chat about Austen’s enduring presence with a panel of literature and media scholars from local universities: Dr Sarah
Gamble (Swansea), Dr Ruth McElroy (Glamorgan), Dr Anthony Mandal (Cardiff) and Dr Becky Munford (Cardiff).

The event is free but booking is essential. Contact publicbookings@cardiff.ac.uk to book your seats.

You can find out more about the Creative Minds weekend, 28-29 October 2011, by visiting http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/creativeminds.

Price One Penny: A Database of Cheap Literature, 1837–1860

A beta version of Price One Penny: A Database of Cheap Literature, 1837–1860 is available via the University of Cambridge. It is intended that the database will catalogue early Victorian fiction, facilitating access to extant copies of this most ephemeral of literary forms, as well as providing accurate bibliographic information. Users can search by title or browse by work, author, publisher, periodical or author. The database currently contains 344 individual records of works (covering 390 editions and 59 periodical serializations) by 236 authors gathered from 187 libraries and published by 39 concerns. Helpfully, these data are also summarized in a section on statistics, which forms part of the website.

Launched in November 2010, Price One Penny (POP) was created and is maintained by Marie Léger-St-Jean, doctoral candidate in English at the University of Cambridge, to provide bibliographical and eventually biographical data about the countless publishers and authors involved in the production of penny bloods, weekly serials sold for a penny to a varied audience throughout the 1840s and 1850s. It is modelled on Troy J. Bassett’s At the Circulating Library. Its content draws from pioneering research by Louis James, Fiction For The Working Man (1973), and current work by Helen R. Smith, as well as from the wealth of information gathered by collectors, the true repositories of penny-publishing knowledge.

Romantic fiction and print culture: paper available for download

On 23 June, Anthony Mandal presented a talk on Romantic fiction and print culture at The Romantic Book: A Day Symposium, hosted by the Open University. The talk, entitled ‘A World of Words: Romantic Fiction and the Literary Marketplace’, provided an overview of various economic, legal and technological factors that impacted on the production of fiction during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as analysing the output of new fiction and what it meant to be a novelist in the Romantic era. The talk and accompanying slides are available for download through the Cardiff Book History blog.

Download Anthony’s paper, ‘A World of Words: Romantic Fiction and the Literary Marketplace’ (PDF).

Download the PowerPoint slides that accompanied the talk (PPTX).

Get your fix of Victorian yellowbacks

1200+ Victorian #yellowbacks free to download from Emory Uni Lib. http://web.library.emory.edu/yellowbacks—
Cardiff Book History (@CardiffBookHist) June 02, 2011

Speaker, 15 Feb 2010: Anthony Mandal on gothic bibliophobia

Anthony Mandal will be presenting his paper, ‘Bibliophobia: Textuality and Alterity in Recent Gothic Fiction’ at 5.15pm on Tuesday, 15 February 2011. The talk will take place in the Cardiff Humanities Building, Room 2.48.

Abstract
The labyrinthine library and textual untrustworthiness are nothing new in fiction: throughout its history, gothic literature, in particular, has been populated with libraries as problematized loci that belie their seemingly progressive principles, while the elucidatory potential of language is subverted by the gothic’s preoccupation with linguistic slippage, discovered manuscripts, inset tales, narrative fragmentation and structural contradictions. Textuality is disclosed in the gothic as a contested concept, both the vessel of lost knowledge and the harbinger of destruction.

Taking some theoretical models supplied by Borges, Foucault and Eco as his starting points, Mandal’s talk will consider the ‘bibliophobia’ of recent gothic novels by John Harwood, Elizabeth Kostova, Arturo Pérez-Reverte and Carlos Ruiz Zafón, in which the text becomes the locus of supernatural irruptions that threaten to infect the everyday world. Promising the privilege and completeness of structured knowledge, these novels paradoxically reveal the textual condition as masking disorder and monstrosity, consequently raising disconcerting questions about authority, truthfulness and human identity itself.

CFP: Mervyn Peake Conference 2011

Mervyn Peake and the Fantasy Tradition : A Centenary Conference

An international conference hosted by the English & Creative Writing Department, University of Chichester and the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy

15–16 July 2011 Chichester, UK

Keynote Speakers include: Joanne Harris | Michael Moorcock | Peter Winnington | Colin Manlove | Farah Mendlesohn | Sebastian Peake

This conference and related events next July to mark the centenary of Peake’s birth include exhibitions of his paintings and illustrations in Chichester (Peake lived in nearby Burpham while writing the Gormenghast books, and is buried there). July 2011 is also the publication date of Titus Awakes, Maeve Gilmore’s conclusion of her husband’s Gormenghast sequence. The conference will celebrate, explore and discuss the many facets of Peake’s rich creativity, including his work as fantasy novelist, children’s writer, playwright, poet, writer of nonsense verse, artist and illustrator (both of his own books and classics such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Hunting of the Snark, the Alice books, Treasure Island and the Grimms’ Household Tales).

Visiting speaker, 7 Dec 2010: Maria DiBattista on native cosmopolitanism

Maria DiBattista will be presenting her paper, ‘Native Cosmopolitanism’ at 5.15pm on Tuesday, 7 December 2010. The talk will take place in the Cardiff Humanities Building, Room 2.48.

Abstract
The contemporary fascination with cosmopolitanism as a moral and political ideal is one response to the widespread, seemingly irreversible changes in the way human beings think about their relation to their family, tribe, community, country.  What we can discern behind the headlines, in the marketplaces, and through the literature of the present day is that the era of identity politics is waning and the age of ‘global’ character is struggling to be born. What form it will take is a riddle the novel can help solve. The novel has more and more been absorbed in chronicling the emergence of a new social type that DiBattista calls native cosmopolitans. Their growing prominence, which has aroused the curiosity, anxiety and imagination of novelists like V. S. Naipaul, J. M.Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, Zadie  Smith, Edwige  Danticat, represents a new form and hope for character: formed in the enduring ethos of local traditions and habits, but marked (stunned, traumatized, exhilarated) by the consciousness that one is more connected to, yet less at home in the global cities in which their destinies are often decided.

Visiting speaker, 17 Nov 2010: Deborah Wynne on Victorian clothing

Deborah Wynne will be presenting her talk, ‘Charlotte Brontë’s Frocks and Shirley‘s Queer Textiles’, at 2pm on Wednesday, 17 November 2010. The talk will take place in the Cardiff University Humanities Building, Room 2.48.

Abstract
Charlotte Brontë’s ‘condition-of-England’ novel Shirley (1849) engages with the issue of textile manufacture and use in the age of mass production. It offers insights into the ways in which cloth functions as a language through which identities can be forged. This talk examines why textiles, particularly women’s clothes and needlework activities, are important in Shirley. It focuses on Brontë’s anxieties about her own metaphorical cross dressing as the ‘male’ author Currer Bell and her complex representations of dress, particularly the homosocial potential of clothing rituals, as she depicts her female characters dressing and undressing their friends. The paper also considers the importance of Brontë’s unpublished Preface to Shirley, entitled ‘A Word to the Quarterly’, an attack upon Elizabeth Rigby, a hostile reviewer of Jane Eyre. Brontë’s satirical essay helps to explain why Shirley offers an extended engagement with the topic of women’s dress.