Amlit resources in the news

Preliminary Questions in Preparing a Dissertation or Book Proposal

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For our English 573, American Moderns, class today.

Preliminary Questions in Preparing a Dissertation or Book Proposal

1. In a sentence or two, what’s the overall argument of this project? What’s the main point that you’re trying to make? (Think about this: how would you describe what you’re doing if you were talking on an elevator with someone for about 2 minutes?)

2. What one author or idea does this project absolutely have to include, and why?

3. What’s the gap in the scholarship that you’re trying to fill by writing about it? What are you saying that others haven’t talked about yet?

4. Why is it important?  (This is the “so what?” question that editors talk about.)

5. What other authors or topics are you planning to include, and why?

6. What’s the most exciting part of this project for you, or what fascinates you about this topic?

7. Is there anything you’ve written that can be incorporated into this project already?

8. Is there anything you’d like to include in this project but probably aren’t going to be able to include because of time, resources, etc.?

9. What theoretical framework(s) do you anticipate being most useful to you as you move forward with the project?

10. What critical works do you admire and might you consider as a model or template for your study?

New Whitman Digital Resource: Letters from his mother, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman

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From DIGAM:

   Wesley Raabe, an assistant professor in the Department of English at Kent State University, has edited the letters of Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, mother of the poet Walt Whitman. Her 170 letters and a new introduction have been published under the title “walter dear”: The Letters from Louisa Van Velsor Whitman to Her Son Walt on the Walt Whitman Archive, and they are now freely available to scholars and to the general public.

   The newly published letters feature digital facsimiles, authoritative transcriptions, dating, and annotation, and integration with Walt’s and other family members’ letters in the Whitman Archive section entitled “Correspondence.” Scholars for the first time will be able to read Walt Whitman’s letters alongside the replies of his mother, who was by far his most frequent correspondent. The edition also includes a new introduction with a biography. The letters and the introduction are online at http://www.whitmanarchive.org/biography/correspondence/index.html. 

 

   Walt Whitman described his mother as “illiterate in the formal sense,” but he also proclaimed his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, to be the “flower of her temperament active in me.” Louisa’s letters illuminate the most important relationship in the poet’s life and offer a rare glimpse into the emotional life of a working-class nineteenth-century American woman. Though she lacked formal education, her letters display verbal power and expressiveness, offering insight into the “family usages” that shaped Walt Whitman’s poetry.  

 

   The letters from Louisa Whitman to Walt span the period from just before the outbreak of the Civil War through a week before her death in May 1873. Her letters helped bind the Whitman family together during the disruptive years of the Civil War and early Reconstruction. The letters to Walt treat mundane everyday life and moments of great family sorrow, and they make incisive observations on Walt’s growing critical reputation and offer curt dismissals of lesser writers.

Edith Wharton Collection at the Beinecke Library to close temporarily beginning in April 2014

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From Gary Totten: 

Various Archival Collections to Close Temporarily Beginning in April 2014

Beginning in April 2014, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library will temporarily close various archival collections in preparation for a major building renovation scheduled to start in May 2015. In general, collections that are temporarily closed will be unavailable for six to eight weeks.

Researchers planning to visit the Beinecke should consult the library’s closed collections schedule beforehand to confirm the availability of desired materials. The schedule is currently subject to change, so researchers should check it frequently as they plan their visits.

Over the next year, the library will transfer about 12,000 cartons of collection material to an offsite shelving facility. This work requires the temporary closing of many of the library’s most important and frequently consulted archival collections. While temporarily closed, the collections will be unavailable for consultation in the reading room, classrooms, or for reproduction requests.

The temporary closings will be staggered throughout the year. Among collections slated to close in the spring of 2014 are the papers of Thornton Wilder, Eugene O’Neill, H.D., Langston Hughes, James Weldon and Grace Nail Johnson, and Edith Wharton. Collections to close in the fall of 2014 include the papers of Mable Dodge Luhan, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Howells in the News: W. D. Howells, Steampunk Spymaster at Wired

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Reposted from the Howells Society site: Howells in the News: W. D. Howells, Steampunk Spymaster at Wired

At Wired, Bruce Sterling reads Howells’s “American Literature in Exile.”  A sample:

*It’s good to read Howell because he’s so secure in his own world. He’s properly dressed in his own Manhattan tie-and-tails; he’s not bitterly agitated, or preyed upon by bipolarity, like Clemens was. Howells is energetic without ever being antic. He gives the impression of a natural ruling-class figure who would likely do very well in the State Department.

*There’s a steampunk version of the Howells-Twain relationship where Howells is “M,” the master spy, the firm-hand-on-the-tiller, while Mark Twain is his brilliant yet reckless field agent, with a license to wander the world and kill off steampunk super-villains. I shouldn’t have said that, because now somebody’s gonna do it and get it all wrong; but, well, I’m in literary mode now, writing an Italian dieselpunk story, and the flights of fancy are proliferating out of control.

Annette Gordon-Reed on Solomon Northup’s 12 Years a Slave

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ImageIn The New Yorker this week, Annette Gordon-Reed discusses Northup’s 12 Years a Slave (available here) and the issues of the genre of slave narratives:

As powerful as they are, slave narratives are often said to raise special concerns as items of historical evidence. One argument goes as follows: White abolitionists, who almost always had a hand in helping to prepare and disseminate the narratives, hoped to destroy slavery by highlighting the more shocking aspects of the institution—the whippings, the separations of families, and the sexual abuse of enslaved women. As a result, the argument continues, the narratives adhere to a literary convention in which all of these events must play a prominent role, raising questions about the veracity of the stories. This seems a rather odd complaint, given that we know from other sources that whippings, separation of families, and sexual abuse were endemic to the institution. It would be more incredible, quite frankly, if Solomon Northup had spent twelve years on a slave plantation in Louisiana without encountering all of these things.

Another concern centers on the nature of the relationship between white sponsors and black narrators. Given the racial power dynamics, could blacks speak freely to the abolitionists and, later, to the white interlocutors who gathered stories for the Work Project Administration (W.P.A.), during the nineteen-thirties? If points of conflict arose, whose view would prevail? It has also been noted that the W.P.A. interviewees were children during slavery. A number of them painted almost benign pictures of the institution of slavery. Was this done to please their white interviewers, who were, after all, agents of the government, or were they just remembering a world through the eyes of children, without the heavy burdens that their parents had known?

There are other issues with slave narratives, but the simple fact is that every form of historical evidence has its own set of problems.

Gordon-Reed’s magisterial book on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, which she references in the concluding paragraphs, sorts out these issues in great detail, distinguishing between what we can and cannot know about the relationship between the two and what the documentary evidence can and cannot reveal.

Trove of Emily Dickinson Documents

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Update:  Julie Dobrow on Lithub (2018) provides additional information but says that the typewriter was a borrowed Hammond typewriter.

Update: More on Dickinson and the Amherst/Harvard controversy at The New York Times: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/23/books/enigmatic-dickinson-revealed-online.html?pagewanted=1&ref=books

And here is the Amherst archive link: https://www.amherst.edu/library/archives/holdings/edickinson

The Boston Globe (http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/10/19/trove-emily-dickinson-manuscripts-appear-online/5NWTLLg5qM8WjF0Hjb8LzH/story.html) reports that Amherst and Harvard are rolling out an online collection of Dickinson materials this week but that there’s friction between the two institutions dating back to the Todd/Dickinson controversies that emerged after Dickinson’s death.

As anyone who’s read Lyndall Gordon’s Lives Like Loaded Guns or other books on Dickinson can attest, it’s a vexed and interesting history–unless you’re involved in it, of course, in which case it’s just vexed.

One of the things that Gordon explains, almost as an aside, is that in transcribing Dickinson’s poems after her death, Mabel Loomis Todd first used what was known as an index typewriter, the World typewriter,  that required the user to point at a letter and press a key to stamp it into the page. To say that this must have been slow going is an understatement.

From the article:

The conflict echoes the longstanding dispute between Harvard and Amherst over who may lay more rightful claim to Emily Dickinson. When Dickinson died, her sister, Lavinia, discovered hundreds of her poems.

Lavinia approached their sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson, about editing the poems. Susan Dickinson delayed too long, and Lavinia turned to Mabel Loomis Todd, wife of an Amherst professor and Emily Dickinson’s brother’s mistress.

Todd enlisted the help of Thomas Wentworth Higginson and the two edited the poems — changing punctuation, amending the text, and adding titles. They published three volumes of Dickinson’s work, the last in 1896. Two years later, a dispute arose between Todd and the Dickinsons.

Todd said Emily Dickinson’s brother had promised her a piece of land and failed to deliver, according to Martha Nell Smith, a professor of English at the University of Maryland and executive director and coordinator of the Dickinson Electronic Archives.

When the Dickinsons asked Todd to return her trove of Dickinson material, she refused, Smith said. In 1956, Todd’s daughter gave the collection — some 850 poems and fragments and 350 letters — to Amherst College, where Dickinson’s grandfather had been a founder and her father and brother served as treasurers.

Meanwhile, the manuscripts that remained in the Dickinson family — some 700 poems and 300 letters — ended up being sold to Gilbert Montague, a distant cousin of Dickinson, who gave the trove in 1950 to Harvard, his alma mater.

Ever since, the two institutions have jockeyed for the mantle of most complete Emily Dickinson collection.

Earle Labor’s new Jack London biography

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Cross-posted from the Jack London Society site at http://jacklondonsociety.org

Edited to add: This clip also has a 10-second excerpt (at 2:00)  from the only known recording of Jack London’s voice, which isn’t otherwise available online.

I’ve been hearing portions of this biography for years at Jack London symposia, and it should be a terrific book.  Labor began working on Jack London in the 1960s; a prominent scholar, he knows as much about London’s life as it’s possible to know after a lifetime of study.

From http://www.npr.org/2013/10/17/230497660/jack-london-believed-function-of-man-is-to-live-not-to-exist

A literary critic once remarked, “The greatest story Jack London ever wrote was the story he lived.” In his brief life, London sought adventure in the far corners of the world, from the frozen Yukon to the South Pacific, writing gripping tales of survival based on his experiences — including The Call of the Wild, White Fang and The Sea Wolf.

His story is the subject of a new biography,Jack London: An American Life, by Earle Labor, curator of the Jack London Museum in Shreveport, La. Labor wrote his first book about London in 1974, but the 85-year-old scholar says with London, there’s always more to write.

Image[read or listen to the rest at the link]

More new Emily Dickinson resources and a gallery of women writers

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First, these two Emily Dickinson resources, which were posted to SSAWW-L (hat tip to Martha Nell Smith and Ellen  Garvey):

Emily Dickinson manuscripts to download for free: “https://acdc.amherst.edu/browse/collection/collection:ed, and when prompted to enter as guest, just do so (this will disappear soon). Amherst has 100s of Emily Dickinson documents, and with each one you can just download the entire image. To find what you’re looking for, keep in mind that it must be in the Amherst Collections. This is not all of ED, but it’s about half of her writings. 

Harvard will also be releasing a resource on Oct 21. And already available is Radical Scatters at http://Radicalscatters.unl.edu, Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences at http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/edc/, and the Dickinson Electronic Archives I & II at http://emilydickinson.org.”

And from Ellen Garvey: 

I just learned of a recently digitized Emily Dickinson resource that may interest SSAWWers. .Harvard has digitized ED’s music binder — sheet music that she collected and played on the piano. Here’s a link to a blog description of it: 

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/houghton/2013/09/05/emily-dickinsons-music-book-edr-469/

and the digitized binder: 

http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/46653089

***

More is available now than ever before, it seems; at least I end up posting resources or calls for paper to the SSAWW site daily now.  Here’s one from this morning: 

At The Library Company, Portraits of American Women Writers Appearing in Print before 1861

http://www.librarycompany.org/women/portraits/gallery.htm

Below: Portrait of Caroline M. Congdon: http://www.librarycompany.org/women/portraits/congdon.htmImage

New resources: Emily Dickinson

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From Kristin Doyle Hyland on C19: Spreading the word: a valuable resource for those teaching Emily Dickinson’s poetry (and especially those using the Norton Anthology of Poetry).

Mike Kelly at Amherst has compiled a linked list of their Dickinson manuscipt holdings (online images, freely available!!) for those poems that appear in the Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th ed. Also includes links to manuscripts available from the Boston Public Library.

https://www.amherst.edu/library/archives/holdings/edickinson/teaching-with-dickinson

PDF version of list available on the above page as well.

Identity of Hannah Crafts (The Bondswoman’s Narrative) Revealed

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From this morning’s New York Times : 

In 2002, a novel thought to be the first written by an African-American woman became a best seller, praised for its dramatic depiction of Southern life in the mid-1850s through the observant eyes of a refined and literate house servant.

Gregg Hecimovich and Reverend Joseph Cooper

John Wheeler lived on the plantation where Hannah Bond escaped slavery.

But one part of the story remained a tantalizing secret: the author’s identity.

That literary mystery may have been solved by a professor of English in South Carolina, who said this week that after years of research, he has discovered the novelist’s name: Hannah Bond, a slave on a North Carolina plantation owned by John Hill Wheeler, is the actual writer of “The Bondwoman’s Narrative,” the book signed by Hannah Crafts.

Beyond simply identifying the author, the professor’s research offers insight into one of the central mysteries of the novel, believed to be semi-autobiographical: how a house slave with limited access to education and books was heavily influenced by the great literature of her time, like “Bleak House” and “Jane Eyre,” and how she managed to pull off a daring escape from servitude, disguised as a man.

The professor, Gregg Hecimovich, the chairman of the English department at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C., has uncovered previously unknown details about Bond’s life that have shed light on how the novel was possibly written. The heavy influences of Dickens, for instance, particularly from “Bleak House,” can be explained by Bond’s onetime servitude on a plantation that routinely kept boarders from a nearby girls’ school; the curriculum there required the girls to recite passages of “Bleak House” from memory. Bond, secretly forming her own novel, could have listened while they studied, or spirited away a copy to read.