C

Cachin (Marie-Françoise)

Round-table : The international history of popular fiction 1850-1950

Campbell (Peter)

University of Sussex, UK

Printing and bookselling in Rodez 1624-circa 1820 / Imprimerie et librairie à Rodez, 1624- vers 1820.

Abstract

Drawing on the national and departmental archives and family records, including some 'account books', this paper addresses several aspects of the family firm of printers booksellers in Rodez under the ancien regime. Four aspects concern us here: I The history of the family firm; II The economy of the family firm; III The production of books and cultural life; IV The social life of the family. The paper will deal in more depth with two of these. It is particularly interesting to use the documentation to trace the ascent of an artisanal family to the rank of bourgeois of the town, and we see the strategies employed which are in many ways typical of the period. There was a typical artisanal marriage strategy employed to help the business survive and cement contacts with others printer-booksellers in the region. The economy of the firm is especially interesting because we have so few records of this kind for the early modern period. We can see what books and documents they printed, and measure the relative importance in the family wealth of the printing-bookselling business vis-à-vis their property in the forms of vines, fields and building in town. The account books, purchase documents, and inventories after death are very helpful. A partially reconstituted list of the publications gives us a good idea of the typical publications of this kind of firm and fills out the drier replies to the government enquiries of the eighteenth century.

Résumé

Cette communication emploie une documentation tirée des archives nationales, départementales et des papiers de famille, parmi lesquelles se trouvent des livres de comptes. Elle considère plusieurs aspects de l'histoire de cette entreprise familiale à Rodez sous l'ancien régime et sous la Révolution. Les aspects qui nous concernent ici sont au nombre de quatre: 1 L'histoire de l'entreprise familiale ; II L'économie de l'entreprise ; III La production de livres et la vie culturelle de Rodez ; IV La vie sociale de la famille. Dans cette communication nous allons considérer de plus près deux de ces aspects. Il est particulièrement intéressant de tracer la montée sociale de la famille à travers les générations, une montée qui mène au statut de bourgeois de la ville et une grande considération au début du dix-neuvième siècle. Nous pouvons apprécier les stratégies qui sont sans doute typiques des entreprises de cette taille dans tant de domaines à cette époque. Une stratégie des alliances matrimoniales sert pour aider à la survie de cette petite entreprise et pour cimenter les relations avec d'autres familles d'imprimeurs dans la région.

L'économie de l'imprimerie-librairie doit nous intéresser parce ce que nous possédons si peu de documents semblables pour l'époque. Nous pouvons voir quels livres et quels documents sont imprimés, et nous pouvons mesurer l'importance relative dans la fortune familiale de l'entreprise elle-même vis-à-vis de leur propriété immobilière, que ce soit en vignobles, terres, ou bien immobilier dans la ville. Les livres de comptes (qui sont loin d'être complet ou de vrais comptes), les documents provenant des achats et les inventaires après décès sont d'une grande utilité. Une liste à présent partiellement reconstruit des publications nous informe sur un ensemble typique de la production de cette sorte d'entreprise, et fait vivre le monde caché derrière les réponses aux enquêtes sur l'état de l'imprimerie au dix-huitième siècle.

Peter Campbell, BA First Class Hons in Modern History, University of London 1976, PhD (Lond) 1983, teaches Early Modern European History. His work as an historian focuses on political culture: the nature of the ancien régime and the intellectual and political origins of the French Revolution. He has published 3 books and a dozen articles on seventeenth and eighteenth century France (see below). His research has contributed to several debates on the nature of the French state and its elites, exploring patronage and clientage, the functions of court society, the forms of political conduct, the system of factions, and the ideologies employed. Power and Politics in old regime France is the only modern history of the government of France on the early reign of Louis XV that is based on extensive archival research (as opposed to general works), a subject surprisingly neglected given its importance for understanding the eighteenth century. This book, the culmination of ten years' postdoctoral research, is both a monograph on the period and a wider reinterpretation of the political culture of the ancien régime and its crises ranging up to the 1780s. A second focal point has been the history of the Parlement de Paris in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, on which he is a leading authority. This in turn has led to research on eighteenth-century French Jansenism and its contribution to politics and political thought. The early modern French book-trade is another area of interest, with recent research on the printer booksellers of Rodez.

Peter Campbell is currently working on ideology and the French Revolution, focusing on the relationship between ideology and political practice in the 1780s, using the history of patrie and patriotism in France before the Revolution of 1789 as a case study, relating the ideas to factions and politics in the pre-revolution. He is working on a long book entitled Ambition, ideology and politics in France in the 1780s, and editing a collection entitled The origins of the French Revolution, with contributions from leading American and British scholars, due to appear in 2004, and another collection on Conspiracy in the French Revolution.

Peter Campbell has been a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Bologna (1989), Beijing (1990) and most recently Visiting Professor at The Université Lumière Lyon 2 in France (2002), where he lectured on another of his interests, early modern French popular culture. In 2000-1 he was a Leverhulme Research Fellow for his work on ideology and politics in France in the 1780s. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1990, and is co-leader of the early modern European seminar in the Institute of Historical Research in London.

Carr (Melodie)

Muncie, Indiana

Braillography : breaking traditional boundaries.

The border between blind culture and the printed word was breached in 1824, when Louis Braille invented the tactile alphabet named for him. Since that invention, the development of Braille publication standards has allowed consistent, predictable distribution of the written word to the Braille reading community. Boundaries still exist, however, as Braille publishers have not kept pace with the innovative, creative, and artistic visions and developments of writers, bok artists, and publishers of the printed word. Indeed, Braille publication could be considered a quintessential example of predictability.

The creative use of typography has given readers the opportunity of virtually limitless new reading experiences. Lack of the same has left Braille readers with little or no evolution in reading material. Empirical experiences indicate, however, that Braille publishers should be embracing the advances and challenges that Braillography (to coin a new phrase) has to offer. The creation of a dual-vision version of Norton Juster’s The Dot and The Line is this researcher’s attempt to help Braille publication take a leap forward in time. The hand-made edition has opened new worlds for the Braille reader, as Juster’s original book did for art and publishing consumers in 1963.

This innovative project was met with difficulties every step of the way, due to both technical limitations and Braille publishing traditions. This paper discusses those difficulties as well as the overwhelmingly powerful successes. Exploration of other issues addressed in this unique bookmaking project (innovations in tactile grahics and exploration of the use of non-traditional papers) are also discussed, as well as Braille publication possibilities for the future.

Melodie Carr is an independent artist and researcher. She holds a B.A. degree in Interdisciplinary Studies : Dance Performance and Teaching, and a M.F.A. (Master of Fine Arts) degree in Book Arts. Both degrees were completed at the university of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. She currently resides in Muncie, Indiana.

Carter (David)

Director, Australian Studies Centre, The University of Queensland, Australia

Managing the middlebrow : cultural transfer and colonial modernity.

Middlebrow book culture has been the subject of major studies in the USA and UK over the past decade but to date there have been no comparable studies for Australia. This paper seeks to define the parameters for such a study. When, if ever, were institutions of the kind typically identified with middlebrow culture established in Australia? What were the meanings of the middlebrow in a context where middlebrow culture was largely imported culture?

The notion of middlebrow culture and the institutions with which it was identified must be understood as distinctively modern and international phenomena. Like the concepts of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, the middlebrow is less a body of texts than a way of organising the field of culture. The tripartite opposition between highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow cultures emerged in the 1920s to name what was new about the field of publishing, commercialisation, criticism and consumption – and to define positions in an early form of the ‘culture wars’. Distinctions between high and low cultures were well-established before the end of the nineteenth century; the emergence of the concept of the middlebrow depended, more specifically, on the distinctively modern segmentation of cultures produced by the emergence of artistic and intellectual modernism, on one side, and the new media technologies of ‘mass culture’ on the other.

Debates about middlebrow culture emerge in Australia in the 1920s and institutions, such as book clubs and commercial book magazines, appear over the 1930s and 1940s. The period immediately following the Second World War emerges as a high point for these middlebrow institutions in Australia and for what might be called ‘middlebrow nationalism’. Australia’s largest publisher, Angus & Robertson, depended upon its reprints of US and UK middlebrow bestsellers. In an important sense these constitutted Australian book culture at elast until the 1940s.

The paper will also address theoretical concerns relevant to print culture studies. The concept of the middlebrow also allows significant engagement with contemporary work on ‘popular culture’, cultural consumption and the international flows of modernist culture.

David Carter is Director of the Australian Studies Centre at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. He is the author of A Career in Writing: Judah Waten and the Cultural Politics of a Literary Career (1987) and editor of Culture in Australia: Policies, Programs and Publics (2001), The Republicanism Debate (1993) and Outside the Book: Contemporary Essays on Literary Periodicals (1991). He is currently researching Australian periodical publication and middlebrow culture in Australia.

Chartier (Roger)

Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris

Conférence inaugurale « Crossing borders… »

Cherbulliez (Juliette)

University of Minnesota

Cosmopolitan violence and Médéa in early modern France.

I examine the mythological figure of Medea, subject of Euripides, Seneca, and Ovid whose overweening passion leads her to kill her children, as she emerges during a historical period when concepts of national sentiment and diaspora were challenging the shape of the absolutist French nation. Drawing on materialist strategies of literary interpretation, I examine Pierre Corneille's portrait of her in his 1639 tragedy Médée. Corneille's reading of Médée is a compassionate one; his Médée is an errant, homeless barbarian whose values and moral structure are inassimilable to Greek habits and ethical imperatives. This controversial interpretation of the ancients' Medea also ran counter to Corneille's own cultural mœurs concerning the spectacle of violence, especially as they emerged following the appearance of Corneille's version. I follow the tragedy's publication history in the seventeenth century from performance to print to critical re-examination through its final operatic re-rendering by Longepierre in 1693. The print history of the seventeenth-century Médée also traces what I term the ethical obligations of print toward the uncontrollable and finally unjudgeable violence of the cosmopolitan in society.

I draw on philosopher and classicist Martha Nussbaum's interpretation of the cosmopolitan as an ideal subject "whose primary allegiance is to the community of human beings in the entire world." Cosmopolitanism, as Nussbaum also understands, is a compelling model for a contemporary global ethics because as a universal, it transcends models of modernity and finds its roots in classical Stoic programs of civic education. Medea is also major figure in Stoic debates about the relationship between passions and action. She provides, according to Nussbaum, "a clear expression of the strongest and least circulative of the Stoic arguments against passion." Médée is also a true cosmopolitan - she is not just a traveller but also a refugee; she has knowledge so foreign it is deemed witchcraft. Medea's power - and the moral condemnation of her by those she harms -- derives directly from her cosmopolitan status. The Stoic model against passion is then also among the best examples of the cosmopolitan; Medea as anti-Stoic cosmopolitan is the limit-case for a universal ethics. Corneille's version challenges the premises on which we evaluate the moral impasse of Medea's unnatural and amoral violence. It does so by insisting on a closer examination of the material, bodily movements through which passions act in the world, and through which their violent power is deployed. It lays bare the real moral impasse at the heart of the debates around cosmopolitanism: the question of how to evaluate a violence not bound by any local sense of morality but instead by a radically individual sense of subjectivity. Corneille's version uncouples violence from its moral foundations, allowing the barbarian an amoral reign over the social, a reign which ulterior versions of Médée will struggle to overcome through print.

Juliette Cherbuliez is Assistant Professor of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She has a forthcoming book, The Place of Exile: The Novel as Experiment in the Limits of Absolutist Culture, and it working on a new project about the ethics of violence in premodern France.

Chester (Gail)

Royal Holloway, University of London

Stanley Unwin and Bernard Miall : two grand old men who made Allen and Unwin an internationalist publishing house in insular Britain.

The British publishing industry has always been rather insular, with one of the lowest rates of translation of any developed country. So it is ironic that Stanley Unwin started his publishing company, George Allen and Unwin, on August 4th 1914, the day World War I started. Stanley Unwin had learned about publishing by spending a year in Germany studying the German booktrade and was one of the few leading British publishers, then or since, who was truly internationalist. He energetically expounded the benefits of foreign trade and co-operation and included many translations in his list.

There are numerous examples of the beneficial effects, both on Allen and Unwin and the whole of British publishing, of Stanley Unwin's outlook and knowledge of other countries and their booktrades. Swann Sonnenschein and George Allen, the firms that Stanley Unwin took over to launch Allen and Unwin, were the first publishers in English of Marx and Freud. In 1930, Unwin undertook the agency for the League of Nations publications, including the early years of Index Translationum, a comprehensive bibliography of published translations, still published by UNESCO. When the Nazis came to power, Allen and Unwin ensured the survival of the Jewish-owned Phaidon Press and its staff by 'buying' its stock and transferring the business to London from Vienna. Stanley Unwin's international outlook and contacts also led to one of the firm’s greatest commercial successes - the English publication in 1950 of The Kon-Tiki Expedition by Thor Heyerdahl, first published by Gyldendal in Norway, which became an international bestseller.

These incidents, and more, are catalogued in the memoirs of Stanley Unwin and his nephew, Philip Unwin. But both ignore the vital role played in the international flavour of Allen and Unwin's publishing list by Bernard Miall, who was principal reader from 1914 until his death in 1953, during which time he read around 2000 manuscripts in several languages. He also published 110 translations - for other publishers as well as Allen and Unwin.

The importance of both publishers’ readers and translators tends to be overlooked when examining the profile and success of publishing houses, so it is not surprising that Bernard Miall's name is entirely unknown, while Stanley Unwin's is famous throughout the world of publishing. Whilst not wishing to downgrade the enormous contribution of Stanley Unwin, I intend to show how Bernard Miall's work also deserves to be celebrated as an integral part of Allen and Unwin's achievements.

Gail Chester is researching for a PhD in Book History at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is investigating the role of the publisher's reader, concentrating on readers at Macmillan and Allen and Unwin between 1898 and 1960. Before studying Book History, Gail worked in small press publishing for over 20 years. Her most recent publication is 'The anthology as a medium for feminist debate in the UK' in Women's Studies Intenational Forum, vol. 25, no. 2, March-April 2002.

Colclough (Stephan)

University of Reading

"More demoralizing than obscenity itself" : the distribution of the Winning Post, Photo Fun and other "objectionable" publications by Smith's, Wyman's and Willing and Co 1907-1908.

A corriger par un angliciste !

In 1907/08 a number of letters were exchanged between the British Home Secretary, Herbert Gladstone, and the principal retail newsagents W.H. Smith & Son, Wymans Ltd, & Willing & Co. on the subject of “indecent paragraphs” and “indecent prints” that were appearing in a range of periodicals, including the Winning Post, Photo Bits, Photo Fun and the Illustrated Police News, available at the bookstalls and shops owned or supplied by the three major distributors. This paper examines the language used by the government when thinking about modifying the laws against indecent publications and in the campaign to prevent the dissemination of texts more “demoralizing than obscenity itself” by “enterprising and unprincipled publishers”. It also traces the reaction of the distributors to what they thought of as a threat to their business, by looking at the way in which they responded to the Home Office’s request to stop stocking the Winning Post. Smiths are perhaps best known as the guardians of “old morality”, but, although broadly supportive of the government’s attempts to “promote the decency of periodical literature”, in this instance they defended their right to continue to stock the Post, arguing that other distributors would benefit from increased sales if they withdrew it from their shops. It appears to have taken the prosecution of the Post under Section Four of the Post Office Protection Act to persuade all three major distributors to remove the text, and I examine the way in which the changing economics of distribution during this period- which saw Smiths losing money as they moved away from their traditional railway-based business altered the attitude of distributors towards a text’s contents. I conclude that this exchange of letters provides a unique glimpse of the government’s anxieties about both the publishing industry and what they broadly conceived of as a newly “literate” audience and of the new relations of distribution that resulted from Smiths establishment of high street shops in 1905/06.

Dr Stephen Colclough is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Writing, Publishing and Printing History directed by Prof. Simon Eliot at the University of Reading, UK. He has published widely on both the history of reading and text distribution (including contributions to both Publishing History and Book History) and is a regular contributor to SHARP.

Cole (Richard G.)

Luther College Decorah, Iowa

Sebastian Münster and Peter Apian : customs, law, religion of all nations…" / Sébastien Münster et Pierre Apian : "Les coustumes, et loix, et religions, de toutes nations…"

I propose to show the manner in which Sebastian Münster, a sixteenth century professor of Hebrew at the University of Basle and Pierre Apian, a professor of Mathematics at the University of Ingolstadt used the genre of the travel books to create anthologies of cross cultural observations.

These anthologies by Münster and Apian portrayed many aspects of what life was like in the known-world of the of the Sixteenth-Century. Many descriptions of non-western peoples and places by Sixteenth-Century explorers and ship captains were as one might suspect culturally arrogant , inaccurate or based on the ethnic stereotypes that survived from classical antiquity, and ethnographic works of Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Münster classified the people of forty nations according to their personality dispositions and exterior appearance. At times, Münster delves into a lot of detail on the rituals, ceremonies, legal system and dining habits of non-Europeans. Münster’s work, for better or worse, worked to ensure the transmission of Sixteenth-Century cultural typologies to future generations. Part of my paper will focus on Münster’s French 1553 edition of La Cosmographia universelle contenant la situaton de toutes les parties du monde avec leurs propreietez & appartenances.” Another scholar and university teacher of the same generation as Münster was Pierre Apian, (1501-1555) In 1524 Apian published a volume Cosmographicus Liber (1583 edition) which described the details and status of life in four parts of the world, the fourth part being the newly discovered “new world.” Apian’s analysis of the indigenous peoples of the new world concluded that they were cruel yet on the other hand had some desirable legal systems and were, in some cases, anxious to learn about Christianity. Apian, as was Münster, was dependent on the sharp and sometimes distorted printed eyewitness accounts of life outside of Europe. Apian was entirely overwhelmed by the printed book. He, on one occasion, asserted that the ‘modern period of history began with the invention of the printing press in 1492 (sic)!

The printed travel book and cosmographic anthologies detailing many of perceived cultural characteristics of non-Europeans left a legacy infusing often culturally arrogant ideas into readers of subsequent generations. Travel literature was an essential ingredient in the early modern European book culture

Connors (Linda)

Drew University

Chair

Cooney (Sondra)

Kent State University, Kent, Ohio

From island to empire : the contribution of maps to Chambers's Encyclopaedia of Universal Knowledge for the People, 1860-1868.

Words are not the only vehicles which enable readers to cross borders. Maps, which by their very nature involve borders, enable readers to do so as well. Indeed, as D.F. McKenzie observed in _Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts _(1986), maps have a language which can be read. When the Edinburgh publishing firm of W. & R. Chambers published _Chambers's Encyclopaedia of Universal Knowledge_ , 1860-1868, they included more than 30 maps in the ten volumes-- some of the ancient, others of contemporary worlds. Assessing these maps as part of the total _ Encyclopaedia_text requires understanding not only the technology required to make and reproduce maps. Evaluation depends as well--perhaps even more --on understanding that maps are inherently rhetorical, as J.B. Harley contends in "Deconstructing the Map" (1989). The Chambers maps were originally produced by the eminent Edinburgh cartographers Johnston and Bartholomew for _Chambers's People's Atlas_. By looking at both the technical and rhetorical features of these maps, I plan to show how they helped moved _Encyclopaedia_ readers from their insularity to an understanding of the larger world--the world of the Empire.

Sondra Miley Cooney is an associate professor of English at Kent State University, Kent, Ohio. Her research focuses on the W. & R. Chambers publishing firm of Edinburgh, Scotland. At the present time, she is working on the history of _Chambers's Encyclopaedia of Universal Knowledge_1860-1868. Her "A Catalogue of Chambers' Encyclopaedia 1868" appeared in _The Bibliotheck_ Vol 24:1999.

Coppens (Christian)

Belgique

The Giolito Catalogues : bookselling techniques in 16th century Italy.

Publishers' and booksellers' catalogues are important evidence of the marketing and distribution of books. In Italy, with the exception of the Manutius family, not so many catalogues are known, almost all dating from the last decade of the sixteenth century. Apart from the 'normally' published catalogues, some occasions seem to have been especially the opportunity to publish them: when a stock was taken over from a member of the family or another bookseller/publisher, or for a big stock coming from the Franfurt book fair for instance. From the last twenty years of the Giolito publishing house (the heirs of Gabriele), two lists and two catalogues are known. This lecture wants to give an analysis of structure and content of these catalogues and will try to place them in the context of the Giolito firm in particular and Italian booktrade in general.

Cottenet (Cécile)

Université de Provence, Aix-Marseille I

Crossing over into the mainstream : Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman, a long road from prepublication to publication in book form.

Anstract

This paper will examine the long road traveled by African-American writer Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932), from his first magazine publication in 1885, to the publication in book form of his first volume of short stories, and first book, The Conjure Woman. To do so is to assess the difficulty this "pioneer of the color line" faced in order to become a professional author, as defined by book historian William Charvat: Chesnutt, living in Cleveland, was geographically removed from the major literary and publishing centers of the times, Boston and New York; was not included in any network of literary institutions; had to sustain a growing family via his practice as a legal stenographer and could therefore not devote all his time to his literary medium; and moreover, at the end of the 19th century, in a time of high tension, when racial segregation was being officially legalized, he was faced with the difficult choice of revealing, or not, his racial origins to his editors and potential publishers.

This paper will try to show how, little by little and despite these apparent obstacles, making use of different channels and literary institutions, Chesnutt made his literary reputation to finally access a highly acclaimed publication in the literary magazine The Atlantic Monthly. But before doing so, and thereby gaining access to mainstream publishing house Houghton, Mifflin & Co. which owned the prestigious magazine, Chesnutt had had to earn his wings. He had started publishing in very small reviews and magazines, accepting what little editors could offer him, before being distributed by S.S. McClure’s literary syndicate, which opened some doors for him, and partly fashioned the way Chesnutt’s stories would be received. Chesnutt gradually learned to distinguish between the high-profile magazines such as Atlantic, The Outlook, The Century Magazine, and smaller ones.

Twelve years separate the publication of the first "conjure story" in The Atlantic Monthly in 1887– "The Goophered Grapevine," which would eventually become the opening story of the volume—and the actual publication of the volume in book form in 1899. How did Chesnutt and editor and mentor Walter Hines Page manage to put together a coherent volume, using stories published separately over such a long period? How were these stories prepublished, and what impact did this have on the publication in 1899? And finally, what use was made of his racial origins: were they advertized or suggested in any way by the prepublication? These are some of the questions that will be addressed as the paper examines the role of the different literary institutions in Chesnutt’s "professionalization" between 1887 and 1899.

Résumé

Cette communication propose d’examiner le long chemin parcouru par l’écrivain afro-américain Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932), depuis sa première publication dans un magazine en 1885, jusqu’à la publication de son premier recueil de nouvelles, et premier livre, The Conjure Woman. Ce faisant, nous évaluerons les difficultés auxquelles se confronta ce « pionnier de la color line » pour devenir un écrivain professionnel, tel que le définit notamment l’historien du livre américain William Charvat : Chesnutt, qui habitait Cleveland, était géographiquement éloigné des centres littéraires et éditoriaux de l’époque, Boston et New York ; il ne fréquentait pas de réseaux littéraires et éditoriaux ; il devait également pourvoir aux besoins d’une famille qui s’agrandissait tout en travaillant comme reporter à la cour, et ne pouvait donc pas se consacrer entièrement à la création littéraire ; enfin, à la fin du XIXème siècle, lorsque la tension raciale était à son comble aux Etats-Unis et que la ségrégation était inscrite dans la loi (arrêt Plessy contre Ferguson, 1896), il devait choisir de révéler ou non son origine métisse aux rédacteurs en chef et potentiels éditeurs.

Cette présentation essaiera de montrer comment, progressivement, malgré ces obstacles évidents, Chesnutt acquit une certaine réputation, à travers différents lieux de publication et institutions littéraires, avant d’accéder au prestigieux magazine littéraire The Atlantic Monthly. Cette publication facilita certainement son entrée au sein de la maison d’édition mainstream Houghton, Mifflin & Co., propriétaire du magazine susnommé. Mais avant cela, Chesnutt dut faire ses preuves, en publiant dans de modestes magazines, acceptant le peu de rémunération que les rédacteurs en chef pouvaient lui offrir, avant d’être diffusé plus largement par le syndicat littéraire S.S. McClure, qui lui ouvrit certaines portes, et influença sans doute la réception de ses nouvelles. Chesnutt apprit peu à peu à distinguer les lieux de publication les plus en vue, tels que The Atlantic Monthly, The Century Magazine et The Outlook, des moins reconnus.

Douze ans séparent la publication de la première « conjure story » dans The Atlantic Monthly en 1887 (« The Goophered Grapevine », qui deviendrait la première nouvelle du recueil) et la publication du recueil en 1899. Comment Chesnutt et Walter Hines Page, son éditeur et mentor, parvinrent-ils à produire un recueil cohérent à partir de nouvelles publiées sur une si longue période ? Comment ces nouvelles furent-elles prépubliées, et quelle influence cette prépublication eut-elle sur le livre de 1899 ? Enfin, comment ses origines raciales furent-elles utilisées : furent-elles affichées, ou suggérées d’une quelconque manière lors de ces publications en magazine ? Telles sont quelques-unes des questions auxquelles tâchera de répondre cette communication, en examinant le rôle des institutions littéraires, magazines et syndicats littéraires, dans la « professionnalisation » de Chesnutt entre 1887 et 1899.

Après des études à l’Ecole Normale Supérieure de Fontenay-St-Cloud, j’occupe actuellement un poste de PRAG à l’Université de Provence, Aix-Marseille I. J’ai soutenu une thèse de doctorat en juin 2003, sous la direction du Professeur Hélène Christol, « Histoires éditoriales : The Conjure Woman de Charles W. Chesnutt (1899) et Cane de Jean Toomer (1923) ». C’est lors de mon année de DEA (1999) que j’ai découvert l’histoire du livre et de l’édition, plus précisément dans le domaine nord-américain. Mes recherches se situent au confluent de l’histoire du livre, de l’histoire de la littérature afro-américaine et de l’histoire américaine.

Cottour (Thierry)

Brest, France

Le Digest, un hybride venu d’Outre-Atlantique.

Le Reader's Digest débarque en France, au sens propre, dans la poche des soldats américains en 1944. Une édition en anglais y est fabriquée dès 1944 puis, en février 1947, une édition en français est lancée. (une édition en franco-canadien suivra peu après). Mais, c'est dès l'avant-guerre que le Reader's Digest donne des idées. Le premier exemple d'imitation date de 1938, suivi peu après, en 1940 par Voici la France de ce mois de René Julliard. Pendant, puis surtout après la guerre, les digests à la française fleurissent, s'inspirant peu ou prou du Reader's digest. Un nouveau genre nait qui concerne plusieurs millions de lecteurs. A partir du milieu des années 50, la fièvre retombe quelque peu mais, jusqu'au milieu des années 70, le digest joue un rôle important dans la presse et l'édition françaises. Car le digest n'est pas seulement un périodique. C'est un "bâtard", mi livre mi journal, un almanach mensuel pour aller vite qui touche à tous les domaines. Livre par ses condensés, parfois vendus reliés, par le club du livre annexe (Sélection du Livre), journal par son prix, sa périodicité. C'est aussi un format, un format de poche avant la lettre.

Professeur agrégé d'histoire au lycée Amiral Ronarc'h (Brest) et à l'U.F.R. STAPS de Brest. D.E.A. d'histoire en 1992 "Un géant au format de poche : l'arrivée du Reader's Digest en France" Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Paris.

Courtney (Cecil P.)

Christ's College, Cambridge, UK

Montesquieu : towards a critical bibliography of the published works 1721-1800.

Montesquieu’s three major works, Lettres persanes (1721), Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734) and L’Esprit des lois (1748) were important events in eighteenth-century intellectual and publishing history. However, while Montesquieu has attracted numerous studies from specialists in literature, history and political philosophy, there have been very few by bibliographers or book historians and, in fact, there is simply no complete or authoritative Montesquieu bibliography. The present bibliography is based on personal examination of editions and relevant manuscript and printed materials in major European and American libraries. The aim is to provide for each edition up to 1758 (the date of the Œuvres allegedly revised by the author before his death in 1755) a detailed description, with as much information as possible on the printing, publication, distribution and reception of each item. For editions published from 1759 to 1800, and for translations, shorter descriptions, are normally given, along with less detailed notes. Particular attention is given to certain bibliographical problems, for example the existence of false imprints used to evade censorship, the proliferation of pirated editions, and the simultaneous publication of distinct issues (with textual variants) for different markets. Attention is given to the transformation of the text up to the 1758 edition of the Œuvres and to how the presentation of Montesquieu’s texts in later editions reflects the changing climate of opinion of the period. Editions published by Huart et Moreau (Paris) contain preliminary matter which defends Montesquieu against his critics, while those of Arkstée and Merkus (Amsterdam et Leipzig) contain a highly critical running commentary. Later in the century some editions include attacks on Montesquieu for his alleged hostility to reform, while in 1796 he is celebrated as a great writer and original thinker in the sumptuous Plassan edition, which was published by subscription and contains several previously unpublished works. A copy of this edition was presented in February 1796 to the Convention, whose members voted that Montesquieu’s remains should be transferred to the Panthéon. This bibliographical and book-history approach to Montesquieu will provide many insights into various aspects of authorship, reading and publishing, particularly regarding the reception of his writings and his place in the intellectual debate of the period.

Some sections of the bibliography have been published in the introductions to the new critical edition of Montesquieu’s Œuvres complètes being published by the Voltaire Foundation (General Editors: Jean Ehrard and Catherine Volpilhac; three volumes published to date). A complete bibliography will be published in a separate volume.

Coustillas (Pierre)

Université de Lille

Gissing in Translation.

Gissing's works have been much more extensively translated than is commonly realized; no stocktaking of the translations has yet been attempted. All his major works have been translated as well as a fair proportion of his 115 short stories that, with the exception of some of the earliest ones, appeared in periodicals before they were collected. In some form or other, he is works have been made available in French, German, Italian, Dutch, Romanian, Swedish, Polish, Greek, Russian, Danish, Japanese, Chinese and Korean. A few of his novels, like New Grub Street in French, German and Russian, Eve's Ransom in French, Danish and Russian, were serialised in dailies, weeklies and monthlies before they were published in book form. Some short stories like ‘A Poor Gentleman,’ which has been the most frequently translated of his shorter works, have appeared mainly in periodicals and anthologies. Statistical approaches to the subject reveal a number of unexpected situations. With one exception, Eve's Ransom, all the Russian translations were translations of novels which had originally appeared under the same imprint, that of Smith, Elder and Co. Of his short, but technically innovative novel, again Eve's Ransom, four translations have been recorded, while a significant late full-length novel like Our Friend the Charlatan has been ignored by all translators. Unaccountably, two Chinese translations of New Grub Street appeared in the same year, and again two of The Odd Women in Japan. The French translation of Born in Exile is an unrecorded bibliographical oddity in that, for each printing, one finds copyright pages with correct or incorrect information. But to the uninitiated the most surprising aspect of Gissing's works, in other languages than his own, is his success in Japan, attested by many different editions in different translations of his last book published in his lifetime, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, and of his short stories. Their proliferation was extraordinary. The present speaker numbers in his collection about 100 translations in Japanese, besides bilingual editions--probably a small number compared to the actual historical total. All these translations did not make Gissing or his descendants rich people, so pitifully low were the translation rights. Whether they were creditable performances or not, they testify to the originality and high artistic value of the English original.

Pierre Coustillas, Professor emeritus at the University of Lille, is the author or editor of numerous books and articles on the late Victorian and Edwardian period. He has edited George Gissing's diary, co-edited his Collected Letters in 9 volumes, and published critical editions of many of the same author's novels. Among his translations of Gissing's works, done independently or in collaboration are New Grub Street, The Odd Women, By the Ionian Sea and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. He has been editor of The Gissing Journal (formerly The Gissing Newsletter) since 1969. The other novelists whose works he has commented upon and/or translated include George Moore, Jack London, W. H. Hudson, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy and Kipling. His full-length biblography of Gissing's works from his student days to the present day is awaiting publication; so are his edition of all Gissing's miscellaneous writings on Dickens (articles, introductions and book reviews) and his critical illustrated edition of By the Ionian Sea.

Crain (Patricia)

University of Minnesota

Literacy as property : The case of Goody Two-Shoes.

Printed anonymously, like most early children’s books, but variously attributed to Oliver Goldsmith or the publisher John Newbery, among others, The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (London, 1765), became a staple of Anglo-American children’s publishing for 150 years in its original and in later redactions, and survives on the pantomime stage as well as in the schoolyard slur.

The novel’s plot follows the fairytale motif of the miraculous recovery of an orphan girl, who survives by her wits, teaching herself and then others to read, and finally coming into great wealth. The pivotal moment in her biography, which transforms her from the one-shoed nobody of Margery Meanwell to a status in which, in the form of the catchphrase “Goody Two-Shoes,” she transcends literature and literacy altogether, is the gift of a pair of shoes. Even before Goody learns to read, these shoes become a virtual estate; like certain kinds of inheritances, they even provide the little girl with her “title,” and they console her entirely for her losses, which have been total: her parents are dead, she’s homeless, and her beloved brother is spirited away from her.

In this paper, I argue that the literacy that comes to be represented to and through children in the eighteenth century establishes a discursive relationship between, broadly speaking, literacy and property, when concepts of property were notably fluid, and long before the term “literacy” had come to represent, as it did only in the late nineteenth-century, a fully consolidated object of “acquisition,” as in the pat phrase “literacy acquisition.” The novel offers Goody’s literacy as both an alternative to property in land and a homeopathic remedy for unstable portable and paper property in a seemingly material literacy that functions as property.

Illustrated redactions of Goody through the nineteenth century shift the conditions of Goody’s literacy, often effacing the original’s dependence on property relations; under the reign of the Victorian Golden Age of children’s literature, Goody gets variously domesticated, sentimentalized, pastoralized, and gothicized. Most significantly, these later versions remove the plight of the poor–the focus of the original–to a great distance from the putative child-reader’s everyday experience, even as the position of actual poor children in both England and America becomes increasingly desperate.

Patricia Crain is Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of The Story of A: Alphabetization in American from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (Stanford 2000), which won the MLA prize for a first book in 2001. Her current book project studies the interconnections between children, literacy, and property in 18th- and 19th-century British and U.S. culture.

Cucic (Vesna)

Dubrovnik Libraries, Croatia

Early printers in Dubrovnik : the review and the results of the researches so far.

The introduction will give the historical review of the history of book and printing in Croatia, mainly in Dubrovnik, and the research results up to now. The accent will be put on the early printing houses in Dubrovnik (Carlo Antonio Occhi, Antonio Trevisan i Antun Martecchini) organized relatively at a later date, by the end of the 18th century. The other part of Croatia had the printing houses organized already by the end of the 15 th century (Kosinj and Senj).

Dubrovnik, as a capital of an independent state (the Republic of Dubrovnik) was rich and full of prominent people who wrote and printed their books in many European centers : Rome, Venice, Brescia, Paris, Milan, Lyon, Vienne etc. Moreover, Dubrovnik gave to Europe one of the most important printers of the 15th century, Dobric Dobricevic (Boninus de Boninis 1454-1528) and a notable librarian from 17th century, Stjepan Gradic, a well known poet and polyhistor and a head-master of the Vatican Library.

In the end the earliest libraries in Dubrovnik will be mentioned.

Vesna Cucic, mr.sc., est la directrice des Bibliotheques de Dubrovnik (La Bibliotheque de Recherche et la Bibliotheque Publique).