Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Research Articles

How to Revise a True War Story: Tim O'Brien's Process of Textual Production

How to Revise a True War Story: Tim O'Brien's Process of Textual Production

African Holdings of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin

Last year the University of Texas at Austin celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of what was to become the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, an archive named after a former English professor who had risen rapidly up the university's administrative ranks, using his considerable budgetary authority as Dean, Vice President, Provost, President, and finally Chancellor of the entire fifteen-campus University of Texas system to fulfill his vision of establishing in Austin “a center of cultural compass, a research center to be the Bibliotheque Nationale of the only state that started out as an independent nation”. To get things started, on September 11,1957, in his position as Director of the university's Rare Book Collection, he wrote a formal letter to himself authorising the expenditure of $25,000 from Special Research Collections in Humanities “to purchase books and materials for the use of the humanities faculty in furthering their research”.

The Topos of the Mound in Samuel Beckett’s Writing

Abstract This essay aims to bring to the fore the varied and broad valences of the ‘mound’ in Beckett’s oeuvre. In my reading, the mound functions as a profuse, multi-purpose symbol, that coalesces into a variety of topoi indicative of Mother Earth, that figure in the thighs, the nipples, the pubis/pubic area and bones, ruins, ants, birth, fetus, and elemental maternal death. I embarked upon the present study before the commencement of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, a collaborative project between the Centre for Manuscript Genetics at the University of Antwerp, the Beckett International Foundation, the University of Reading and Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin. Valorising the author’s editing, additions, notes and comments provided by the upcoming digitalized manuscripts of Beckett in 2014 and 2015, I expect to contribute to the work in progress, and to the corpus of Beckett studies in general, especially those approaching his bilingual works. It is my contention that the frequency of certain terms, the diagrams that Beckett included in some of his letters (as is the case of the mound in Happy Days), shed significant light on the nature of his symbolism.

Profiles: A Pilgrim’s Progress: Decherd Turner, 1922-2002

A biographical profile of Decherd Turner, director of the Bridwell Library at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX from 1950-80, and director of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin from 1980-88. This profile focuses on Turner's remarkable personality and his accomplishments in building the special collections of these institutions.

J. M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics After Beckett

J. M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics After Beckett

The Mysterious Fate of La Bibliothèque de Louis Pasteur (1822–1895)

In addition to the holdings at Bibliothèque Nationale de France and Musée du Pasteur Institut à Paris, major parts of la Bibliothèque de Louis Pasteur are in four institutions in the United States - Reynolds Historical Library at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Alabama; Burndy Library on the History of Science and Technology at Huntington Library in San Marino, California; Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at University of Texas in Austin, Texas; and Truman G Blocker History of Medicine Collections, The Moody Medical Library, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas. The circuitous paths that led each part of la Bibliothèque de Louis Pasteur to their present locations were traced and the lives of key individuals in medicine, science and the humanities who obtained these valuable documents were recounted. The documents in each institution were discussed and a plan was considered to make them accessible to scholars who wish to further explore the life of Louis Pasteur.

Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller (review)

Reviewed by: Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller Jack Fischel, Emeritus Professor of History, Visiting Professor of the Humanities Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller, by Ira B. Nadel. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. 352 pp. $27.95. Before his death in 2003, Leon Uris authored 13 novels, three Hollywood movie scripts (Battle Cry, 1954, The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, 1957, and The Angry Hills, 1959), and a photographic history, accompanied with historical essays on Israel and Ireland. He will be best remembered, however, for his best-selling historical works of fiction, Battle Cry (1953), Exodus (1958), and Trinity (1976). An indefatigable researcher, Uris prided himself on his extensive research and interviews, which laid the groundwork for recreating, among other historical events the Warsaw Ghetto uprising (Mila 18), the founding of Israel (Exodus), and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish history (Trinity). Although not recognized among the top tier of American-Jewish writers, such as Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, and Bernard Malamud, Uris nevertheless has attained his place, along with Herman Wouk and Chaim Potok, amid the nation's best-selling novelists. Uris' most important work, Exodus, was not only among the most popular novels of its time, but it did more to instill a positive image of Israel in the mind of the American public than any work of history or fiction to this date. When Doubleday published Exodus, the former prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, noted its propaganda value as the most significant thing ever written about Israel. Aside from Kathleen Shine Cain's Leon Uris: A Critical Companion (1998), however, there has not until now been a full-length critical study of Uris's life and work. This omission has been rectified with the publication of [End Page 153] Ira Nadel's biography (which oddly omits Cain's work in its bibliography) of one of the last century's most important writers of popular fiction. Both the strength and weakness of Nadel's biography, however, lies with his access to the Leon Uris archive, housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and much information about his early life gleaned from his interviews with Uris's family. Although Nadel has made an important contribution to our understanding of his subject, he writes as if he were determined to provide the reader with every detail unearthed from his research, whether relevant or not. Nadel, for example, notes that an intruder was found dressed in Uris's bathrobe in his Colorado home (p. 236), but neglects to inform us of the relevance of this incident. This criticism aside, there is much to praise in Nadel's biography and he certainly succeeds in providing us with a great many insights about a writer whose novels challenged the stereotype of the effete Jew and promoted the image of the "tough Jew." Leon Marcus Uris was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to Wolf William Uris, a shopkeeper, and Anna Blumberg. Both parents were Jews of Russian Polish origin. His father, an immigrant from Poland, spent a year in Palestine after World War I and derived his surname from Yerushalmi, meaning "man of Jerusalem." Uris, growing up in Norfolk, Virginia, was undersized as well as asthmatic and once said that "I used to think of myself as a sad little Jewish boy." Leon was brought up without any religious training, and because his father was a Communist, he forbade his son any preparation for becoming a Jew, including training for a bar-mitzvah (both his son and daughter through his third wife, Jill Peabody, received a bar and bat-mitzvah). Later in life, Uris, because of the Holocaust, embraced a part of Judaism because he wanted it as his moral standard for living. Until his service in the U.S. Marines (the inspiration for his first best-seller, Battle Cry) Uris never strongly identified with Judaism or religion. As Nadel writes, The history of the Jews meant something to him culturally, but not spiritually and certainly not personally. But the image of the "soft" Jew angered him and he was determined to replace it with one of strength. He undertook...

The Rectory Magazine (review)

Reviewed by: The Rectory Magazine Richard Kelly (bio) The Rectory Magazine by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) Eds. Valerie Sanders and Elizabeth O'Reilly; pp. 136. Sydney, Australia: Juvenilia Press, 2008. $15.00. The trouble with juvenilia is that they seldom make compelling reading in themselves, but since they often prefigure their author's mature works, they deepen our understanding of the creative process and the development of complex imaginations. Juvenilia Press, which has published editions of juvenilia by authors from Jane Austen to Harold Pinter, provides a welcome and important look at the origins of literary genius. The Rectory Magazine is one of several family publications that Lewis Carroll edited, wrote for, and illustrated (with some contributions from his brothers and sisters) during his teens, while living at the Croft Rectory. An amalgam of prose, verse, satiric "Reviews," "Answers to Correspondents," and illustrations, The Rectory Magazine reveals an intelligence, wit, and careful eye for the absurd in contemporary literature and magazines. A facsimile edition, edited by Jerome Bump, based on the original manuscript in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, was published in 1975. The scarcity of this decades-old edition makes the current one all the more agreeable. In their introduction, Sanders and O'Reilly briefly discuss the text and its ambiguous date of composition (somewhere between 1845 and 1850) and go on to recount the tradition of family magazines in the nineteenth century. They assume that the Dodgson family members were familiar with such periodicals as the Edinburgh Review, Blackwood's, and Punch and conclude that these works served as models for Carroll's satiric incarnations of them. The editors then credit Jane Austen and Charles Dickens for helping to shape Carroll's irony in deflating the pompous and socially pretentious humbugs of the day. They also assume that Carroll's puns, made-up words, and (in his verse) rollicking rhythms reflect Lear's A Book of Nonsense, published in 1846. In the Carroll and Lear scholarship, however, there is (amazingly) no evidence that Carroll ever read Lear or even heard of him. Similarly, there are no indications that Lear was familiar with Carroll, despite his later fame for the Alice books. Lear, of course, was hardly a household name in 1846, whereas works by Dickens and Austen were much more likely to have been gathered into the Dodgson family library. Nevertheless, Sanders and O'Reilly make a reasonable case for Lear's early influence based upon several parallels in the styles of each author. Carroll's eye for the absurd and his delight in the sheer sport of nonsense are apparent throughout this volume. In his essay "Ideas Upon Ink," he observes that in ancient times there was no ink, that people scratched on the leaves of the papyrus, and goes on to wonder what it would be like if people now had to read the Times on papyrus. Adjoining the essay is his cartoonish colour illustration of a family attempting to read the news on huge papyrus leaves. A [End Page 239] man asks, "Julia, can you understand that leader [British term for editorial]?" Sitting beneath one of the large leaves, Julia responds, "As I'm sure I can't, it's quite above me" (81). Some of Carroll's verse reveals his sense of the comic grotesque, foreshadowing works like "Phantasmagoria" and "Jabberwocky." His fascination with railroads in "Terrors" combines images of mythic horror deflated by the mundane: Is not that an angry snakeLo! he twists his writhing tail!Hear the hisses he doth make!See his yellow coat of mail. Distant howls still louder groan,Angry mutterings sounding near,All proclaim with solemn tone,Something dreadful coming here! Lo! it comes, a vision grim!Puffing forth black coils of smoke!While amid these terrors dimI listened, thus the monster spoke, "Clear the line there! Clear the rails!"Stop the engine! hold there! steady!"Stoker! hand me up those pails!"Euston station! tickets ready!" (52) Although the helpful notes at the end of this edition comment on a few of the connections between The Rectory Magazine and the Alice books, one wishes that the editors had...

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Politics, Print Culture and the Habermas Thesis Cluster

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Politics, Print Culture and the Habermas Thesis Cluster

John Osborne: A Patriot for Us (review)

Reviewed by: John Osborne: A Patriot for Us Luc Gilleman John Heilpern . John Osborne: A Patriot for Us. London: Chatto & Windus, 2006. Pp. xv+528 , illustrated. £25.00 (Hb); American edition: John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man. New York: Knopf, 2007. $35.00 (Hb). Recent scholarship is demanding a re-evaluation rather than a dismissal of John Osborne's work. Dan Rebellato, in 1956 and All That, points to the many external factors that helped build Look Back in Anger's reputation: an extract was shown on television, for instance, and the newly established Royal Court Theatre needed a creation myth and a controversy to get off the ground financially. Rebellato also mentions more sinister reasons for the play's success: its vitality was hailed as an authentic masculine energy, a breath of fresh air after the closeted daintiness of Binkie Beaumont productions. The reputation of gay playwrights such as Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan suffered as a consequence — undeservedly so, as Rebellato has shown in his superb introductions to new editions of Rattigan's work. Ten years in preparation, John Heilpern's authorized biography of John Osborne is a defence of both the work and the man against what the biographer sometimes wrongly perceives as their enemies. The book's argument in defence of Look Back in Anger is a passionate but familiar one: with Look Back in Anger, the drama of evasion made way for one of confrontation. Inadvertently, this defence gives fuel to Rebellato's argument — even as Heilpern admits that, while George Devine, artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre, insisted on a breach rather than a continuity with the past, Osborne admired Rattigan's and some of Coward's plays. Indeed, with Time Present (1968), The Hotel in Amsterdam (1968), and West of Suez (1971), Osborne returned to the tradition that Look Back in Anger was said to have replaced. Osborne pre-empted much of the biographer's work in two autobiographical volumes, A Better Class of Person (1981) and Almost a Gentleman (1992), the first containing some of his best prose. To these, Heilpern's biography often and perhaps inevitably reads like an appendix. Heilpern, who worked for The Observer with Helen Dawson, Osborne's last wife (his "Numero Cinque," as he fondly referred to her), [End Page 292] has used considerable journalistic skill in tracking down and interviewing major and minor figures in the autobiographies. He has also made good use of Osborne's archives at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas. While others have perused this impressive collection, Heilpern is the first to be granted permission to quote verbatim from the private notebooks and correspondence kept there. Among the letters Osborne sold for cash is his devastating repudiation, in 1982, of Nolan Osborne, his sixteen-year-old daughter with novelist Penelope Gilliatt. It eerily resembles Bill Maitland's rejection of his daughter in Inadmissible Evidence (1964). The theatre is a gossipy kind of world, and this is a pleasantly written, gossipy kind of book. Not everyone is pleased with this kind of approach, however. For example, the book received a devastating review from Ferdinand Mount in the Spectator (6 May 2006), for many years home to Osborne's "Diary" column. However, a biography of Osborne cannot avoid dealing with sex, not when its deliberately camp subject is on the record, gloating, "Whatever else, I have been blessed with God's two greatest gifts: to be born English and heterosexual." According to David Hare, what was so "revolutionary" about Look Back in Anger was that it was all about sex (127) — and so is every other Osborne play, most notably A Sense of Detachment (1972), that strange medley of porn and poetry that sent an outraged public in murderous pursuit of the playwright. Moreover, Osborne never let go of a chance to reveal a sexual indiscretion, especially other people's, so it should have come as no surprise that some of his victims retaliated. Shortly after his death, Nicolas de Jongh outed the playwright in an infamous series of newspaper articles, claiming that Osborne and his early collaborator Anthony Creighton had been lovers. In the...

Cultural Record Keepers: The Evelyn Waugh Library, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin

Cultural Record Keepers: The Evelyn Waugh Library, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin

Fast Learner: The Typescript of Pynchon's V. at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin

Fast Learner:The Typescript of Pynchon’s V. at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin Luc Herman and John M. Krafft "Scripts're in the top drawer." But they were all purple, Dittoed—worn, torn, stained with coffee. Nothing else in the drawer. "Hey. . . . Where's the original? What did you make these copies from?" (Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 77–78) In the spring of 2001, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRC) at The University of Texas at Austin announced its "acquisition of the corrected typescript to Thomas Pynchon's first novel, V. [1963]," along with eight letters written by Pynchon to Faith and Kirkpatrick Sale between 1960 and 1964 (Stephen Smith). Until now, critics have not had much apart from Pynchon's novels and stories to work on or with: the occasional letter; Pynchon's introduction to Slow Learner, his 1984 collection of the short stories he published between 1959 and 1964; some juvenilia (contributions to a high school newspaper, reprinted in the Pynchonbibliography by Clifford Mead); and a little nonfiction, including a New York Times Magazine article on the Watts riots. This lack of materials put Pynchon scholars at a disadvantage when it came to genetic criticism, in which texts are studied with a focus on their development. How did Pynchon's novels come to be what they are? We had almost no way of knowing until now, but the HRC typescript radically changes this situation with regard to V. We were aided in the early stages of our research into the Ransom Center's acquisition by the late Stephen Tomaske, a librarian at California State University at Los Angeles who had been doing biographical research on Pynchon for some twenty years. Since we thought (perhaps erroneously) that Pynchon himself would not like to collaborate on this project, we approached Corlies ("Cork") Smith, Pynchon's editor for V. at the publishing house J. B. Lippincott. Smith was extremely forthcoming. We interviewed him by telephone and face to face, and he even provided us with nearly all his editorial correspondence with Pynchon about V.1 [End Page 1] Those letters proved invaluable, since they provide the key to the connection between the Ransom Center's typescript and the published novel. The correspondence we have between Cork Smith and Pynchon starts in March 1960 with a "'Hello There!'" note from Smith and ends abruptly in June 1962 in the midst of a discussion about the place of a specific chapter in the eventual text. Thanks to the good offices of Pynchon's recently acquired agent, the famous Candida Donadio, Lippincott had bought his story "Low-lands" for inclusion in issue 16 of its New World Writing series, which came out in 1960. Donadio knew that Pynchon was writing a novel, and she managed to sell this unfinished novel to Lippincott as well. The date on the contract (as we learned from Tzofit Butler, the manager of theInformation Center Archives at HarperCollins, which currently holds the rights to V.) is January 29, 1960. Cork Smith told us in this connection that Lippincott also "faked up a delivery date. We put it like a year and a half later or something." Sure enough, on August 2, 1961, Smith wrote to Pynchon that Lippincott had accepted the novel. Smith recalls that, since the decision had to be cleared with his boss, he must have received the novel perhaps three or four weeks before the beginning of August, which means Pynchon delivered almost exactly on the fake date added at the time of the contract. The novel reached Lippincott in a box via Pynchon's agent. Smith is adamant that this box contained a clean typewritten original. Therefore, that document is not what can now be consulted in Austin. The typescript acquired by the HRC is a copy rather than an original. To be more precise, the typescript features two kinds of copies, one black, the other various shades of blue. Sarah Funke, an employee of Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in New York, through whom the HRC bought the typescript, identified the blue pages as carbon copies. But the crispness of the type, evidence of scraping, and exactness of corrections on the...

Hannah More Items in the Huntington Library: Correspondence and a Poem

Hannah More Items in the Huntington Library: Correspondence and a Poem

Royal-Paper Copies of Aldine Editions, 1494–1550

Royal-Paper Copies of Aldine Editions, 1494–1550 Conor Fahy* (bio) The question of royal-paper copies of Aldine editions, of which the bulk of the surviving copies are printed on smaller paper, first impinged on my consciousness a few years ago, in the course of a collaborative research project on the first edition of Baldassar Castiglione’s Il libro del Cortegiano, a folio printed by the Aldine press between the end of November 1527 and the beginning of April 1528. In a letter sent from Spain in April 1527 to his factor, Cristoforo Tirabosco, Castiglione expressed the wish to have an edition of 1000 copies, for which he did not specify a paper size, plus thirty copies to be printed on the best quality royal paper available in Venice at the time. In a further letter to Tirabosco, written in April 1528, after the publication of the edition, Castiglione again referred to the thirty copies on royal paper, indicating that some at least were intended as presentation copies to important figures, such as the marquis of Mantua, Isabella d’Este and Elisabetta Gonzaga, “quelli più principali”, as he explained.1 Our census of surviving copies of this edition brought to light 147 copies,2 none of which was distinguished by its leaf height, but which were printed on two different paper stocks, 136 on stocks (predominantly anchor paper) which [End Page 85] we know from the evidence of an uncut copy in the library of the Diocesan Seminary, Padua, to be super-chancery, and eleven, all bound and trimmed, on another sort of anchor paper, easily distinguishable from the stocks used in the majority of copies by having no countermark.3 It was tempting to assume that these eleven copies were the survivors of the thirty copies on royal paper ordered by Castiglione, but to have been reduced to their present size all eleven must have undergone a savage trimming over the centuries, reducing the leaf size of an untrimmed royal folio (c.445 × 307 mm) to that of a trimmed super-chancery folio (c.315 × 220 mm). Since the royal-paper copies, or some of them, were destined originally for illustrious personages, it seemed odd that not one of our eleven should have leaf dimensions which indicated that it might have been printed on royal paper. But because of the pressure of other work I put the problem to one side. My interest in the question was rekindled recently by the chance encounter, in the pages of the catalogue of the Aldine collection of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin, of an entry relating to the 1536 folio edition of the commentary by the Byzantine philosopher and theologian Eustratius of Nicea on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. Alongside a first copy of the edition, for which, in accordance with the general practice of the catalogue, no leaf size was given, the collection also contained a second copy, on “very large paper”, measuring 425 × 270 mm.4 The discovery of a folio edition published by the Aldine press less than ten years after the Cortegiano, containing a copy printed on what seemed like royal paper, led me to reopen the question of the eleven copies of the Cortegiano printed on paper different from that used in the main run. And the first step was clearly that of finding out whether, in the production of the Aldine press, there were other known examples of this usage. In the last fifty years many important studies have been published on the press, particularly for the period from 1494 to 1515, when it was directed by the great Aldus. These studies have given us a much deeper knowledge of the cultural importance of Aldus’s publication programme, of his relations with the international world of scholarship, of the commercial organization of the press, of the various series of types created by and for him, and of the links between [End Page 86] the press and the Venetian art world. But in all this activity there has been a notable absentee—a serious interest in the descriptive bibliography of the Aldine press. One of the obstacles is...

Anne Sexton and Confessional Poetics

This article re-evaluates the work of the American poet Anne Sexton. It suggests that, far from being the apotheosis of confessionalism, as is typically asserted, Sexton's writing is engaged in a process of negotiation and contestation with the boundaries of the confessional mode. The article begins by summarizing and critiquing conventional definitions of confessional poetry, as exem-plified in the work of Sexton's contemporaries, A. Alvarez, M. L. Rosenthal, and others. Thereafter, a number of more recent, theoretically rigorous accounts of confessional discourse (including the work of Antony Easthope, Michel Foucault, and Leigh Gilmore) are introduced. Close readings of a number of Sexton's poems are offered in order to assess the appropriateness of these critical approaches. In particular, the little-known poem ‘Cripples and Other Stories’ is examined. The article suggests that this text reads as a provocative pastiche and rejection of orthodox readings of confessionalism, and anticipates and substantiates the perceptions of confessional discourse proposed by later, post-structuralist, commentators. The argument throughout the article is informed by reference to unpublished material from the Sexton archive at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Romps with Ransom’s King: Fans, Collectors, Academics, and the M. P. Shiel Archives

HOUSING THE ARCHIVES OF SUCH NOTABLE LITERARY FIGURES as Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, E. E. Cummings, and Oscar Wilde, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas is a Mecca for academic researchers from all over the world. At the same time, it is a Mecca for a very different kind of researcher attracted to a very different kind of archive. Take Alex, for example, a self-professed goth who describes his pilgrimage to the Ransom Center to view the Aleister Crowley archives in his blog, Alex's Journal. (1) Among his other interests cited on the user info page, Alex lists death metal, body piercing, drinking, comics hurting peoples brains [sic], debauchery, subdural haematomas, and weirding out weird people. The sheer eccentricity of the Ransom's collections--which include high literary, mass cultural, and even counter-cultural material--make it a place where a professor earnestly poring over a Joyce manuscript might rub shoulders with a like Alex who describes his research on Crowley as having fun and taking some cool notes. In other words, it is a place where the academic and the come face to face. The essay that follows discusses this confrontation between the academic and the in the archive--not in a literal way--but through the story of the archive of M. P. Shiel, an obscure writer of mystery, detective, horror, science fiction and other popular genres. His archives at the Ransom Center owe their existence entirely to a select few fans of Shiel--namely, a drunken bibliophile and a right-wing millionaire plastics manufacturer--figures who, like Alex, present a stark contrast to the earnest academics we normally associate with archives. In telling the story of this archive, the essay considers the differing discourses of the academic and the and how these discourses come into conflict when fans become implicated with archives, when fans engage in scholarship, and when the academic confronts the inside him- or herself. At the same time, it reveals how the Ransom Center became the kind of eclectic research institution that would consider creating archives devoted not only to renowned literary and cultural figures, but also to popular and mass cultural figures, from the more enduring and notorious of these--such as Crowley--to the most obscure and forgotten--such as Shiel. Academic, Fan, and Collector Discourse One of the reasons the image of the earnest Joyce scholar rubbing shoulders with the goth of Crowley in the Ransom Center is so amusing is that implicitly we recognize the stark contrast between the ethos of the academic and that of the fan. Before going on to discuss how the Shiel archives bring academics and fans into conflict, I will briefly summarize the discourses that define the academic and the fan. I will also describe the discourse of another figure central to the existence of archives, one who bears a close relationship to the fan--the collector. While academics, fans, and collectors may be broadly characterized as having in common a deep investment in culture, there are great differences in what Matt Hills calls the imagined subjectivities of these distinct groups or, the guiding discourses and ideals of they adopt (8). (2) Broadly speaking, academic culture is founded on Enlightenment principles which value reason over emotion, objectivity over subjectivity (Jensen 21, Frith 581). An academic would never, for example, describe his or her archival experience as taking cool notes, as Alex, the fan, does. Fans, who have a strong emotional engagement with and who express enthusiasm for their areas of interest, do not fare well under such a discourse. (3) The term fan itself, a term derived from the word fanatic, suggests a form of engagement with culture antithetical to that of the reasoning and objective academic. Fandom, as Joli Jensen, Lawrence Grossberg, Matt Hills, and others have argued, has tended to be pathologized by academics and this practice has served to uphold an elitist us/them dichotomy between forms of engagement with cultural life. …

Shaw's Sex Credo

[Shaw's letter to Frank Harris, 24 June 1930, is published in Dan H. Laurence, ed., Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters IV, 1926-1950 (New York: Viking, 1988), pp. 190-93. A slightly bowdlerized version appears at the end of the chapter entitled Sex Credo in Harris's Bernard Shaw: An Unauthorized Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1931; London, Victor Gollancz, 1931). Substantial changes, deletions, and additions were made for republication as To Frank Harris on Sex in Biography, chapter XVI of Shaw's Sixteen Self Sketches (London: Constable, 1949). The letter is also found in Stanley Weintraub, ed., The Playwright and the Pirate: Bernard Shaw and Frank Harris: A Correspondence (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), whose Introduction summarizes the Shaw/Harris relationship. For their published versions (upon which the one below is based), Laurence and Weintraub consulted the text of the original manuscript letter in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. However, the letter as it appears below is a conflation of three documents: Shaw's 1930 letter, the changes made for the 1931 Harris biography, and those made for the 1949 sketches. In one instance, for example, Shaw goes from copulations (1930) to gallantries (1931) to sex histories (1949). Given the context of certain publication by Harris, either verbatim or as (possibly distorted) narrative, Shaw's 1930 letter is surprisingly frank. Even his friends H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett, both incorrigible womanizers, never publicized their sexual experiences in as much detail or with such desinvolture as Shaw does here. A few years earlier, on the other hand, the priapic Harris had unabashedly described his own sexual adventures in his notorious memoirs, My Life and Loves (4 vols., 1922-27; vol. 5, 1954) more fantasy than fact, cautions Weintraub (xiii) the first volume of which was burned by Charlotte Shaw in the fireplace! The reasons for Shaw's frankness on 24 June and for his closing ca-

Introduction

On 3 and 4 November 2000 the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center hosted the Fleur Cowles Flair Symposium 2000: "The Infinite Library, Old Worlds and New: Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections in the Twenty-first Century." This international symposium on the future of the library brought together leading authors, publishers, librarians, university administrators, national policy shapers, representatives of leading foundations, and experts in information technology to discuss key issues facing humanities research and special collections in the new century. This volume includes selections from the papers delivered at the symposium. Reading them now recalls some of the interesting and highly charged discussions that took place following the delivery of these lively presentations.

Tony Pastor presents: afterpieces from the vaudeville stage

The Tony Pastor Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Introduction Masaniello or, Fish Catcher of Naples The White Crook The Fawn Romeo and Juliet or, the Beautiful Blonde Who Dyed for Love Macbeth Yeast Lynne or, the Humors of Lady Isabel Go West! or, the Emigrant Palace Car in an Uproar The Pie-Rats of Penn-Yann Mysteries of Gotham New York Mechanics Joe Kidd in Fistiana High Life and Low Life or, Scenes in New York The Tenth Ward by Day and Night Bibliography

Reviews

Reviews Get access Aldine Press Books at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin: A Descriptive Catalogue. By CRAIG W. KALLENDORF and MARIA X. WELLS. Austin, TX: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. 1998. 415 pp. + 34 black-and-white illustrations. $75.00 (paperbound $50.00). ISBN 0 292 74335 1 (hardback); 0 292 74334 3 (paper). MARTIN DAVIES MARTIN DAVIES London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Library, Volume s6-21, Issue 4, December 1999, Pages 378–380, https://doi.org/10.1093/library/s6-21.4.378 Published: 01 December 1999