Why Modern Manuscripts Matter

Why Modern Manuscripts Matter PDF Author: Kathryn Sutherland
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192856510
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
This is a study of the politics, the commerce, and the aesthetics of heritage culture in the shape of authors' manuscripts. Draft or working manuscripts survive in quantity from the eighteenth century when, with the rise of print, readers learnt to value 'the hand' as an index of individuality and the blotted page, criss-crossed by deletion and revision, as a sign of genius. Since then, collectors have fought over manuscripts, libraries have curated them, the rich have stashed them away in investment portfolios, students have squeezed meaning from them, and we have all stared at them behind exhibition glass. Why do we trade them, conserve them, and covet them? Most, after all, are just the stuff left over after the novel or book of poetry goes into print. Poised on the boundary where precious treasure becomes abject waste, litter, and mess, modern literary manuscripts hover between riches and rubbish. In a series of case studies, this book explores manuscript's expressive agency and its capacity to provoke passion--a capacity ever more to the fore in the twenty-first century now that books are assembled via word-processing software and authors no longer leave in such quantity those paper trails behind them. It considers manuscripts as residues of meaning that print is unable to capture: manuscript as fragment art, as property, as waste paper. It asks what it might mean to re-read print in the shadow of manuscript. Case studies of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Walter Scott, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen--writers from the first great period of manuscript survival--are interspersed with discussions of William Godwin's record keeping, the Cairo genizah, Katie Paterson's 'Future Library' project, Andy Warhol's and Muriel Spark's self-archiving, Cornelia Parker's reclamation art, and more.

Why Modern Manuscripts Matter

Why Modern Manuscripts Matter PDF Author: Kathryn Sutherland
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192856510
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book

Book Description
This is a study of the politics, the commerce, and the aesthetics of heritage culture in the shape of authors' manuscripts. Draft or working manuscripts survive in quantity from the eighteenth century when, with the rise of print, readers learnt to value 'the hand' as an index of individuality and the blotted page, criss-crossed by deletion and revision, as a sign of genius. Since then, collectors have fought over manuscripts, libraries have curated them, the rich have stashed them away in investment portfolios, students have squeezed meaning from them, and we have all stared at them behind exhibition glass. Why do we trade them, conserve them, and covet them? Most, after all, are just the stuff left over after the novel or book of poetry goes into print. Poised on the boundary where precious treasure becomes abject waste, litter, and mess, modern literary manuscripts hover between riches and rubbish. In a series of case studies, this book explores manuscript's expressive agency and its capacity to provoke passion--a capacity ever more to the fore in the twenty-first century now that books are assembled via word-processing software and authors no longer leave in such quantity those paper trails behind them. It considers manuscripts as residues of meaning that print is unable to capture: manuscript as fragment art, as property, as waste paper. It asks what it might mean to re-read print in the shadow of manuscript. Case studies of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Walter Scott, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen--writers from the first great period of manuscript survival--are interspersed with discussions of William Godwin's record keeping, the Cairo genizah, Katie Paterson's 'Future Library' project, Andy Warhol's and Muriel Spark's self-archiving, Cornelia Parker's reclamation art, and more.

The Professor Is In

The Professor Is In PDF Author: Karen Kelsky
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0553419420
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
The definitive career guide for grad students, adjuncts, post-docs and anyone else eager to get tenure or turn their Ph.D. into their ideal job Each year tens of thousands of students will, after years of hard work and enormous amounts of money, earn their Ph.D. And each year only a small percentage of them will land a job that justifies and rewards their investment. For every comfortably tenured professor or well-paid former academic, there are countless underpaid and overworked adjuncts, and many more who simply give up in frustration. Those who do make it share an important asset that separates them from the pack: they have a plan. They understand exactly what they need to do to set themselves up for success. They know what really moves the needle in academic job searches, how to avoid the all-too-common mistakes that sink so many of their peers, and how to decide when to point their Ph.D. toward other, non-academic options. Karen Kelsky has made it her mission to help readers join the select few who get the most out of their Ph.D. As a former tenured professor and department head who oversaw numerous academic job searches, she knows from experience exactly what gets an academic applicant a job. And as the creator of the popular and widely respected advice site The Professor is In, she has helped countless Ph.D.’s turn themselves into stronger applicants and land their dream careers. Now, for the first time ever, Karen has poured all her best advice into a single handy guide that addresses the most important issues facing any Ph.D., including: -When, where, and what to publish -Writing a foolproof grant application -Cultivating references and crafting the perfect CV -Acing the job talk and campus interview -Avoiding the adjunct trap -Making the leap to nonacademic work, when the time is right The Professor Is In addresses all of these issues, and many more.

How the Page Matters

How the Page Matters PDF Author: Bonnie Mak
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 080209760X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
From handwritten texts to online books, the page has been a standard interface for transmitting knowledge for over two millennia. It is also a dynamic device, readily transformed to suit the needs of contemporary readers. In How the Page Matters, Bonnie Mak explores how changing technology has affected the reception of visual and written information. Mak examines the fifteenth-century Latin text Controversia de nobilitate in three forms: as a manuscript, a printed work, and a digital edition. Transcending boundaries of time and language, How the Page Matters connects technology with tradition using innovative new media theories. While historicizing contemporary digital culture and asking how on-screen combinations of image and text affect the way conveyed information is understood, Mak's elegant analysis proves both the timeliness of studying interface design and the persistence of the page as a communication mechanism.

Manuscripts of the Book of Revelation

Manuscripts of the Book of Revelation PDF Author: Garrick V. Allen
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198849052
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
The Book of Revelation is a disorienting work, full of beasts, heavenly journeys, holy war, the End of the Age, and the New Jerusalem. It is difficult to follow the thread that ties the visions together and to makes sense of the work's message. In Manuscripts of the Book of Revelation, Garrick Allen argues that one way to understand the strange history of Revelation and its challenging texts is to go back to its manuscripts. The texts of the Greek manuscripts of Revelation are the foundation for the words that we encounter when we read Revelation in a modern Bible. But the manuscripts also tell us what other ancient, medieval, and early modern people thought about the work they copied and read. The paratexts of Revelation--the many features of the manuscripts that help readers to interpret the text--are one important point of evidence. Incorporating such diverse features like the traditional apparatus that accompanies ancient commentaries to the random marginal notes that identify the true identity of the beast, paratexts are founts of information on how other mostly anonymous people interpreted Revelation's problem texts. Allen argues that manuscripts are not just important for textual critics or antiquarians, but that they are important for scholars and serious students because they are the essential substance of what the New Testament is. This book illustrates ways that the manuscripts illuminate surprising answers to important critical questions. We can learn to 'read' the manuscripts even if we don't know the language.

Minor Knowledge and Microhistory

Minor Knowledge and Microhistory PDF Author: Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317607813
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
This book studies everyday writing practices among ordinary people in a poor rural society in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Using the abundance of handwritten material produced, disseminated and consumed some centuries after the advent of print as its research material, the book's focus is on its day-to-day usage and on "minor knowledge," i.e., text matter originating and rooted primarily in the everyday life of the peasantry. The focus is on the history of education and communication in a global perspective. Rather than engaging in comparing different countries or regions, the authors seek to view and study early modern and modern manuscript culture as a transnational (or transregional) practice, giving agency to its ordinary participants and attention to hitherto overlooked source material. Through a microhistorical lens, the authors examine the strength of this aspect of popular culture and try to show it in a wider perspective, as well as asking questions about the importance of this development for the continuity of the literary tradition. The book is an attempt to explain “the nature of the literary culture” in general – how new ideas were transported from one person to another, from community to community, and between regions; essentially, the role of minor knowledge in the development of modern men.

Early Modern Women's Manuscript Writing

Early Modern Women's Manuscript Writing PDF Author: Jonathan Gibson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351942344
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
Because print publishing was often neither possible nor desirable for women in the early modern period, in order to understand the range of writing by women and indeed women's literary history itself, it is important that scholars consider women's writing in manuscript. Since the body of critical studies on women's writing for the most part prioritizes print over manuscript, this essay collection provides an essential corrective. The essays in this volume discuss many of the ways in which women participated in early modern manuscript culture. The manuscripts studied by the contributors originated in a wide range of different milieux, including the royal Court, the universities, gentry and aristocratic households in England and Ireland, and French convents. Their contents are similarly varied: original and transcribed secular and devotional verse, religious meditations, letters, moral precepts in French and English, and recipes are among the genres represented. Emphasizing the manuscripts' social, political and religious contexts, the contributors challenge commonly held notions about women's writing in English in the early modern period, and bring to light many women whose work has not been considered before.

Why the Middle Ages Matter

Why the Middle Ages Matter PDF Author: Celia Chazelle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136636471
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
The word "medieval" is often used in a negative way when talking about contemporary issues. Why the Middle Ages Matter refreshes our thinking about this historical era, and our own, by looking at some pressing concerns from today’s world, asking how these issues were really handled in the medieval period, and showing why the past matters now. The contributors here cover topics such as torture, marriage, sexuality, imprisonment, refugees, poverty, work, the status of women, disability, race, political leadership and end of life care. They focus on a variety of regions, from North Africa and the Middle East, through Western and Central Europe, to the British Isles. This collection challenges many negative stereotypes of medieval people, revealing a world from which, for instance, much could be learned about looking after the spiritual needs of the dying, and about integrating prisoners into the wider community through an emphasis on reconciliation between victim and criminal. It represents a new level of engagement with issues of social justice by medievalists and provides a highly engaging way into studying the middle ages. All the essays are written so as to be accessible to students, and each is accompanied by a list of further readings.

Teenage Writings

Teenage Writings PDF Author: Jane Austen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191057185
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
'Jane Austen practising' Virginia Woolf Three notebooks of Jane Austen's teenage writings survive. The earliest pieces probably date from 1786 or 1787, around the time that Jane, aged 11 or 12, and her older sister and collaborator Cassandra left school. By this point Austen was already an indiscriminate and precocious reader, devouring pulp fiction and classic literature alike; what she read, she soon began to imitate and parody. Unlike many teenage writings then and now, these are not secret or agonized confessions entrusted to a private journal and for the writer's eyes alone. Rather, they are stories to be shared and admired by a named audience of family and friends. Devices and themes which appear subtly in Austen's later fiction run riot openly and exuberantly across the teenage page. Drunkenness, brawling, sexual misdemeanour, theft, and even murder prevail.

Selections from Manuscripts

Selections from Manuscripts PDF Author: James Hinton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aesthetics
Languages : en
Pages : 810

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Book Description


Burning the Books

Burning the Books PDF Author: Richard Ovenden
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674241207
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The director of the famed Bodleian Libraries at Oxford narrates the global history of the willful destruction—and surprising survival—of recorded knowledge over the past three millennia. Libraries and archives have been attacked since ancient times but have been especially threatened in the modern era. Today the knowledge they safeguard faces purposeful destruction and willful neglect; deprived of funding, libraries are fighting for their very existence. Burning the Books recounts the history that brought us to this point. Richard Ovenden describes the deliberate destruction of knowledge held in libraries and archives from ancient Alexandria to contemporary Sarajevo, from smashed Assyrian tablets in Iraq to the destroyed immigration documents of the UK Windrush generation. He examines both the motivations for these acts—political, religious, and cultural—and the broader themes that shape this history. He also looks at attempts to prevent and mitigate attacks on knowledge, exploring the efforts of librarians and archivists to preserve information, often risking their own lives in the process. More than simply repositories for knowledge, libraries and archives inspire and inform citizens. In preserving notions of statehood recorded in such historical documents as the Declaration of Independence, libraries support the state itself. By preserving records of citizenship and records of the rights of citizens as enshrined in legal documents such as the Magna Carta and the decisions of the US Supreme Court, they support the rule of law. In Burning the Books, Ovenden takes a polemical stance on the social and political importance of the conservation and protection of knowledge, challenging governments in particular, but also society as a whole, to improve public policy and funding for these essential institutions.