Copyright (c) 2009 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/daniel_traister Recent documents in Daniel H. Traister en-us Sun, 31 May 2009 04:54:28 PDT 3600 http://works.bepress.com/daniel_traister/10 http://works.bepress.com/daniel_traister/10 Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:57:05 PST Daniel H. Traister http://works.bepress.com/daniel_traister/9 http://works.bepress.com/daniel_traister/9 Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:57:03 PST Daniel H. Traister http://works.bepress.com/daniel_traister/8 http://works.bepress.com/daniel_traister/8 Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:57:01 PST Rare book, manuscript, and special collections libraries remain both more difficult and more forbidding to use than any other parts of most libraries. A shift from an ethos that emphasized acquisition, cataloging, and preservation has brought into new prominence issues generally grouped together under the rubric of "promotion." This essay considers some of the ways in which this addition to the ethos of special collections has the potential to change for the better the ways such libraries are perceived and used. Daniel H. Traister http://works.bepress.com/daniel_traister/7 http://works.bepress.com/daniel_traister/7 Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:56:58 PST Illuminating Letters, edited by Paul C. Gutjahr and Megan L. Benton, adds notably to the study of "the relationship between a text's typography and it literary interpretation." Daniel H. Traister http://works.bepress.com/daniel_traister/6 http://works.bepress.com/daniel_traister/6 Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:56:56 PST Reference books hide their learning. The reader who opens The Oxford Chronology of English Literature to 1815 may read, inter alia, about "[John Galt (1779)]/F The Majolo / A Tale / FOR H. COLBURN / Anon. 'Introductory Address'dated Apr. 1815. / Repub. in 2 vols with additional text, 1816" (1:354; "F" stands for "fiction"). Nothing about such an entry surprises or perhaps even seems of interest. Daniel H. Traister http://works.bepress.com/daniel_traister/5 http://works.bepress.com/daniel_traister/5 Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:56:54 PST OF THE HOLY TRINITY - collecting, preserving, and making accessible precious books, manuscripts, and other special materials - preservation takes precedence. Following are three brief prefatory notes that will be helpful in understanding this essay. First, readers should note that the word polemical appears in the essay's title. I ask the reader's indulgence in understanding that I mean this word literally. The essay is a polemic. Intended to be serious, it is not therefore also intended to be "balanced" or "fair". In addition, it is an essay, not a paper; and its informality of style is intended to reflect a difference between these two genres. Daniel H. Traister http://works.bepress.com/daniel_traister/4 http://works.bepress.com/daniel_traister/4 Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:56:51 PST Daniel H. Traister http://works.bepress.com/daniel_traister/3 http://works.bepress.com/daniel_traister/3 Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:56:49 PST If reviews in the journal bore titles, this review's title would be "Our Love is Here to Stay." The overall burden of the essays collected by Jeffrey Nunberg in The Future of the Book, despite some scattered sour notes, is, like that of Gershwin's lyrics, reassurance. Not to worry. The book is here to stay. Daniel H. Traister http://works.bepress.com/daniel_traister/2 http://works.bepress.com/daniel_traister/2 Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:56:47 PST Published in 1975, Marilyn Butler's Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press) instantly detached Austen from the constricted world of the "little bit of ivory, two inches wide, on which I work with so fine a brush as to produce little effect after much labour." Before Butler, Austen's critics, whether they valued or despised that world, had agreed in finding it by and large confined to her little bit of ivory. Since Butler, Austen's readers see that her fictions, and Austen herself, clearly engage with the great world of her revolutionary times. Daniel H. Traister http://works.bepress.com/daniel_traister/1 http://works.bepress.com/daniel_traister/1 Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:56:45 PST Sidney's words, as Rosalie has remarked,"can at once triumph, assert and deny the truth of what they say."1 They give to Astrophil a verbal dexterity - or ambidexterity - that is one of his many attractions. Few characters in the literature of the English Renaissance are as engaging as the protean Astrophil who speaks to us from the sonnets and songs of Sidney's sequence. Daniel H. Traister