Each TCB event will be followed by a reception.

Friday, 23 September, 4:15 p.m.

St. Michael's College, 100 St. Joseph's Street
Father Madden Hall, in Carr Hall

Bill Sherman (University of York)

“The Reader's Eye: Between Annotation and Illustration”

In Association with Book and Media Studies, St. Michael's College, and the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies

The margins of old books are filled not just with words but also with images. Between medieval illumination and modern illustration there are a wide range of traces and practices that we have been slow to see and study, and for which we are poorly served by both methodology and terminology. In the first few centuries of print culture, in particular, active readers drew sketches, diagrams, iconic tags and body parts as well as fully-fledged decorative or illustrative schemes. What function do they serve and for whom? What kinds of text do they appear in and what kinds of content do they mark? What kinds of graphic training, aesthetic tastes and cognitive habits do they reflect? I will survey some rich examples from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries and offer some preliminary thoughts about the visual mode of response in early modern Europe.

Bill Sherman is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Renaissance & Early Modern Studies at the University of York. He has published widely on the history of books and readers and is best known for his work on marginalia--including John Dee and Used Books. He has also been active as an editor, particularly in the field of Renaissance drama: he is Associate Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly and co-editor (with Peter Hulme) of both the Norton Critical Edition of The Tempest and 'The Tempest' and its Travels. He is currently working on an Arden edition of Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, a general book on Renaissance libraries, a collection of essays on Renaissance Collage, and a series of projects that explore the modern legacies of early modern spies and ciphers.

Listen to a podcast of this lecture at Toronto Review of Books:

TRB Podcast: Bill Sherman at the University of Toronto

Thursday, 17 November, 4:15 p.m.

Munk School of Global Affairs, 1 Devonshire Place
Room 208N

Hester Blum (Penn State University)

“Polar Imprints”

In Association with the Centre for the Study of the United States

Narratives of polar voyages enjoyed wide circulation in Anglo-American cultural and political spheres during the long nineteenth century. Yet the familiar travel accounts of adventurous voyage and their fictional counterparts were not the only forms of literary production generated by Arctic and Antarctic exploration. Many expeditions brought a surprising piece of equipment aboard ship: a printing press. With such presses, polar-voyaging sailors wrote and printed newspapers, broadsides, plays, and other reading matter beyond the Arctic and Antarctic Circles; these publications were produced almost exclusively for a reading audience comprised of the mission's crew members.

“Polar Imprints” will examine the first printed polar newspapers. I am interested in what this drive toward what I call "extreme printing" tells us about the state of print culture and coterie publication in the nineteenth century Anglo-American world. While polar expeditions might have had nationalist aims, the gazettes produced on such missions kept their focus on the local and intimate, unlike the newspapers that Benedict Anderson has argued are coextensive with nationalist projects. My talk will be attentive to the rhetorical distance between mass-published voyage accounts and the coterie publications produced and circulated aboard ship. At a terrific remove from the usual spheres of literary circulation, communities of polar expedition members produced new works for exchange, debate, and provocation. Polar newspapers emerged as a joint product of the scientific and nationalist aims of expeditions, the manual labor performed by polar voyaging sailors, and the developing technologies of print and literary culture. "Polar Imprints" is attuned to the tension between the global ambitions of polar voyages, and the remarkably circumscribed conditions of their practice.

Hester Blum is an associate professor of English at Penn State University. She is the author of The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), which won the John Gardner Maritime Research Award. She is also the editor of William Ray's North African captivity narrative Horrors of Slavery, or, The American Tars in Tripoli (Rutgers University Press, 2008). A co-founder of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Blum is currently at work on a new project entitled “Arctic and Antarctic Circles: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration.”

Listen to a podcast of this lecture at Toronto Review of Books:

TRB Podcast: Hester Blum at the University of Toronto

Thursday, 19 January, 4:15 p.m.

Faculty of Information, 140 St. George Street
Bissell Building, Room 728

Yvan Lamonde (McGill University)

“Book History, Cultural History and Beyond”

In Association with the iSchool

Cultural and intellectual history is benefiting from strong recognition on the part of international historiography due in good part to its proximity in the last four decades to book history. If historians brought a unique contribution to book history, book history decisively contributed to the mapping of crucial subfields of a certain type of culture. Our new understanding of political culture in the 18th and 19th centuries gained much from the exploration of the links between print culture and the birth of public opinion, between “édition et sédition”. Book history allowed us to document the making of culture by a refinement of our understanding of literacy and reading, our understanding of the dissemination of ideas and opinions and of the iconographic representation of culture through its selection of social attributes. Finally book history made clear to cultural and intellectual historians that they were exploring, in fact, one kind of source, the printed word, and that there were others kinds of sources, other worlds of culture which needed to be explored.

Emeritus Professor and James McGill Chair in Quebec comparative history, Yvan Lamonde was co-general editor of Book History in Canada / Histoire du livre et de l'imprimé au Canada with Patricia Fleming. The author of a multivolume Histoire sociale des idées au Québec (in the process of being translated at McGill-Queen's) he has also published on the history of libraries, bookstores and reading.

Thursday, 1 March, 4:00 p.m.

Faculty of Information, 140 St. George Street
Bissell Building, Room 728

Matthew Kirschenbaum (Maryland University)

“Track Changes: The Literary History of Word Processing”

In Partnership with the iSchool Colloquium Series

Mark Twain famously prepared the manuscript for Life on the Mississippi with his new Remington typewriter, and today we recognize that typewriting changed the material culture (and the economics) of authorship. But when did literary writers begin using word processors? Who were the early adopters? How did the technology change their relation to their craft? Was the computer just a better typewriter, or was it something more? This talk, drawn from the speaker's forthcoming book on the subject, will provide some answers, and also address questions related to the challenges of conducting research at the intersection of literary and technological history.

Dr. Matthew Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). He is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the teaching faculty at the Rare Book School. See http://www.mkirschenbaum.net for more information.

Thursday, 22 March, 4:15 p.m.

Victoria College, 91 Charles Street West
Alumni Hall, Old Vic 112

Deidre Lynch (University of Toronto)

“Recycled Paper: Readers' Scrap-books in Late Georgian Literary Culture”

In Association with the Friends of the Victoria College Library

Early nineteenth-century literary culture in Britain depended to a remarkable extent on readers' practices of excerpting, clipping, and pasting, and redrafting, recontextualizing, and recycling: practices that would seem alien to literate individuals' standard definitions of the act of reading, except that recently our interactions with the reading materials of the Internet have made them newly familiar. To ponder the historical changeability of our definitions of literary appreciation, this paper surveys the scrapbooks created by leisure-class girls and women: a collection of hand-made, personalized anthologies of quotable quotes, riddles, and poetic beauties, which also functioned as an exhibition-space for polite female accomplishments such as botanizing, flower-painting, and fern-pressing. In the context defined by early-nineteenth-century women's scrap-booking, the retranscription of literary texts to fit new contexts was an important part of the reading process: that these readers read with pencil and scissors at hand challenges historicist accounts of reading as acculturation. In this context, too, literary appreciation was a forum for sociability and social rivalry, in ways that challenge accounts of reading as a solitary, private process. “Recycled Paper” also looks to these scrap-books for how they might illuminate the love of literature: the labours with pen, paintbrush, scissors, and paste that created these albums also converted books by authors into love tokens to authors--votive offerings to a canon of authorial saints.

Deidre Lynch is Chancellor Jackman Professor of the Arts and an associate professor in the Department of English. With the support of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Humanities Center (in the United States) and, most recently, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, she has published widely on the theory and history of the novel and on the literature, information cultures, and book history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. She is the author of The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture and the Business of Inner Meaning (1998; winner of the 1999 Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book): a study that treats the “inward” turn of the novel and the attendant “rounding” of novelistic character as events in the history of reading and the history of consumer society. Her other books include (as co-editor, with William B. Warner) Cultural Institutions of the Novel (1996) and (as editor) Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees. She is a contributor to the Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period, the Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature, the Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe, the Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, the Blackwell Companion to Jane Austen, and many other anthologies and handbooks.  Professor Lynch is also active as an editor and anthologist, having prepared editions of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (a Norton Critical Edition, 2009), Jane Austen’s Persuasion (Oxford World’s Classics, 2004), and, with Jack Stillinger, the Romantic-period volume of The Norton Anthology of English Literature (2006). She is currently completing At Home in English: A Cultural History of the Love of Literature, which engages the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prehistory of English studies in order to give a new account of the state of the discipline and the state of our literary affections. This book sets out to bring poetics, book history, and the history of aesthetics together with the histories of psychology, sexuality, and the family, in order to trace the particular redefinitions of literary experience – and of the interior spaces of the mind and home – that had to occur in order for the love of literature to become part of English studies’ “normal science.”