Library Edition Research Articles

Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy

Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy

A Norton Critical Edition: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises ed. by Michael Thurston

Reviewed by: A Norton Critical Edition: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises ed. by Michael Thurston Donald A. Daiker A Norton Critical Edition: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Edited by Michael Thurston. New York: Norton, 2022. 348 pp. Paper. $14.38. The Norton Critical Edition of The Sun Also Rises, edited by Michael Thurston, is welcome because of its illuminating textual annotations but disappointing because of its one-sided approach to the novel’s meanings and value. [End Page 116] In addition to the full, magnificently annotated text of Ernest Hemingway’s first and arguably finest novel, the Norton Critical Edition (hereafter NCE) includes biographical and autobiographical material, background pieces on postwar Paris, bullfighting, and literary influences, and a brief selection of letters. For criticism, the NCE provides contemporaneous reviews by Edmund Wilson, Allen Tate, and others followed by ten essays of “Modern Criticism.” The volume concludes with a useful Hemingway chronology and an uneven selected bibliography. If you are reading The Sun Also Rises for the first or fourteenth time, your best bet is the annotated NCE text. That’s because this 1926 Hemingway novel includes references and even whole conversations that are difficult and even impossible for twenty-first-century readers to comprehend. The competing editions, like the Hemingway Library Edition and trade paperbacks, offer no annotations at all. The Library of America edition edited by Robert W. Trogdon provides helpful annotations not as footnotes but hundreds of pages away in a section labeled “Notes.” Besides, the NCE notes are far more extensive and helpful. Whereas Trogdon says nothing about Robert Cohn’s “feeling of inferiority and shyness . . . on being treated as a Jew at Princeton” (5),1 Thurston tells us that “Princeton had the lowest number of Jewish students among the Ivy League universities” (5). Trogdon does not gloss the passage when young men arrive at the dancing club, but Thurston’s note would have been appreciated by my students: “Hemingway’s description suggests that the young men are homosexual. Jake’s subsequent reaction confirms this” (17). Trogdon ignores Jake’s reference to the “n***** drummer” at Zelli’s restaurant in Montmartre, but Thurston responds with an informative and nuanced mini essay (47). Following the exemplary model of the Hemingway Letters Project, the annotated NCE enlarges our experience and deepens our understanding of The Sun Also Rises. The NCE aptly includes what is perhaps the most famous letter from one American writer to another: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letter to Hemingway praising the novel he had read in manuscript but urging that its original opening be deleted because of its “sneers, superiorities and nose-thumbings” (195). Thurston also includes several relevant Hemingway letters but not some of the most significant: Hemingway’s letter to Fitzgerald cautioning that Sun is “not . . . at all for a child to read” (Letters vol. 3, 75); his letter to Canadian writer Morley Callaghan asserting that Sun “is not about sex” (Letters vol. 3, 112); and his letters to his editor Maxwell Perkins explaining why he cannot further reduce the book’s “profanity” (Letters vol. 3, 107), why it “is a great mistake to put real [End Page 117] people in a book” (Letters vol. 3, 110), why Sun is not “a jazz superficial story” (Letters vol. 3, 148), and why Gertrude Stein’s epigraph, “splendid bombast,” should not be taken seriously (Letters vol. 3, 158). Thurston’s well-written, informative, and lucid “Introduction” helps explain his choices of critical essays. For Thurston, Sun lacks anything like a moral code or set of values. Instead, he writes, readers “are invited to find meaning in the arduous achievement of technique” (xxi). Thus, it is Hemingway’s “stylistic achievement”—his “mastery of the sentence”—and not “moral behavior” (xx] that is central to the novel and best accounts for our enjoyment of it. If you had read only the ten chosen “Modern Criticism” essays, you would scarcely have known that the novel’s central relationship is between Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley. You would be largely unaware of the novel’s most important dramatic scenes—the bedroom scene in Paris, the seduction scene in Pamplona, and the scenes in a bedroom, bar...

Garden Hunter

Garden Hunter

The Human Library in the Netherlands: A successful exchange of life

The originally Danish principle of The Human Library has been known in the Netherlands for about six years now. Even during the coronavirus crisis, the organizers managed to reach more than 700 people in over 20 sessions. The high average rating given by the participants is in line with the positive results of previous studies on the impact of The Human Library. A distinction can be made between short-term and long-term effects, effects on voluntary participants versus participants in an edition of The Human Library in a mandatory setting, such as a work situation, and effects achieved in terms of awareness, change in attitude and behavioural change. In almost all of these areas, The Human Library scores high. In the future, more research can be done into the distinction between these different situations, as well as on the effect on the 'books' rather than the 'readers', on whom almost all research now focuses.

Recent Articles

Recent Articles

"Without Even His Hat Took Off": Faulkner's Sanctuary

"Without Even His Hat Took Off":Faulkner's Sanctuary William Brevda In his infamous introduction to the Modern Library edition of Sanctuary, William Faulkner stated that he wrote the original version of the novel just "to make money" (v). Angry and frustrated about his difficulties getting Sartoris and The Sound and the Fury published and being told that Sartoris was not going to sell, Faulkner decided to write a more commercial novel: "I took time out, and speculated what a person in Mississippi would believe to be current trends, chose what I thought was the right answer and invented the most horrific tale I could imagine" (vi). Although Faulkner did not identify these trends, it is safe to say that they were the gangster phenomenon, the vogue of Freudianism, movies, sex, and fashion. Faulkner exploited popular trends to make money, but he also parodied them for a laugh. Sanctuary is primarily a gangster novel, but it is also a criticism of the artificiality of modern life. The attributes of Popeye are the attributes of a material object. Faulkner's gangster has no self that is separate from his things or from the current trends out of which he has been fashioned. The indifference of Popeye and Temple Drake to their own corruption is the indifference of the inanimate world in their lack of a conscience. Sanctuary is a gangster Waste Land, as Faulkner might have expected even a person in the "Sahara of the Bozart" (Mencken) to recognize, breeding gangsters out of the dead land. Sanctuary depicts a world of dead matter and spiritless "already dead" people (Sanctuary 115). Pop-eye is the most "thing-like" character, but all the characters, as I argue in this essay, are hat-like (Adamowski 32). How would we know the gangster without his gat and his hat? The gat is important, but the hat is essential. Writing a gangster novel would have seemed like a good way to make money in 1929 when Faulkner began writing Sanctuary. Damon [End Page 393] Runyon's first four Guys and Dolls stories were published in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1929. That year Donald Henderson Clarke's Louis Beretti sold 11,000 copies and another 99,000 when the movie version Born Reckless was released in 1930. Armitage Trail wrote Scarface in 1929. It was published in 1930 and released as a film in 1932. Also published in 1929 were Frank L. Packard's The Big Shot and W. R. Bur-nett's Little Caesar and award-winning short story "Dressed to Kill." The pulp magazine Gangster Stories began publication in 1929. All an author needed in 1929 to make a killing in the popular market was a tough Italian gangster, or so it must have seemed to Faulkner, who needed money for his impending marriage. Popeye's ethnicity is a pop culture stereotype: he is pop Eyetalian. Faulkner's writing of Sanctuary coincided with Al "Scarface" Capone's well publicized reign as the "King of Gangland" from the mid-1920s to 1931 (Enright 85). On February 14, 1929, one month after Faulkner began work on Sanctuary, the media coverage of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre turned Capone into a national celebrity. In March 1930, Capone, the personification of the gangster myth, made the cover of Time Magazine (nine years before Faulkner did). That same year, Fred D. Pasley popularized the Capone legend in Al Capone: The Biography of a Self-Made Man. Popeye is not Al Capone, and even Capone said that he did not belong in Pasley's book "any more than I belong in a book by Horatio Alger" (Ruth 118), but Capone is the archetype of the literary and cinematic gangster. When Faulkner "took a little time out, and speculated what a person in Mississippi would believe to be current trends," it would not have taken him long to identify them and to see how they were related (Introduction vi). In a 1930 story by Runyon, a character based on Walter Winchell uses Freudian lingo to call the public's obsession with gangsters "an underworld complex" ("Social Error" 70). This fascination with "gangster chic" had a lot to do with...

For Whom the Bell Tolls: The Hemingway Library Edition by Ernest Hemingway

Reviewed by: For Whom the Bell Tolls: The Hemingway Library Edition by Ernest Hemingway Stacey Guill For Whom the Bell Tolls: The Hemingway Library Edition. By Ernest Hemingway. Foreword by Patrick Hemingway. Edited with an Introduction by Seán Hemingway. Scribner, 2019. 576 pp. Paperback $16.99. 16 July 2019 marked the publication date of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls: The Hemingway Library Edition. This new edition of the novel includes a foreword by Hemingway’s son Patrick Hemingway and an introduction by grandson Séan Hemingway, who also serves as the volume’s editor. This publication is the sixth in The Hemingway Library Edition series which began with A Moveable Feast (2009), followed by A Farewell to Arms (2012), The Sun Also Rises (2014), Green Hills of Africa (2015), and The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (2018). This new release of For Whom the Bell Tolls includes a trove of supplementary material pertinent to the novel. Appendix I features the text of Ernest Hemingway’s speech to the American Writers Congress at Carnegie Hall on 23 June 1937 before the premiere screening of the Joris Ivens/Ernest Hemingway propaganda film, The Spanish Earth. In the speech, which was later published in New Masses with the title “Fascism is a Lie,” Hemingway scathingly condemns fascism, exposes the murder of innocent civilians by Francisco Franco’s forces, and warns his audience: “The totalitarian fascist states believe in the totalitarian war” (FWBT-HLE 480). Appendix II presents a four-page untitled manuscript, written by Hemingway, circa 1938, (“Unpublished Account of the Spanish Civil War”). As in his speech to the American Writers Congress, Hemingway rails against the indiscriminate bombing of civilians by the fascists and includes gruesome first-hand accounts of bombing victims, along with accounts of his own personal near-death experiences while covering the war and during the filming of The Spanish Earth. Both of these texts enhance the reader’s appreciation of Hemingway’s deep devotion to the Spanish people and his support in their fight to retain their democratically elected government. Moreover, many of the themes in these texts echo similar themes in the novel. Tragically, despite Hemingway’s efforts and all those who championed the Loyalist cause, Franco and his fascist regime were victorious. In Appendix III, we have the opportunity to witness Hemingway’s genius in the wake of this defeat as he channels the Republic’s heartbreaking three-year struggle into a [End Page 106] magnificent work of fiction. In numerous examples of his early drafts, previously only accessible by visiting the Hemingway Collection housed at the JFK Library, we see Hemingway inventing and then meticulously revising lines, passages, and some very well-known scenes from the novel. In one of the manuscript passages, for example, we see the author struggling over a highly sexualized scene between Pilar and Maria that occurs in Chapter 12. It is a fascinating example and a reminder of the richness contained in these archives. The other interesting element of this edition is the inclusion of three rarely seen short stories by Hemingway written about his experiences in World War II. Those who attended the 2018 International Hemingway Conference in Paris will recognize “A Room on the Garden Side,” first published in Strand Magazine in 2018, which was included in our conference packet. “Indian Country and the White Army” and “The Monument” comprise the other two stories. In the Foreword, Patrick Hemingway compares these WWII stories to his father’s novel Across the River and Into the Trees and concludes that they “present a very different view of WWII . . . [and] are much more personal and closer to [Hemingway’s] own experience” (FWBT-HLE xii). For this very reason, however, I wonder if these stories would have served a better purpose in a future Hemingway Library Edition of Across the River and Into the Trees rather than this edition. In my opinion, there are perfectly excellent Spanish Civil War stories which could have been included instead. That being said, these three stories have a general resonance with the novel in that they are not just about WWII but about war in general. To that end, they share many...

Recollections of Eudora Welty: Monteleone Hotel, New Orleans to Pinehurst Street, Jackson

Recollections of Eudora Welty:Monteleone Hotel, New Orleans to Pinehurst Street, Jackson Hunter McKelva Cole I recall that Eudora rode back to Jackson with me after giving a reading at an annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses. I forget the year,1 but the occasion was soon after the publication of One Writer's Beginnings. The site was the Monteleone Hotel in New Orleans. On Sunday after the close of the AAUP meeting, I connected with Eudora in the hotel's coffee shop. She was having breakfast there with Seta Sancton, a dear friend from Old Jackson but then living in New Orleans. (Seta's family had lived a few blocks from the Weltys during Eudora's high school days. Eudora told me that Seta was one of those girls who could not resist pausing to play a few chords whenever she passed a piano. "Fur Elise"2 was her theme song. She often would run her fingers over the keys of the Welty's piano. Tom Sancton, Seta's husband, was a novelist and national journalist, and their son Thomas Jr. was the Paris bureau chief for Time magazine.) During the ride home, Eudora remarked that prior to giving her presentation before the AAUP audience, she had had her hair done in the hotel beauty shop and that, as it happened, the hairdresser was a young man from Jackson. He told her he was a graduate of the Fondren School of Beauty. Eudora was amused by his account of having participated recently in an international hairdressing competition held in Las Vegas. Competing hairdos had absurdly fantastical names, which he cited and which Eudora remembered and then jotted on the back of an envelope. She opened her purse and read the list to me. The titles delighted her. And me. They had names such as these that I'll make up: "Fantastical Parisian Holiday Extravaganza" and "A Venetian Night in the Gondola of Love." A few months later Eudora drove down to Baton Rouge to Louisiana State University with me for the fiftieth anniversary celebration of The Southern Review, at which she was one of the main speakers. On stage she read aloud one of her stories3 that had been published in that journal when Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren were the editors. The story was "Petrified Man." Perhaps I was the only one in the audience who noticed, [End Page 307] but in reading a passage of dialogue in the beauty parlor Eudora slyly inserted the names of those wild hairdos from the Las Vegas competition. This, too: For her public readings, Eudora usually read from the Modern Library edition of her stories. It was well-worn, coverless, and probably fitted conveniently into her purse. Once, I noted it lying on her coffee table, and I realized its significance. I recall noting pencil annotations, although I did not touch the book. So, I surmise that book still exists somewhere, perhaps in the Archives. If so, I wonder if her Las Vegas annotations are included in "Petrified Man."4 Hunter McKelva Cole Brandon, Mississippi Notes 1. According to the website of the Association of American University Presses, the New Orleans meeting was in 1985, the same year The Southern Review celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 2. "Für Elise," Beethoven's Bagatelle No. 25, is featured in Welty's short story "June Recital" in The Golden Apples. 3. "Petrified Man." Southern Review, vol. 4, Spring 1939, pp. 682–95. 4. In the Modern Library edition of Selected Stories of Eudora Welty, 1954, the very copy Cole noted at Welty's house, added at the bottom of page 44 to replace the line "She's a beautician," Welty wrote, "Listen, she won 2nd prize at the Convention for the best Fantasy Comb-Out." One does smile at the thought that she also spontaneously amended her reading with the name of that prize-winning comb-out. Copyright © 2021 Department of English, Georgia State University

Adam Smith as an Example of Samuelson’s 1952 Point That Mathematics Can Be Written Out in the English Language: On Smith’s Anti-Utilitarianism Based on the Differences Between Precise and Imprecise Probability Presented in 1776 in the Wealth of Nations

In the Wealth of Nations in 1776, Smith gave two clearly worked out mathematical examples involving a comparison- contrast examining the concepts of precise probability (exact, definite, linear, numerical) and imprecise probability(inexact, indefinite, nonlinear, non numerical) that must incorporate uncertainty, which means there is missing or unavailable evidence that is not available to the decision maker at the time that he must make a choice between two or more different alternative options or alternatives. Smith’s analysis is carefully presented on pp. 106-113 and pp. 419-423 of the Modern Library edition of the Wealth of Nations edited by Cannon with the foreword by Max Lerner. It is interesting that there has not been a single academic economist, philosopher, historian, sociologist, psychologist, political scientist, social scientist or decision theorist in the 244 years since Smith published the Wealth of Nations in 1776 to note this fact. The fact that Smith believed that the use of precise probability, as advocated by Jeremy Bentham, who was Smith’s great intellectual opponent and adversary, was possible only under very special conditions, explains why Smith rejected utilitarianism as an ethical system and foundation for the science of economics-the requirement for precise probabilities and precise outcomes was, in general, not possible, due to the fact of missing or unavailable relevant information data ,knowledge or evidence that the decision maker would need to estimate the consequences in the future of his present decision to act. An example of this severe misunderstanding and confusion of Smith’s approach to decision making can be seen, for just one instance, in the 2016 paper by Hollander Thus, discussions about whether Smith was a utilitarian ,partly a utilitarian, whatever that may mean, not a utilitarian or anti-utilitarian are all besides the point once it is realized that Smith completely rejected the additivity and linearity of the probability calculus upon which Bentham based his utilitarianism on, that all men can calculate. Smith realized that Bentham’s belief in the ability to calculate future consequences was extremely limited. Apparently, economists can’t read the English Language that Smith used to express his mathematical analysis of his approach to decision making in the Wealth of Nations. The belief that Smith did not use mathematical analysis in the Wealth of Nations can only be a conclusion reached by economists who are themselves mathematically illiterate, inept, innumerate or severely confused about how mathematical arguments and analysis can be presented. This leads to the conclusion that the M. Friedman, G. Becker, and G. Stigler school of economics, that is taught at the University of Chicago, can have nothing to do at all with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations because they base all of their economic analysis on precise probability, which is an approach that is identical to that expressed in the original work of Jeremy Bentham in chapter IV of the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1787).

The Collected Dickens: A Bibliography of the Lifetime U.K. Editions of Charles Dickens's Works by Jeremy Parrott

Reviewed by: The Collected Dickens: A Bibliography of the Lifetime U.K. Editions of Charles Dickens's Works by Jeremy Parrott Joel J. Brattin (bio) Jeremy Parrott. The Collected Dickens: A Bibliography of the Lifetime U.K. Editions of Charles Dickens's Works. Szeged: Kakapo Press, 2020. Pp. 294. $50; £40; €45. ISBN 978-615-00-5916-7. Jeremy Parrott, independent scholar and the author of this essential new bibliography, is best known as the discoverer and owner of the markedup set of All the Year Round, which identifies hundreds of contributors to Dickens's periodical. Scholars around the world eagerly await publication of his research pertaining to that remarkable discovery. But in the meantime, they will be delighted with this informative, interesting, nicely illustrated and fully researched bibliographic work. The volume is an important one, offering both basic and esoteric information about a topic rarely discussed and often misunderstood: collected editions of Dickens's works published in the UK in his lifetime. All Dickens scholars, Victorianists, Dickens collectors, and book dealers will be grateful for the work, and many generalists and Dickens enthusiasts will appreciate Parrott's insights into Dickens's publishing career. In his succinct introduction, Parrott outlines the five relevant collected editions: the Cheap edition (1847–68, 18 volumes), the Library edition (1858–59, 22 volumes), the Illustrated Library edition (1861–74, 30 volumes), the People's edition (1865–67, 25 volumes), and the Charles Dickens edition (1867–75, 21 volumes). He identifies the scope and relevance of his bibliography, and summarizes some of the limitations of and errors in previously-published work on this topic, noting the scarcity of most of these volumes, identifying "ghosts" (books described in bibliographies that do not actually exist), and also a few recently discovered books, like the extraordinarily rare 1866 printing of the Illustrated Library edition of Our Mutual Friend – now identified as the second edition of Dickens's last complete novel. Parrott reveals Dickens's income from each of the books in these editions over time, presenting that information in a useful graph. Finally, Parrott clearly lays out the format and conventions for the descriptive bibliography of each of the 116 volumes to follow. In this review, I will consider Parrott's discussion of the five collected editions, move on to an examination of his bibliographic descriptions, and conclude with some comments about the illustrations. In his introduction to the Cheap edition, Parrott reproduces a little-known [End Page 432] address from the sixth monthly instalment of Dombey and Son advertising the edition, gives the history of earlier cheap editions of other authors, and notes that earlier bibliographers identified as few as 15 and as many as 22 volumes in the series. Prices varied between 2s/6d and five shillings per volume; even the longer novels appeared in a single volume. Parrott provides notes about extra illustrations and binding variants in the volumes, transcribes the new prefaces in full, and gives the dates of subsequent reprints and the size of print runs. Parrott explains why Dickens provided no new preface for the Cheap edition of David Copperfield – though new prefaces were an important feature in the edition. He also offers a plausible explanation for the publication of Great Expectations some three months before A Tale of Two Cities in this series. Though the Cheap edition was aimed for the domestic UK market, Parrott tells us it was later issued in 1866 by Lippincott in Philadelphia. Parrott notes that The Uncommercial Traveller appeared in book form for the first time in this edition, and that Our Mutual Friend, the final volume in the Cheap edition, is extremely rare, with at most 2,000 copies printed (less than half the number for other titles); perhaps only about 1,000 of those copies sold. He says the only copy he has found in any public collection is in the Charles Dickens Museum Library – the same copy I mentioned in my Everyman Dickens edition of the novel (London: Dent, 2000). In his consideration of the Library edition, Parrott identifies the motivation for the edition: "a more substantial and permanent repository of Dickens's collected works than the Cheap edition." He highlights its poor...

Speculations on Eudora Welty's Reading of Seven Gothic Tales and Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen

Speculations on Eudora Welty's Reading of Seven Gothic Tales and Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen Pearl Amelia McHaney Eudora Welty reviewed Isak Dinesen's 1957 Last Tales and two scholarly studies of the Danish writer's oeuvre for the New York Times Book Review. She read, and passed on to William Maxwell, Dinesen's essay "On Mottoes of My Life," and she also contributed to a memorial tribute for Dinesen (the pen name of Karen Blixen) in 1965. These commentaries are part of Welty's oeuvre and have been reprinted and made available to readers and scholars. Until 2019, the first known book review that Welty had published was of Marguerite Steedman's But You'll Be Back for the Saturday Review of Literature in 1942. Recently, however, I learned that in 1938 Welty had reviewed Dinesen's memoir Out of Africa in her hometown paper, the Jackson Clarion Ledger.1 In her review, Welty also acknowledges having read Seven Gothic Tales, Dinesen's first book. By 1938, when she first reviewed Dinesen's work, Welty had traveled throughout Mississippi for her five months as a junior publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration and had had one photography exhibit in the Jackson Municipal Art Gallery and two photography exhibits in New York City. She had published eleven short stories in truly "little" magazines and had written and burned the first version of "Petrified Man." Edward O'Brien had reprinted "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies" in his edition of The Best Short Stories of 1938. Welty was eighteen months away from receiving Diarmuid Russell's invitation to be her primary reader and agent. She was years away from writing a novel, and nearly a half-century would pass before she would write her own memoir. To write a book review is to read closely and then to think, almost from afar, of which details and which impressions to gather and share. To review Out of Africa, the second book by Dinesen, Welty begins by commenting that "'Seven Gothic Tales' appeared several years ago under the name Isak Dinesen. It was a widely read book of ornate, metaphysical stories designed carefully and with a sharp obviously feminine humor, to delight and tantalize the reader who likes curious and unreal things" (1). This brief summary of Dinesen's first book illustrates, most importantly, that Welty had read Seven Gothic Tales prior to writing her Out of Africa review, and, in addressing the "reader who likes curious and unreal things," she begins [End Page 125] the habit of reviewing from a reader's perspective—a point of view she maintains in nearly all of her book reviews. The library of books in Welty's home includes the 1934 Random House Modern Library edition of Seven Gothic Tales that reprints the Smith and Haas publication with Dorothy Canfield's introduction. This first collection of Dinesen's tales was an April Book-of-the-Month Club selection and was on the New York Times Best Seller list for April, May, June, and July of 1934. The book is a complex exploration of the Gothic: sudden dark, stormy, windy weather causing drastic consequences; ancient worlds bearing down on the present through elaborate allusions; corporeal ghosts and shadowy people; unexpected, fantastic events; death; strange visages and bodies; and riddles posed to the characters and readers. Dinesen asks, "'What is it,' she said very slowly, in the manner of a sibylla, 'which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused?'" (Seven 115).2 Peter Monro Jack reviewed Seven Gothic Tales in the New York Times Book Review under the headline "A Strange Book for Our Time." Jack found the tales "curious" with an "almost Proustian sensibility that illuminates, by refining, the romantic mood." Citing that Dinesen's "pattern is as flexible as Scheherazade's," Jack asserts that Dinesen's "inventiveness is apparently inexhaustible," and he concludes, "This is a work of the imagination, very subtle and graceful; a rare and curious book, it will be white magic to many and mere mummery to others … though both are in the book, there is more magic than mummery" (6). This evaluation, I believe, would...

A Note on Philip Roth's Franklin Library "Special Messages"

This note highlights how Philip Roth used his short prefaces called "Special Messages" for The Franklin Library editions of his works to foreground his authorial intentions and provide readers with brief but telling glimpses into some of the historical and personal experiences that spurred his imagination and influenced his fiction.

LIBRARY OF THE CIRCLE OF DEFENDERS OF FORTRESS PORT-ARTHUR (1906-1913)

For the first time the history of creation and activity of the Circle of Defenders of the Fortress Port Arthur and the attached library are presented based on pre-revolutionary sources. Reports of the Circle of Defenders’ Council for the period from December 2, 1906 up to November 13, 1913, concerning the library activity and editions it possessed, devoted to the Russian-Japanese war of 1904-1905, are analyzed.

Why Didn’t P. Oslington’s Invisible Hand (the ‘Providential Hand of God’) Prevent the Destruction of the Scottish Macro Economy by the Projectors, Imprudent Risk Takers, and Prodigals in 1772 after the Ayr Bank Collapse?

P. Oslington’s (2012) Invisible Hand (the ”providential hand of God”) is viewed by him as the providential hand of God, who is watching over the macro economy of Scotland to make sure that nothing evil befalls the Scottish economy. The problem is that Oslington is completely oblivious to the collapse of the Ayr bank in 1772, which resulted from massive financial speculation in land engaged in by British East India Company connected borrowers whose bubble collapsed in 1772, ushering in a four year depression in Scotland and a worldwide recession. Oslington never mentions the national and international, coercive economic power of the British East India Company, which dominated the English economy for well over 200 years. Oslington never mentions Smith’s great concerns about the very negative economic impacts on society as a whole of the prodigals, imprudent risk takers, and projectors that Smith discussed extensively on pages 279-341 of the Modern Library (Canaan) edition of the Wealth of Nations with the foreword of Max Lerner. Oslington never mentions the Ayr bank collapse, a direct result of extensive land speculation by British East India Company borrowers, which resulted in the collapse of the Scottish economy from 1772-1776. G. Kennedy made it quite clear that it is simply impossible for any type of “Invisible Hand” to be operating to maximize economy wide benefits for all in the face of such groups of upper income class citizens, such as the prodigals, imprudent risk takers, and projectors, unless their economic activities are heavily constrained or suppressed by government action by a government that is independent of entities such as the British East India Company. The idea of an Invisible Hand is a necessary condition for the acceptance of Laissez Faire. Nowhere in the Wealth of Nations (WN;1776) is there a single mention of “laissez faire”, a concept Smith was well aware of from his interactions with the French Physiocrats in the 1760’s. The reason why there is no mention of laissez faire is because Smith rejected completely any kind of metaphysical, as opposed to metaphorical, view of a Invisible hand as some kind of Wizard of Oz.

Pedestrian Pedagogy: The Walking Library for Women Walking

The Walking Library for Women Walking (2016-18) is an edition of the ongoing creative research project, The Walking Library. Co-created and launched in 2012 by Dee Heddon and Misha Myers, The Walking Library explores the multiple relationships between walking, literature, and environment (see Heddon & Myers 2014, 2017, in press).
 For each edition of The Walking Library, we invite donations and suggestions of books to accompany what we propose is a pedestrian pedagogy: a learning that takes place on foot and on the move in the company of others (present and virtual), sharing and creating knowledge side-by-side, step-by-step and without hierarchy. Pedestrian pedagogy facilitates meaning-making as emergent and re-orientating (Osberg et al., 2008). In this pedestrian pedagogy learning is improvisatory and relational, engendered through the collaborative and collective body of walkers moving through space and time, side by side, in the company of each other and a diverse collection of books.

CRISPR-based modular assembly of a UAS-cDNA/ORF plasmid library for more than 5500 Drosophila genes conserved in humans.

Construction of a genome-wide transgenic UAS-cDNA/ORF library in Drosophila based on the binary GAL4/UAS system has been severely hampered by technical difficulties, although genome-wide cDNA or ORF resources of Drosophila, human, and mouse have been publicly available for more than a decade. Here, we developed a new method named CRISPR-based modular assembly (CRISPRmass) for the high-throughput construction of a genome-wide UAS-cDNA/ORF library from publicly available cDNA/ORF resources. Through cleavage of shared vector sequences of cDNA/ORF plasmids by CRISPR/Cas9 and subsequent insertion of UAS modules by Gibson assembly, the procedure of construction of such a library by CRISPRmass is standardized as massively parallel two-step test tube reactions before bacterial transformation. Using CRISPRmass, we generated 5551 UAS-cDNA/ORF constructs covering 83% of the Drosophila genes conserved in humans in the Drosophila Genomics Resource Center (DGRC) Gold Collection, and among them, 5518 were generated within 3 mo by three people. Our results show that CRISPRmass allows modulization, simplicity, efficiency, and adaptability in the generation of a genome-wide UAS-cDNA/ORF plasmid library by using publicly available cDNA/ORF resources. CRISPRmass can be applied to editing various genome-wide libraries in general and is an alternative to Gateway technology in high-throughput plasmid library editing. Furthermore, the more than 5500 UAS-cDNA/ORF plasmids of Drosophila genes serve as a powerful resource for gain-of-function (GOF) screening in cultured cells and for generation of a transgenic UAS-cDNA/ORF library in Drosophila.

The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle ed. by Ian Campbell, Aileen Christianson, David Sorensen

Reviewed by: The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyleed. by Ian Campbell, Aileen Christianson, David Sorensen David Paroissien Ian Campbell, Aileen Christianson, David Sorensen, eds. Duke-EdinburghEdition. Vol. 46. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2018. Pp. xxxix + 262. $30.00. ISBN. 978-1-4780-0349-6 Few descriptions of Carlyle later in life rival one by Charles Eliot Norton. Visiting him at home in Chelsea on 22 March 1869, the American author and journalist noted nothing about the seventy-four year old Carlyle to suggest "the feebleness of age." To the contrary, he saw someone who seemed "younger than his years," oddly dressed, perhaps, wearing a gray woolen wrapper rather like a long dressing gown, which reached to feet, "cased in slippers." But no one could see him, Norton concluded, "without being impressed by the massive shape and strong lines of his countenance and the force and brilliancy of his deep-set eyes." Carlyle received his American guest, we learn, "quietly and pleasantly, with a certain air of shyness," Norton fancied (qtd. 34n.). So much for Carlyle welcoming visitors to number 5 Cheyne Row. Evidently the Sage of Chelsea, considered "merely eccentric and wayward" to many of his fellow countrymen, retained the power accorded him across the Atlantic. It was America, John Tyndall noted in his "Personal Recollections," which had opened to Carlyle "her mind, her heart, her purse" (qtd. 34n.). The 126 letters written between January 1869 and April 1870 offer different impressions of Carlyle at this stage of his life, a widower of four years still deeply upset at the loss of Jane Welsh Carlyle in April 1866. Focus on the project to which he had committed himself of collecting and editing his wife's correspondence provided solace with a double edge. To get on with a task he viewed as "sacred" in the hope of seeing "the whole of those dear letterslying legible to good eyes (with the needful commentaries &c)" was indeed work worth doing (journal qtd. p. 64). At the same time, it was very much a "sad Task" unquestionably associated with a sense of end things, of a greater need to set "my poor house in order; wh hI wdfain finish in time, and occasionally fear I shan't" (10). Two other projects required sustained attention: (1) the compilation of materials related to Carlyle's Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches(2 vols. 1845) and his biography of Frederick the Great(6 vols. 1858–65) for a bequest to Harvard University and (2) preparation of his Collected Worksfor publication by Chapman and Hall. Commenting on his circumstances to Edward Fitzgerald at the end of October 1869, Carlyle explained that with the printing of "a 'Library Edition,' […] of my poor books," he was in regular receipt from the publishers of five or six proof-sheets to which he was bound to read. "This is pretty much my one prescribedemployment, but I have enough of othersvery much more interesting to me." Of these, [End Page 188]Carlyle noted "some pleasant conversation" now and then, and reading. In answer to Fitzgerald's confession that having tried three times and failed three times with Browning's Ring and The Book(12 bks., Nov.1868–Feb. 69), Carlyle confided that he had read it at Browning's insistence and found it "full of talent, of energy, and effort, but totally without backbone or vein of common-sense." In short, "among the absurdest books ever written by a gifted man." Far better the recently published Poems and Prose Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough, with a Selection from his Letters and a Memoir(2 vols. 1869). "Let me recommend that to you; I knew Clough, and loved him well" (101). For social life Carlyle had trusted resources. Chief of these was John Forster, both visiting and issuing invitations. Through Forster, Carlyle maintained contact with Dickens, receiving news of his reading tour in the United States and also learning more of the same from the novelist himself. "He talked to me ab tAmerica as a wonderer, by no means as a lover," Carlyle commented to his brother John Aitken Carlyle on...

Feathery Traces: The (Dis)appearance of the Angel in the Work of Mallarmé

Religion & Literature 186 Newman, John Henry. “The Powers of Nature: The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels.” In Parochial and Plain Sermons. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997. —–. “The Dream of Gerontius.” In Verses on Various Occasions, by John Henry Newman. London: Longmans Green & Co., 1903 Nichols, Aidan. All Great Art is Praise: Art and Religion in John Ruskin. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2016. Pater, Walter. Appreciations: with an Essay on Style. London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1889. Potter, Dylan David. Angelology: Recovering Higher-Order Beings as Emblems of Transcendence, Immanence , and Imagination. Cambridge: James Clarke, 2017. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Jakob ringt mit dem Engel [Jacob Wrestling with the Angel]. C. 1659, oil on canvas, 4.6 x 3.10 in. Gemäldegalerie der Staatlichen Museen, Berlin. Rossetti, Christina.Christina Rossetti: The Complete Poems. Edited by R. W. Crump. London: Penguin, 2005. Ruskin, John. The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin. 39 vols. Edited by Cook and Wedderburn. London: George Allen, 1903-12. —–. Ruskin in Italy: Letters to his Parents. 1845. Edited by Harold J. Shapiro. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. Stanford, Peter. Angels: A Visible and Invisible History. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2019. Tolkien, J. R. R., On Fairy-Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947. FEATHERY TRACES: THE (DIS)APPEARANCE OF THE ANGEL IN THE WORK OF MALLARMÉ1 Felix Schmelzer The Nicene Creed refers to God as “maker of heaven and earth, and of all that is, seen and unseen,” words that imply a profound unity of the material and spiritual (invisible) universes.2 Within the Christian vision, neither would be complete without the other.3 Throughout the modern age, this vision is increasingly undermined by a materialist determinism, the key element of a one-sided scientific worldview. Placing themselves in opposition to an absolutist notion of scientific knowledge, many romantic writers have tried to reintegrate the spiritual dimension into European culture, with poetry especially becoming one means of doing so.4 This is, of course, a somewhat simplifying generalization, which nonetheless bears a tendential truth. Important to point out here is that Stéphane Mallarmé, though widely regarded as the most “modern” of all nineteenth-century poets, is still driven by this romantic impulse; in other words, the idea of a profound unity between matter and spirit, and the question of how to FORUM 187 express this unity in words to overcome a merely materialist vision of the world, is essential to his work. As we shall see, the motif of the angel, the spiritual creature per se, is closely related to that idea. In Mallarmé’s early work, the world still seems in order. Omnipresent and irresistible ties, such as a “virgin’s white thread” hanging down from the sky, hold together that which belongs together, celestial purity (always “white” for Mallarmé) and material existence.5 In Mallarmé’s own words: “The rose loves the lily.”6 The most important, or at least most frequent, tie between the two worlds is the angel. Mallarmé’s early poetry almost seems overcrowded by white-winged messengers mediating between Heaven and Earth. Marchal characterizes this period appropriately as an “ancient angelic dream.”7 Oftentimes, the angel is evoked metonymically by “feather” or “wing,” body parts that suggest the idea of an ascension to the invisible sphere—angels are invisible by definition—particularly well. Mallarmé would not be as modern as he is if this Christian and romantic conviction of continuous contact between the visible and the invisible worlds, or at least the possibility thereof, had not been placed severely in doubt. From 1862 onwards, the old Heaven (“Azur”) becomes, in the Baudelairian tradition, more and more unreachable.8 Angels still appear in the poems, but now in the form of featherless beings, incapable of ascending. The connection with heaven has been interrupted, the tie cut. These pitiful creatures can be read as a metaphor of poetic failure. In “Les fenêtres,” the poet, in an act of self-contemplation, recognizes himself as an angel (“je me mire et me vois ange” [I look at myself and see mysef as angel]), only to realize at the same time that he has lost his feathers...

Recent Publications

Recent Publications Stewart Plein The history of West Virginia is rich and complex. Over one hundred and fifty years have passed since West Virginia was admitted to the Union, and the desire to understand and relate to our past continues to the present day. The books, theses and dissertations, magazines, and journal articles listed here are testament to the continued interest in the state and its people, traditions, and culture. Each of the works cited in this bibliography is available for reading and research at the West Virginia and Regional History Center, the largest historical archives collection and library relating to West Virginia. This list includes works published from 2016 to 2019. West Virginia–related titles not found in this bibliography can be located in other resources for publishers, periodicals, magazines, historical societies, and state publications. Special thanks go to Jessica Kambara for her periodicals, dissertation, and book research and her work on compiling the bibliography, and Laureen Wilson for her meticulous proofreading and editorial assistance. As always, if you are aware of significant books or articles concerning West Virginia, its people and places, please bring them to my attention. ________ Albert, Howard. My Journey Through Life. 126 pages. Lulu Publishing. (November 10, 2017). This autobiography was written by a 92-year-old West Virginian looking back over the course of his life. The author describes his childhood, during which he lived on a small farm in Summers County, and includes details about the ways of life in rural West Virginia in the 1930s. As a young man, Albert joined the Merchant Marines and served in the US Army; he provides stories, anecdotes, and tales of adventure from those years. Aldinger, Kyle Ray. “Ecology and Management of Golden-Winged Warblers (Vermivora chrysoptera) and Associated Avian Species in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia.” PhD diss., West Virginia University, 2018. 197 pp. Almond, Greenbrier. More Stories of a West Virginia Doctor for Kith and Kin. Volume Seven. 240 pages. Parsons, WV: McClain Printing Company (January 2, 2019). This volume continues Almond’s stories of his experiences as a doctor in West Virginia. Topics of this volume include the doctor’s travels around the world, his four granddaughters, and family holidays along with episodes drawn from his many years of medical practice. Also included are a genealogy and photographs of the Almond family. Alvarez, Raymond M. “Is your dad home from the mines?” Goldenseal 44 (Fall 2018): 23–26. In this article, Zella Martin recalls the experience of losing her father in the 1968 Farmington Mine Disaster. Alvarez, Raymond M. “Nurses at No. 9.” Goldenseal 44 (Fall 2018): 46–47. This article concerns the nurses who provided medical aid and emotional support to those injured in the 1968 Farmington Mine Disaster. Among the nurses, Alvarez focuses on Doris Lee Colbert in particular. Andrew, Ross Gilbert. “Examination and Characterization of Brook Trout Ecology Before and After a Broad Scale Disturbance Event in Headwater Streams of West Virginia, USA.” PhD diss., West Virginia University, 2018. 128 pp. Arbogast, Terry E. West of Cumberland: A History of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in the Mountain State West of the Queen City. Fairmont, WV: Glover Gap Graphics, LLC. 448 pgs. Book Two. MR/SHORT LINE. Profusely illustrated. Tracing both the history and the route of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad through West Virginia this profusely illustrated book follows the railroad up the West Fort River from Fairmont to Clarksburg, then down the West Fork River, and over Hartzel Hill to the Ohio River. Asce Pittsburgh 100th Anniversary. Engineering Pittsburgh: A History of Roads, Rails, Canals, Bridges and More. 226 pages. History Press Library Editions (September 10, 2018). Ayers, Ginny Savage, and Lon Kelly Savage. Never Justice, Never Peace: Mother Jones and the Miner Rebellion at Paint and Cabin Creeks (West Virginia and Appalachia). 360 pages. West Virginia University Press. (August 29, 2018). In 1986 Lon Savage published Thunder in the Mountains: The West Virginia Mine War, 1920–21, a popular history now considered a classic. When Savage passed away, he left behind an incomplete book manuscript about a lesser-known Mother Jones crusade in Kanawha County, West Virginia. His daughter Ginny Savage Ayers drew on...

Heroism and Comics Form: Feminist and Queer Speculations

Heroism and Comics Form: Feminist and Queer Speculations