University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press
Pages: 290
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9¼
978-1-61148-442-7 • Hardback • May 2012 • $128.00 • (£98.00)
978-1-61148-443-4 • eBook • May 2012 • $121.50 • (£94.00)
Kevin L. Cope is professor of English and of comparative literature at Louisiana State University. The author of three books and the editor of ten volumes as well as the general editor of two periodicals, ECCB: The Eighteenth-Century Current Bibliography and 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, Dr Cope is presently at work on a comprehensive study of the subterranean world (caves, volcanoes, mines, and earthquakes) in the long eighteenth century. Dr Cope is also active in university governance and higher education policy.
Robert C. Leitz, III is the curator of The James Smith Noel Collection and the holder of the Ruth Herring Noel Endowed Chair at Louisiana State University in Shreveport. Both a bibliographer and originally an expert on Jack London, Charles Chesnutt, William Dean Howells, and American prose, Dr Leitz has turned his efforts in recent years to the issues pertaining to rare book libraries and special collections. He is the Co-General Editor of ECCB: The Eighteenth-Century Current Bibliography as well as of several collections of essays in the area of eighteenth-century studies.
Introduction by Kevin L. Cope
Part I: Digital Distribution and its Discontents
“No Man but a Blockhead: What the Eighteenth Century has to Teach us about Digital Humanities” by David Hill Radcliffe
“The Plurality of Images for the Minority of Texts” by Kevin L. Cope
“Threats to Bibliographical and Textual Studies Posed by Widely Distributed Filmed and Digitized Texts” by James E. May
Part II: Profusion’s Precise Market Share: Entrepreneurs, Industries, and Eccentrics
“A War of Words: Privateers, Pirates, and a Professor’s Attempt to Enter the Fray; Or, Wandering in the Desert in the Land of Profusion” by Kathryn Stasio
“The Manuscript Newsletter: Its Contribution to the Evolution of the Public Sphere” by James L. Thorson and Connie Capers Thorson
“The Twenty-Years War: The Defoe Bibliography Controversy” by Kathleen “Kit” Kincade
“Power in Profusion: Collecting and Selecting Jane Austen’s Letters” by Peter Sabor
Part III: The Export File: The New World
“Commonplacing the Fathers” by John P. Kaminski
“In Pursuit of Laurence Sterne in America: A Lark in the Sandbox” by W. B. Gerard
“Thomas Jefferson’s ‘Absent Friends’” by Tom Baughn
Afterword
“Delirious God: Text, Book, and Library in the World of Samuel Johnson” / Greg Clingham
Exploring a burgeoning and increasingly popular field, these essays are invaluable.
— The Year's Work In English Studies
Most writing about the abundance of texts made possible by the digital revolution can be divided into utopian declarations of a dawning age of plenitude and lugubrious elegies on a lost age of Gutenberg. Cope, Leitz, and their contributors take a different track, offering learned, witty, and compelling accounts of canonicity, academic labor, and access to resources in our newly wired era, when scholarly standards are more, not less, important than under the old dispensation. Neither a pie-in-the-sky proclamation of triumphalism nor a glum jeremiad, Textual Studies and the Enlarged Eighteenth Century is a thoughtful and wide-ranging account of the current state of the art in eighteenth-century textual studies.
— Jack Lynch, Professor of English, Rutgers University and author of The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson and Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Excellent explorations of the ongoing ferment inside literary and cultural studies.
— John J. Burke, Jr., Professor of English, University of Alabama