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Page (P. Ivan)

Archives générales des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rome, Italie

Apprendre la langue pour répandre la Parole : les travaux linguistiques des missionnaires d'Afrique (Pères Blancs) jusqu'en 1932.

Résumé

L’auteur part du catalogue Publications en langues africaines sorti de l’Imprimerie des Missionnaires d’Afrique à Alger en 1932. Par l’analyse des livres eux-mêmes, et l’étude des archives de la Société, il évalue la contribution de ces missionnaires à la connaissance des langues africaines, à l’alphabétisation, et à la dissémination du christianisme par l’imprimé.

Abstract

Starting from the list of publications in African languages issued by the Imprimerie des Missionnaires d’Afrique at Algiers in 1932, the author analyses the books themselves, and studies the archives of the Society, to evaluate the contribution of these missionaries to the knowledge of African languages, to the spread of literacy, and the diffusion of Christianity through print.

Ivan Page à été conservateur à la réserve des imprimés de la Bibliothèque nationale d’Australie, où il a commencé à s’intéresser à l’histoire de l’imprimerie. Devenu prêtre missionnaire par la suite, il a travaillé pendant 12 ans au Burkina Faso. Depuis 1996 il est archiviste de la Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique à leur Maison généralice à Rome.

Panofsky (Ruth)

Ryerson University

"Literary Swan" or "Village Goose" : Paul Hiebert's Sarah Binks.

By 1947, when Oxford University Press Canada published Paul Hiebert’s satiric work, Sarah Binks, the eponymous (albeit fictitious) poet already was known as the “Sweet Songstress of Saskatchewan,” the “Poet’s Poetess,” and her verse had been in circulation for more than six years. As Professor of Chemistry at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg and an aspiring humorist, Hiebert frequently presented the poetry of Sarah Binks at local academic and community gatherings. During the difficult years of World War II – when circumstances prohibited the publication of Canadian works in general, and works of humour in particular – Hiebert sought to disseminate Binks’s poetry as widely as possible. As a result of her creator’s prodigious efforts, Sarah Binks soon enjoyed a local following, and her audience would increase dramatically upon publication of Hiebert’s work. In fact, Paul Hiebert’s Sarah Binks would remain popular throughout the twentieth century, “still a going concern” in the early 1990s, according to critic Carole Gerson. Moreover, as recently as 2002, Sarah Binks was chosen as one of five titles in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s annual “Canada Reads” competition, a contest designed to foster nation-wide reading of a single Canadian work of fiction.

That Hiebert’s satiric work remains a seminal literary text and Sarah Binks herself a recognizable icon is confirmed by a study of the work’s publication and reception. This paper will consider the composition, publication, and contemporary reception of Sarah Binks, a work of humour that takes Canada as its subject – in the tradition of Thomas Chandler Haliburton and Stephen Leacock, Canada’s premier humorists – and succeeds in laying bare the country’s pretensions. This paper will trace the gestation of the work, prolonged by global circumstances of war and the local difficulties faced by publishers seeking to issue Canadian titles during the 1940s. Hiebert’s publisher had hoped to issue Sarah Binks in the early 1940s, but several times Oxford University Press was obliged to delay publication. Over the course of six years, Hiebert often despaired that his work would ever be published. Ironically, when Sarah Binks finally went to press, it received infelicitous treatment by a local printing company. Embarrassed by the inferior quality of the published book, an abject Bill Clarke (Oxford’s Manager between 1936 and 1949) wrote to the ever-patient Hiebert: “the whole job has been very carelessly executed in spite of everything we could do to watch over it day by day” (W. H. Clarke to Paul Hiebert, 3 December 1947).

In an effort to reconstruct the historical moment of Sarah Binks, this paper will draw on the archival holdings of Oxford University Press Canada. The in-house archive of Oxford Canada has been made available to me for the purposes of writing this paper. The archive covers the period 1904 – when Oxford first was established in Toronto – to the present. The archive is extensive and includes documents such as executive and author correspondence; reader’s reports; contracts; financial, production, and publicity material. The archive of Oxford University Press is valuable as a living record of the cultural history of Canada and as a resource for scholars across disciplines. This paper will draw on that resource, used here for the first time for scholarly purposes, to reconstruct the publication and contemporary reception of Paul Hiebert’s Sarah Binks, and to analyze the continuing popularity of a deceptively unassuming work of humour.

Ruth Panofsky is Associate Director of the Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture at Ryerson University in Toronto, Ontario. She is the author of numerous scholarly articles on author-publisher relations in Canada, and Canadian publishing houses. Her most recent publications include Adele Wiseman: Essays on Her Works (2001) and Lifeline (2001), a volume of poems.

Parinet (Elisabeth)

Ecole nationale des chartes, Paris

L'édition en temps de guerre : la librairie Hachette pendant la Première guerre mondiale.

Les historiens du livre en France semblent avoir mis entre parenthèses les quatre années de guerre. Pourtant, l'édition s'y trouve confrontée à une situation nouvelle par bien des aspects : difficultés d'organisation, hausse des coûts de production, bouleversement du contexte intellectuel…La présente communication se propose d'étudier le cas de la plus grande entreprise d'édition, la Librairie Hachette. Cet éditeur de littérature générale tourne au ralenti pendant six mois, comme ses concurrents, puis reprend lentement une production, d'abord marquée par les événements.

A travers cette étude de cas, il s'agit d'étudier les répercussions économiques de la guerre sur un grand éditeur. A-t-elle été pour eux une période de difficultés financières ou sont-ils de ces entrepreneurs qui ont fait des "bénéfices de guerre" ? Comment les éditeurs ont-ils réagi aux revendications des imprimeurs et relieurs ? Quelle politique de hausse de prix ont-ils pratiquée ? Le but de ce questionnement est de déterminer si la période de guerre a influé sur le fonctionnement de la branche Édition et si la guerre marque un tournant dans l'évolution économique des maison d'édition.

La seconde partie de l'étude porte sur la production de ces quatre années, en s'intéressant au catalogue. Il s'agit de déterminer la part exacte de la littérature de propagande, dans la production et dans les lectures des Français. Cette distinction repose sur les observations faites dans des études antérieures consacrées à d'autres éditeurs, qui semblaient montrer que les lecteurs se sont assez vite détournés d'une littérature de circonstance pour chercher l'évasion dans la littérature romanesque la plus éloignée de la réalité. L'étude du plus grand éditeur français est d'un apport décisif sur ce point car le propos est de cerner les lectures de la majorité des Français et délaisse délibérément les valeurs consacrées par l'histoire littéraire qui n'ont eu qu'un succès confidentiel.

Élisabeth Parinet est Directeur d'étude à l'École nationale des chartes. Parmi ses publications,

- "L'édition littéraire de 1890 à 1914", dans Histoire de l'édition française, tome IV, Paris : Promodis, 1986, p. 148-187.

- "Une entreprise : la maison d'édition", en collaboration avec Valérie Tesnière, ibid., p. 123-147.

- La Librairie Flammarion, 1875-1914, Paris : I.M.E.C. Éditions, 1992, 404 p.

- Bibliothèque bleue et littératures de colportage, [colloque organisé par la Bibliothèque municipale de Troyes et l’École des chartes, 12-13 novembre 1999], textes réunis par É. Parinet et Thierry Delcourt, École nationale des chartes, 2000.

Passet (Joanne E.)

Indiana University East, Richmond

Raising radical readers : 19th-century freethinkers and literature for children.

Radical thinkers have long relied on print culture to spread their ideas to others, but little is known about the history of radical literature for children. In the last quarter of the nineteenth-century, American freethinkers—individuals who formed opinions independently of authoritative individuals and institutions and tended to reject religious dogma—became concerned about the possibility of their children being contaminated by exposure to books infused with Christian morality. Concerned about the lack of suitable reading material for their children, they constructed alternative sources. Such noted freethinking women as Anne Denton Cridge, Susan H. Wixon, and Elmina Drake Slenker published books intended for children's use in the home and in the schools. Others established children’s columns in icals, and encouraged little freethinkers to discuss works they had read. Additionally, those periodicals advertised and sold a variety of books and pamphlets for young readers.

Who wrote freethought literature for children, and why? Did liberal children's literature prove effective in transmitting freethought ideas to the next generation? Who were the children who consumed liberal texts, and in what settings did they read? Which works did little freethinkers find especially meaningful, and why? Did they, like their parents, form a community of readers when they discussed these texts, or did they read in isolation? This paper is based on examination of freethought children's literature, children's letters to the Truth Seeker, adult discussions of children's reading habits, and census records. By connecting real readers to the texts they read during the second half of the nineteenth century, the findings of this study add to our knowledge of children and their reading, and explore the role of print culture in the social reproduction of a freethought worldview.

Potter (Jane)

Wolfson College, Oxford

Never a dull life : The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the 19th- and 20th-century book trade.

Must the marriage of biography and book history be a dull one? Does it, as Robert L. Patten has recently remarked, produce ‘the worst of both worlds: a dull life and an even duller list of books’? It is true that most publishers’ claim to fame relies on long lists of books that bear their imprint, of which only a handful may have endured; moreover, the members of the trade were focused only on the commercial success (or failure) of their businesses. Nonetheless, this paper will draw on the entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography to argue that studying the lives of publishers, booksellers and literary agents of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can enrich the study of book history.

Book trade firms were made in the image of their founders, each of whom had agendas that influenced the day-to-day running of their businesses. As their entries attest, the personalities of such figures as Archibald Constable, J.M. Dent, Stanley Unwin and Victor Gollancz contributed both to the output of their firms and to their own reputations. This relationship between the individual and the firm will also be apparent in the Dictionary’s innovative use of ‘group’ entries, in which each member of, for example, the Longman or Hodder publishing clans is viewed both individually and collectively in order to create a memoir of their family firm. In this way, the Dictionary will encourage readers to see publishing houses not as economic monoliths but as personal creations. Moreover, as all the entries in the Dictionary strive to set the individual within a larger historical context, its book trade entries will provide valuable insights into the machinations of the last 200 years of British publishing, from its development as ‘an occupation for a gentleman’ to its dramatic metamorphosis brought about by the conglomerate takeovers of the late twentieth century.

Of course the Dictionary will not ignore the associations between authors and publishers, and so literary scholars will find much of interest, from Archibald Constable’s association with Walter Scott to Rayner Unwin’s interaction with J.R.R. Tolkien. Nonetheless, gone are the ‘dull’ lists of books and authors that characterized the old Dictionary’s book trade entries and in their place will be more nuanced and fascinating biographies that bring alive the men and women who existed in the shadows of the books they disseminated. Book history cannot be divorced from biography.

Jane Potter was a Research Editor at the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography between 2000 and 2003. Her editorial responsibilities included all entries on literary figures from 1790 to the present day as well as all entries on members of the book trade since 1790. She is currently Assistant to the Archivist at Wolfson College, Oxford, and a temporary lecturer in Publishing History at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford. She is also engaged in cataloguing the literary papers of Ian Fleming.

Poulain (Martine)

Institut national d'histoire de l'art, Paris

Les représentations de l'étranger en France au XXe siècle à travers les écrits interdits.

Les lois protégeant les publications écrites en France (loi de 1881 sur la liberté de la presse, décret de 1939 sur l’outrage aux moeurs, loi de 1949 sur la protection de la jeunesse) sont aussi celles qui permettent de les interdire, au nom de diverses valeurs considérées comme plus grandes : la protection de la nation, de l’Etat, de la jeunesse, de la morale. Dans ce combat entre liberté et interdit, les écrits étrangers ou « d’origine étrangère » sont particulièrement surveillés.

Une analyse de ces interdictions permet de repérer les périodes et les thèmes qui suscitent des craintes particulières. Elles sont en général d’ordre politique ou moral. Du côté du politique, ce sont les périodes de guerre (décret de 1939 sur les écrits de provenance étrangère), puis de lutte anti-colonialiste qui rendent suspect l’écrit étranger : il s’agira alors d’en empêcher la diffusion et la lecture, afin que les idées qu’il contient soient partagées par des lecteurs français. Du côté de la morale, on peut être étonné que l’écrit étranger soit lui aussi suspecté : la France est souvent représentée comme ayant au contraire fait preuve de libéralisme en ce domaine, et nombre d’écrivains étrangers y ont trouvé refuge pour y écrire plus librement que dans leur pays d’origine. Pourtant, un certain nombre d’écrits « d’origine étrangère » seront interdits en France, notamment dans des périodes de raidissement des pouvoirs en charge de protéger la morale publique. Des éditeurs, comme les éditions Obelisk Press ou Olympia Press, spécialisés dans la publication de romans anglais ou américains, seront ainsi systématiquement poursuivis dans les années 50 ou 60. D’autre part, sans que l’on puisse assimiler la protection économique des écrits français à une censure, on cherchera à comprendre aussi comment celle-ci vise à refuser une influence, estimée trop forte ou délétère, de l’étranger et à protéger un système de valeurs nationales.

Nous nous proposons de faire l’histoire des interdits de livres et de publications étrangères en France au XXe siècle et de restituer, en analysant succinctement les contenus de ces publications, les représentations de l’étranger que ces interdits ou ces refus mettent en scène.

Martine POULAIN est Conservateur général des bibliothèques, Directrice du Département de la bibliothèque et de la documentation, Institut national d'histoire de l'art, Paris.

Pretorius (Fransjohan)

University of Pretoria, Republic of South Africa

Reading practices of Boer combatants in the Anglo-Boer War 1899-1902.

This paper concerns the reading practices of Boer combatants during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. In particular, it explores the impact that the state of literacy on commando and the availability and sorts of reading matter had on these reading practices. In the research a large number of published and unpublished diaries, letters and reminiscences have been consulted.

The first part of the paper will be an assessment of the state of literacy on commando, made possible by an investigation of educational standards in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State in the second half of the nineteenth century. All available statistics from annual educational reports will be consulted. From this a picture will emerge of a small number of highly literate men, a larger group of adequately literate men, a still larger group of semi-literates, and finally the illiterate group.

The second part of the paper will explore the sorts of reading matter on commando. Certain categories will be distinguished, viz. the Bible, newspapers and magazines, and books. Various examples will be given of each category. It will be pointed out that everything depended on what reading matter was available in both the set-piece battle phase of the war (lasting from October 1899 to August 1900), and the guerrilla phase (in the last two years until May 1902). It will be made clear that sources for making reading matter available in the set-piece battle phase included relatives at home and the governments of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. It will also be pointed out that deserted and devastated homesteads, vacated British camping sites and captured trains, provided the Boers with reading matter in the guerrilla phase, and that even libraries were built up from available stock.

Fransjohan Pretorius is professor of history at the University of Pretoria in the Republic of South Africa. He has received international acclaim for his research on the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. He is the author and editor of six books on the Anglo-Boer War, of which four have appeared in both Afrikaans and English. His book, Kommandolewe tydens die Anglo-Boereoorlog 1899-1902 (1991 and 1999) has received four prestigious awards, while the English edition, Life on Commando during the Anglo-Boer War 1899-1902 (1999), was the runner-up to the coveted Sunday Times Alan Paton Award. Pretorius has read papers at conferences in South Africa, England, Northern Ireland, Canada, the Netherlands and Austria.