Youth, Writing, and Scholarship

Abstract

Under the heading of Issues in Pedagogy and Research I can cheerfully present you with not so much an issue as a project in both Pedagogy and Research. My project involves students directly in the nuts and bolts of scholarship, and it is becoming an important area of my own research. My pedagogical baby, the Juvenilia Press, started not as a press but a classroom exercise. Since Jane Austen's juvenilia are an area of her writing not much worked over, in an undergraduate course on Austen I made one available essay topic the introducing, editing, and annotating of Jack and Alice, a very funny story that she wrote when she was about thirteen. Of the two students who took on the topic, one concentrated on the introduction, one on the annotations. We put their work together, sought permission to print from OUP, added light hearted illustrations by other members of the class, and bingo! we had a little book.11 printed up a little edition, not just enough for souvenir volumes for the class, but some to spare, which I sold to members of the Jane Austen Society. And we ended up ? rather to my embarrassment ? making a profit. That was the simple beginning of a project that has grown into the Juvenilia Press. We now have a list of ten titles, with more in the works. Several of them ? juvenile works by Charlotte Bront?, Louisa May Alcott, and Jane Austen ? were produced almost entirely by undergraduate students, as part of their work for a course (with some fairly interventionist editing by me, I confess). Others are by known scholars in the area, who have worked in various degrees of collaboration with their students, graduate and undergraduate. We don't specify what the student input has to be; only that some student involvement is a sine qua non of each volume. When Isobel Grundy, a major scholar who is writing a biography of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, offered us a hitherto unpublished story that Lady