Thursday, April 10 | 5:00PM
Plangere Writing Center Annex, Murray Hall 302

B. Venkat Mani (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Unpacking Orhan Pamuk's Library: The Shelf-Lives of Books

Thursday, March 27 | 5:00PM
Alexander Library, Pane Room

Zachary Lesser (University of Pennsylvania)

Literary Drama: William Shakespeare vs. The Anonymous Thomas Tomkis

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.

Thursday, February 21 | 5:00PM
Alexander Library, Teleconference Lecture Hall (4th Floor)

Wayne Wiegand (Florida State University)
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

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.

Sponsors:
Department of English | Center for Cultural Analysis | Department of French | Department of History

Department of Library and Information Science | Program in Early Modern Studies (PEMS)

Rutgers University Libraries | School of Arts and Sciences | School of Communication, Information & Library Studies
Department of Germanic,Russian, and East European Languages and Literatures | The Transliteratures Project

Contact: Meredith L. McGill