Seminar in the History of the Book

Wayne Wiegand (Florida State University) and Sarah Wadsworth (Marquette University)
“Right Here I See My Own Books”:
A Cultural History of the Women’s Library at the World’s Columbian Exposition
(Chicago, 1893)
Thursday, 21 February (Alexander Library, SCC Auditorium)

Abstract: From May to October 1893, the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago hosted over twenty-seven million visits from people who came to witness the myriad technological and cultural wonders on display. One such marvel was the seven-thousand-volume library housed within the Woman’s Building. As the first attempt to gather under one roof the collective contribution of women to the world of letters, the Woman’s Building Library carried the weight of a momentous historic event laden with lasting significance. But the library has a more elusive value as well, one that can be recovered only by considering the collection within the historical context of the 1890s. This presentation considers the Woman’s Building Library as simultaneously a representation and a redaction of the ways in which women of the late nineteenth century conceived of women’s writing and constructed it as a meaningful body of texts. The surviving bibliography can be regarded as a mirror of sorts that reflects (and sometimes distorts) the way in which women’s literary culture was perceived by the Library’s creators as well as by visitors to the Fair. The presentation includes a behind-the-scenes history of the Woman’s Building Library—a story saturated in the gender and racial politics of the American 1890s—as well as an analysis of some of the more striking features of this landmark collection of women’s writing. A brief demonstration of the Woman’s Building Library database will suggest ways in which the story this collection tells about women’s role in print culture departs substantially from those articulated in conventional literary histories.

Melodie Fox, Associate Dean of Instruction at Bryant & Stratton College (Milwaukee) will give an interactive demonstration of the Woman's Building Library relational database on Friday, 22 February, 10-12 a.m. (SCILS, Faculty Lounge)

Zachary Lesser (University of Pennsylvania)
Literary Drama: William Shakespeare vs. The Anonymous Thomas Tomkis
Thursday, 27 March (Alexander Library, Pane Room)

Abstract: Over the past two decades, the question of the "literary" status of drama has remained a central preoccupation of book-historical work in early modern studies. Were the plays of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and their contemporaries considered merely subliterary "riff-raff" as Thomas Bodley termed them in a letter advising his librarian to exclude playbooks from the nascent Bodleian Library? Or did these "plays" become "works" over the course of the early modern period? If so, how was this transformation effected? What I want to suggest in this talk is that, in seeking to answer these questions, we have left largely unexamined a logically prior question: What exactly do we mean by "literary" drama, and how does what we mean by that term relate to what early modern meant by it? To begin to answer this question, this paper tells the story of two very different publishers, Simon Waterson and his son John, who ran a shop at the sign of the Crown in Paul's Churchyard for nearly seventy years; and of two very different plays, Thomas Tomkis's Lingua (1607) and Shakespeare and John Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634), that issued from the Crown bookshop. Examining the careers of these two stationers, their playbooks, and especially the collapse of the Waterson shop following the death of the father and the accession of the son, will help to illuminate the fractured and often self-contradictory nature of "the literary" in seventeenth-century England.

B. Venkat Mani (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Unpacking Orhan Pamuk's Library: Shelf-Lives of Books
Thursday, 10 April (Plangere Annex in Murray Hall)

Abstract: This paper reflects on reading novels that travel faraway from their points of linguistic origin and create new readerships through acts of translation. Instead of proposing an easy accessibility of the "faraway reader," the paper questions the position and ambition of that reader, her accessibility to the world that the novel creates, and to the one in which the novel was created. Through these reflections, the paper moves to a discussion of select novels and non-fiction writings of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, in order to emphasize the pervasive presence of print media in the varied worlds that Pamuk creates for his readers. The paper explores the efficacy of Roger Chartier's work on "the materiality of the written" and "libraries without walls" as strategies for reading novels. In doing so, it underlines the need for innovative modes of "book-keeping" and "cataloging" that would push comparatist evaluations of contemporary textual practices beyond binaries of geo-cultural divides and inventories of influences.