FRANKENSTEIN: Charles Robinson’s New Edition

The Hoarding is especially pleased to note the appearance of a paperback edition of Charles Robinson’s landmark Bodleian edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Here is his message, as posted to the NASSR list:

“On Mary Shelley’s birthday [she was born 30 August 1797], I take the opportunity of announcing that my Bodleian hardbound edition of The Original Frankenstein is available in the United States and Canada as a Vintage paperback for $14 [official publication date is 8 September 2009]. The edition of 448 pages contains two texts of the novel [the first uses italics for the words that PBS wrote into MWS’s Draft of the novel; the second removes all of these PBS words and restores MWS’s more colloquial words that he had canceled; and the second uses “running foots” to allow for comparisons between the two texts].

“This edition, based on the Bodleian Draft manuscripts, also retains the original structure of the novel in 2 volumes with 33 chapters [much faster paced than the first edition in 3 volumes and 23 chapters].

“Anyone interested in an examination copy for courses may contact

Keith Goldsmith
Executive Director of Academic Marketing
The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
(212) 572-2597
kgoldsmith@randomhouse.com

“Placing the ISBN of 978-0307474421 into google will yield descriptions, etc., at Amazon and other places.

“If you wish to send this email to your librarian for order, the url for the book is at

http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780307474421

Thank you.”

Charles E. Robinson

University of Delaware

CFP: “Victorian Forms and Formations:” BAVS Conference, University of Glasgow, September 2-4 2010

CFP:  British Association for Victorian Studies 2010 Conference :   ‘Victorian Forms and Formations’

September 2-4, 2010, University of Glasgow

The 2010 BAVS conference seeks to address the question of ‘form’, in all its varied meanings, in Victorian culture. We invite papers that address the topic of literary form, and that engage with current debates in the field over the return to form in literary criticism, but also wish to broaden the topic to encompass forms and formations in other disciplines, including but not limited to art history, science, architecture, politics, religion and history of the book. Papers might consider the role of different social and political groupings and institutions in the Victorian period, or the formation of a particular idea or discipline. They might deal with wide-ranging debates over varied attempts at reform in the nineteenth century, or could focus on the formation or reformation of the individual. Papers considering material forms, including the fashioning of the body in medical and other discourse, are welcome, as are papers on the physical features of the Victorian landscape: urban and rural spaces, natural forms and the built environment. We also invite papers that are concerned with the reworking of Victorian forms in twentieth and twenty-first century literature and culture.

Plenary speakers:

• James Eli Adams
• Matthew Campbell
• Margaret Macdonald
• Catherine Robson

A number of postgraduate bursaries will be available for postgraduate students presenting a paper at the conference or acting as a conference reporter. Please check this site in spring 2010 for details of how to apply.

Deadline for submission of abstract: 15 March 2010.  Please send a 200-word abstract to bavs@arts.gla.ac.uk

Suggested topics for consideration:
Poetic form* Narrative form* Generic formation* Neoformalism*  Political formations* Social reform* Educational reform* Scientific formations* Geological forms*  Religious formations* Imperial formations* Urban forms* Architectural form* Sculptural form* Domestic design* Intellectual formations* Forms of publication* Bodily formations* Gendered forms* Forms of conduct* Forming identities*  Moral forms*Neovictorian forms*

Dr Christine Ferguson
Department of English Literature
5/302 University Gardens
University of Glasgow
G12 8QQ
c.ferguson@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk

NASSR 2010: “Romantic Mediations”

The Eighteenth Annual North American Society for the Study of Romanticism Conference

ROMANTIC MEDIATIONS

August 18-22, 2010
Coast Plaza Hotel and Suites
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

The 2010 NASSR Conference is co-hosted by the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University in association with the University of Victoria.  The theme of the conference is ‘Romantic Mediations.’  The main focus is the communications technologies and print culture of the Romantic period.  But we also conceive of ‘mediation’ in a broadly metaphorical sense and look forward to papers on such topics as contacts between peoples and cultures, the tensions between bodies and minds, and the intersections of disciplines and forms of knowledge.

PLENARY SPEAKERS:

Heather Jackson (English, University of Toronto)
Iwan Rhys Morus (History, University of Wales at Aberyswyth)
Clifford Siskin (English, NYU) and William Warner (English, UCSB)

Please note that the conference will begin on a Wednesday evening with the first plenary and the opening reception.  We have decided to begin the conference on the Wednesday evening to avoid having panels on Sunday morning and to make room for the Annual General Meeting.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The organizers of the eighteenth annual NASSR conference, co-hosted by Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia, invite proposals from any discipline on the subject of Romantic Mediations.  A major Pacific Rim port, Vancouver marks the cultural intersections of the East and West and is a centre of both digital invention and environmental action—it is a city of meetings and mediations, broadly understood.   Similarly, the field of Romantic studies has been expanded and transformed by its engagements with the study of print culture, the histories of writing, technology, and scientific thought, the philosophy of mind and its environments, and the increased recognition of global movement.  The era that saw the invention of semaphore, telegraphy, the continuous-feed press, and the difference engine, the Romantic in all its senses might be characterized as a period of significant experimentation in media and ideas of mediation.  We imagine a conference that will engage the topic of mediation across a broad spectrum that includes materialist appreciation as well as theoretical inquiry—indeed, that emphasizes their meeting, or their mediations.

Possible Topics include:

* Communication and its Technologies
* The histories of writing and print
* Professionals and Amateurs
* Minds, Bodies, and Environments
* Culture and Nature
* Realities material and virtual
* Mediations of peoples and nations
* Cosmopolitanisms and Trans-nationalisms
* Spiritual Encounters and Religious Meetings
* Collecting and Antiquing
* Mediation and Disciplinarity
* Generic Blends and Mixtures (more to follow)

Please send abstracts of 250-500 words  to NASSR.2010@ubc.ca. The deadline for submission to the conference is 1 March 2010.

CFP: 19th-Century Literature at the CEA: “Voices”

NINETEENTH CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE

Call for Papers
The 41st Annual College English Association Conference
March 25-7, 2010
San Antonio, Texas
www2.widener.edu/~cea

Conference Theme: Voices
“And in my voice most welcome shall you be.”
_As You Like It_ 2:4.87

San Antonio. Images of the River Walk merge with the memories of its most famous location, the Alamo. Remember it, the voices from the past call out, and we do.

Those voices on opposing sides of its walls, representing Santa Anna and Sam Houston, spoke for two distinctly diverse cultures. And within those cultures were voices and texts that influenced the actions during that struggle, significant cultural markers of time, place, and being.

Before and after the struggle there, writers everywhere have reflected and influenced the events of their day, and from their experience, the great writers have created texts that have become ageless connections to what is past, or passing, or to come.

In the shadow of San Antonio’s famous symbol of voices that call for attention and allegiance, College English Association asks you to submit papers on any aspect of the following topics:

Native Voices
Giving Voice
Voices in Poetry, Fiction, Drama
Voice in Oral Literatures
Voices from the Center
Poet as Sayer; Poet as Voice-giver
Voice (lessness) as Power
Vox Populi
Composition and Voice
Voices of the Home
Oral Interpretation of literature
Voice as Speech
Digital Voices
Voices of Deception
Voices in the Wilderness
Voices of Joy
Voice Studies
Voices as Vocalizations
Voices of the Folk
Voices in Material Culture
Voices of Praise
Voices of Protest
Voice in Curricula, Courses, & Programs

Submission Instructions
Submit proposals online at www2.widener.edu/~cea

Electronic submissions open on August 21 and close on November 1, 2009.
Abstracts for proposals should be between 200 and 500 words in length
and should include a title.

RSVP Colby Prize: Nominations Sought

Call for Nominations
Robert Colby Scholarly Book Prize

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals is very pleased to award the annual Robert Colby Scholarly Book Prize for a scholarly book that most advances the understanding of the nineteenth-century British newspaper and/or periodical press.  All books exploring periodicals of the period are eligible (including single-author monographs, edited collections, and editions) as long as they have a publication date of 2009.  The winner will receive a plaque and a monetary award of up to $3,000, and will be invited to speak at the RSVP conference at Yale University in New Haven (September 10-11, 2010). The prize was made possible by a generous gift by Vineta Colby in honor of Robert Colby, a long and devoted member of RSVP and a major scholar in the field of Victorian periodicals.

Previous winners of the Colby Prize are:

• 2009:  Catherine Waters, Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (Ashgate)
• 2008:  Kathryn Ledbetter, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals: Commodities in Context (Ashgate).
• 2007: David Finkelstein, Ed., Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition (University of Toronto Press).
• 2005-2006: Linda Hughes, Graham R.: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters (Ohio University Press) and Peter Morton, The Busiest Man in London: Grant Allen and the Writing Trade, 1875-1900 (Palgrave).

To nominate a book please email Kathryn Ledbetter (KLedbetter@txstate.edu) by December 1, 2009.  Self-nominations are welcome.

Byron Journal on Project MUSE; New Issue Available

The Hoarding is happy to see that the Byron Journal is now available in electronic form as a Project MUSE resource.  Those of you without access to MUSE articles can receive the quarterly print journal by joining the Byron Society of America for $25 (students) / $40 (regular) per year.  See here for details.

The new issue (37:1) contains articles on the following subjects:

• Byron and Scottish Romanticism, by Murray Pittock
• Byron and Cain, by Trevor Hart
• Leigh Hunt’s Letters to Byron, by Timothy Webb
• Byron and Montaigne, by Anne Fleming
• Byron’s Manfred, by Michael Simpson

There are also other items, including a tribute to Maureen Crisp, a report on an April 2009 staging of Sardanapalus, and reports on various Byronic conferences and events in Manchester, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.  Book reviews by Bernard Beatty, Jane Stabler, Emily Berhard Jackson, Richard Foulkes, Gilles Soubigou, Andrew Nicholson, Alistair Hays, Jack Wasserman, Diego Saglia, Sally Bushell, John Baker, Chris Jones, Claire Brock, Rebecca Domke, Elham Nilchian, and Sharon Ruston.

The International Byron Conference will be held in a few weeks in Greece. Click here for more information.

CFP: British Women Writers @ Texas A&M, April 2010

Cross-posted from the VICTORIA list:

The 18th Annual 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers Conference
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX

“Journeys”
April 8-11, 2010

Call for Papers

This year’s conference will explore the abundant varieties of journeys found
in 18th- and 19th-century British women’s writing. We encourage
interdisciplinary considerations of topics such as migration, travel, exile,
exploration, tourism, border crossing, religion, travel writing, art,
fantasy, children’s literature and more.

We are pleased to announce that our speakers will include Kate Flint,
Felicity Nussbaum, Mary Fissell, Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, and Erika Rappaport.

Proposals for panels and individual papers might consider, but are not
limited to, the following issues:

-Travel writing/art
-Biographical narratives
-Marriage/Honeymoon
-Continental tours
-Motherhood/Childhood
-Colonialism and Empire
-Philosophical investigations
-Scientific inquiry
-Religious explorations
-Spiritual awakenings
-Transatlantic movement of persons, ideas, and/or goods
-Immigration/Emigration
-Memory as travel
-Dreams
-Re-envisioning the past/future
-Mapping the body
-Rites of passage
-Crossing class boundaries
-Movement between private and public spheres
-Exile (Social, Political, Familial)
-Women and work
-Education
-Intertextuality

Individual proposals should be two pages: a cover sheet including name,
presentation title, university affiliation, address, email address, phone
number, and brief biographical paragraph; and a 500-word abstract. Please do
not include any identifying information on the abstract.

Panel proposals should include a coversheet–containing panel title,
presenters’ names, presentation titles, university affiliations, addresses,
email addresses, phone numbers, brief biographical paragraphs, and the name
of the moderator–followed by separate abstracts (500-word) that describe
the significance of the panel topic and each presentation. Please do not
include any identifying information on the abstracts.

Proposals must be submitted electronically as an attachment in .doc or .rtf
format by October 15, 2009 to the conference email address: BWWC18@tamu.edu.

For more information and updates, please visit our conference website
http://www-english.tamu.edu/bwwc18

Thank you!
Elizabeth Talafuse
BWWC 2010 Organizing Committee
Texas A&M University

New Ashgate Collection: Fellow Romantics

Fellow Romantics: Male and Female British Writers, 1790–1835

• Edited by Beth Lau, California State University, Long Beach, USA
• Series : The Nineteenth Century Series

Beginning with the premise that men and women of the Romantic period were lively interlocutors who participated in many of the same literary traditions and experiments, Fellow Romantics offers an inspired counterpoint to studies of Romantic-era women writers that stress their differences from their male contemporaries. As they advance the work of scholars who have questioned binary approaches to studying male and female writers, the contributors variously link, among others, Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, Mary Robinson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Felicia Hemans and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jane Austen and the male Romantic poets. These pairings invite us to see anew the work of both male and female writers by drawing our attention to frequently neglected aspects of each writer’s art. Here we see writers of both sexes interacting in their shared historical moment, while the contributors reorient our attention toward common points of engagement between male and female authors. What is gained is a more textured understanding of the period that will serve as a model for future studies.

· Contents:

• Introduction, Beth Lau
• Revisiting the egotistical sublime: Smith, Wordsworth and the romantic dramatic dialogue, Jacqueline M. Labbe
• Coleridge and Robinson; harping on lyrical exchange, Ashley Cross
• Romantic ambivalence in Frankenstein and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Beth Lau
• ”Something must be done”: Shelley, Hemans, and the flash of revolutionary female violence, Susan J. Wolfson
• Spiritual converse: Hemans’s A Spirit’s Return in dialogue with Byron and Shelley, Alan Richardson
• William Wordsworth and Felicia Hemans, Julie Melnyk
• ”Does it not make you think of Cowper?” : rural sport in Jane Austen and her contemporaries, Barbara K. Seeber
• The uses and abuses of imagination in Jane Austen and the romantic poets, Beth Lau
• ”Beautiful but ideal”: intertextual relations between Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Michael O’Neill
• Romantic and Victorian conversations: Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning in dialogue with Byron and Shelley, Jane Stabler

· About the Editor: Beth Lau is professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, USA

· Reviews: ‘Beth Lau has assembled a strong group of scholars who adopt a new approach to the study of male and female writers in the romantic period. Rather than sorting writers by gender, these essays put men and women into conversation, exploring how they mutually inspired one another, influenced one another, shaped one another. The collection brings women within romanticism in a different way, showing how close they are to the major male writers of the traditional canon. We find, for example, refreshing accounts of Hemans and her connections with Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth, of Austen’s use of romantic poetry, and of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning’s shared interest in Byron and Shelley.’
Jeffrey N. Cox, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA

New Ashgate book on Enlightenment and Romantic Novels

A new book published by Ashgate will be of interest to Romanticists:

Enlightening Romanticism, Romancing the Enlightenment:

Edited by Miriam L. Wallace, New College of Florida, USA

Ashgate, July 2009 234 x 156 mm

240 pages Hardback

978-0-7546-6243-3 $99.95

As eighteenth-century scholarship expands its range, and disciplinary boundaries such as Enlightenment and Romanticism are challenged, novels published during the rich period from 1750 to 1832 have become a contested site of critical overlap. In this volume, scholars who typically write under the rubric of either the long eighteenth century or Romanticism examine novels often claimed by both scholarly periods. This shared enterprise opens new and rich discussions of novels and novelisticconcerns by creating dialogue across scholarly boundaries. Dominant narratives, critical approaches, and methodological assumptions differ in important ways, but these differences reveal a productive tension. Among the issues engaged are the eighteenth-century novel’s development of emotional interiority, including theories of melancholia; the troubling heritage of the epistolary novel for the 1790s radical novel; tensions between rationality and romantic affect; issues of aesthetics and politics; and constructions of gender, genre, and race. Rather than positing a simple opposition between an eighteenth-century Enlightenment of rationality, propriety, and progress and a Romantic Period of inspiration, heroic individualism, and sublime emotionality, these essays trace the putatively ‘Romantic’ in the early 1700s as well as the long legacy of ‘Enlightenment’ values and ideas well into the nineteenth century. The volume concludes with responses from Patricia Meyer Spacks and Stephen C. Behrendt, who situate the essays and elaborate on the stakes.

Contents

• “Introduction: enlightened romanticism or romantic enlightenment?” by Miriam L. Wallace
• “Novel romanticism in 1751: Eliza Haywood”s Betsy Thoughtless,” by Margaret Case Croskery
• “The melancholy Briton: enlightenment sources of the Gothic,” by Peter Walmsley
• ”’Disagreeable misconstructions’: epistolary trouble in Charlotte Smith”s Desmond,” by Scott C. Campbell
• “Reason and romance: rethinking romantic-era fiction through Jane West”s The Advantages of Education,” by Daniel Schierenbeck
• “The politics of masculinity in the 1790s radical novel: Hugh Trevor, Caleb Williams and the romance of sentimental friendship,” by Shawn Lisa Maurer
• “The ‘double sense’ of honor: revising gendered social codes in Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray,” by Shelley King
• “Reading the metropole: Elizabeth Hamilton”s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah,” by Tara Ghoshal Wallace
• “The Woman of Genius: in praise of the inchoate future,” by Julie Shaffer
• “Frances Trollope”s America: from enlightenment aesthetics to Victorian class,” by Christopher Flynn

Response Essays:

• “How we see: the 1790s,” by Patricia M. Spacks
• “Cultural transitions, literary judgements, and the romantic-era British novel,” by Stephen C. Behrendt

Reviews of Richard Holmes’ Age of Wonder

Here is a small collection of reviews of Richard Holmes’s new book, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and the Terror of Science

Molly Young, on the Poetry Foundation website:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=237378

Patricia Fara, in the Literary Review:

http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/fara_10_08.html

Jenny Uglow in the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/11/richard-holmes

Adam Kirsch in Slate:

http://www.slate.com/id/2222360/

An excerpt from The Age of Wonder, courtesy of Random House and the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/books/excerpt-age-of-wonder.html