What do we mean by “bibliography+ for the 21st century”?
This is our call for revitalization.
As you’ll see in the history below, our panel is in need of new energy to invigorate it and keep it going into the future.
The panel’s name is officially “Bibliography, Publishing Studies, and Textual Criticism,” all of which is wrapped up with Book History, related work in Digital Humanities, even History of Rhetoric, and probably sub-disciplines I’m overlooking at the moment. For the sake of our current call, we are designating our shared work “Bibliography+.”
We’re people who care about texts and transmission—how people created, edited, preserved, and used texts for as long as texts have existed. If this sounds like you, please join our email list for updates—we’d love to have you join us in person or virtually for the 2021 session!
Please scroll down to read about our panel’s history, this year’s presenters, and the CFP to which this year’s presenters responded.
Hope to talk soon!
—Heidi Nobles, panel chair
History of the Panel
The South Central conference is the only regional conference that maintains a Bibliography+ panel
There are 6 regional conferences in the Modern Language Association. But although the national conference hosts Bibliography-related sessions each year (in 2021’s Toronto conference, there are 2 panels that promise to be engaging; see here and here), the South Central conference is the only regional conference that maintains a Bibliography+ panel.
This panel launched in 1976 as a special interest group for “Bibliography and Textual Criticism.” Ernest W. Sullivan II of Texas Tech University proposed the group for the 1976 convention of the South Central Modern Language Association; ten additional scholars signed Sullivan’s petition. The SCMLA’s governing body granted unanimous approval, and the panel has stood ever since. For the 2020 convention, we expanded the panel’s name to be “Bibliography, Publishing Studies, and Textual Criticism,” in an attempt to better reflect the breadth of our work.
In the early years of the SCMLA, a subsequent issue of the South Central Bulletin would publish an annual conference program summary. The very first issue of the South Central Bulletin, published in December 1940, declares “First Meeting Successful,” documents the numbers involved (212 registrations, 47 papers, etc.), and expresses the “interest and keen satisfaction so widely evident among the membership of the new organization.” The author concludes by reporting “the oft-repeated comment on the large number of young people who had come to the meeting.”
The South Central Bulletin published its last issue in 1983, and in 1984, the South Central Review became the official journal of the SCMLA, publishing “a stimulating mix of interdisciplinary scholarly articles, essays, interviews, and opinion pieces.” As a traditional journal, the Review did not publish the conference programs. For our purposes, the transition means we have paper titles for the sessions of our panel from 1976-1983; records from more recent years reside with the panelists and those holding print conference programs.
From reviewing those materials, I can tell you that for more than 40 years, bibliography and textual scholars have been presenting us with both theoretical and practical arguments about curating texts and with lively case studies in works including Fahrenheit 451 (1980 conference), Jack London’s letters and poems by John Donne (1984 conference), all the way to 2018’s presentations on Erma Brodber’s Nothing’s Mat, selected Bengali Dalit autobiographies, and the New Orleans-based literary magazine, The Double Dealer, and 2019’s papers on John Faulkner’s corresponding with his publishers, Walt Whitman’s forms and formats in Leaves of Grass, and the custodial history of selected Somerville and Ross manuscripts. In other words, we’ve seen a lot of vital range in since this panel first launched in 1976.
But if I may be frank, at recent conferences, we have been missing the turnout of young people reported at the 1940 event, and we are in need of emerging scholars, whose minds will carry this work forward.
Excerpted from “First Meeting Successful,” South Central Bulletin 1.1 (1940).
We are in need of emerging scholars, whose minds will carry this work forward.
2021 Panelists
*This section is a work in progress; photos/abstracts/bios will be posted as they are finalized.
Panel One
(Thursday, October 7, 10:15 AM - 11:45 AM)
Opening Comments by Heidi Nobles: “Bibliography+: Revitalizing Textual Studies for the 21st Century”
”Were ‘Cheap Quartos’ Really Cheap?”
Aaron T. Pratt, Harry Ransom Center, UT Austin
“Search and Browse Interfaces and Shakespearean Bibliography”
Heidi Craig, Texas A&M
Search and browse interfaces are the conventional portals to digital bibliographies. Like many terms borrowed from the physical realm and repurposed for digital spaces, “browsing” and “searching” simultaneously carry and transcend their earlier resonances. For example, “to browse” originally referred to the leisurely or preparatory consumption of food; “browse” and its cognates appears throughout Shakespeare’s oeuvre, each time associated with consumption. In the nineteenth century, browsing came to refer to the casual examination of books, shelves and stacks. In online contexts, browsing retains its leisurely resonances, but has largely shed its associations with consumption. The term’s historical ties to print culture makes “browsing” simultaneously useful and frustratingly ineffective for describing research activities in digital spaces. In most cases, “to browse” implies a directionless, anticipatory activity, often contrasted with a more directed or rigorous one, namely “searching,” in bibliographical contexts. And although the image of the “browsing scholar” risks caricaturing the daily habits of a seemingly idle academic, the serendipity of the stacks has produced monumental discoveries. In Shakespeare studies, arguably the most capacious field in English literary studies with some of the largest and longest-standing bibliographical resources, browsing and searching have a special significance. In this paper, which derives from a larger project on which I am working with Prof. Laura Estill (Associate Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University and co-editor of the World Shakespeare Bibliography), I consider how research interfaces in print and online have historically shaped and continue to transform bibliographical approaches to Shakespeare.
”Bibliography of and as Natural History and Poetry”
James P. Ascher, University of Virginia
Panel Two
(Friday, October 8, 10:15 AM - 11:45 AM)
Opening Comments by Lauren Liebe
”Editing medieval Latin: Autographs real and imagined”
Andrew Kraebel, Trinity University
”The Longman Archive and the Microeconomics of British Fiction Publishing, 1780–1836”
Michael VanHoose, University of Virginia
"Jesmyn Ward: Publishing History, 2008-2020"
Thomas Bonner, Jr., Xavier University of Louisiana
2020’s Call for Papers, and Emerging Specialists
*For your reference, this is the call to which all panelists above responded. This call is now closed, but the panel will be accepting papers again for the 2022 conference—stay tuned!
As a standing panel, the general details of our call remain the same as in years past: we invite papers that consider the creation, preservation, and function of texts as material and social objects. As described above, past presentations have considered variations across editions; manuscripts in translation; and the history/theory of manuscript editing; among others. The current panel chair especially seeks serious and lively engagements with textuality in either print or digital form, whether considering individual texts or the institutions/systems that manage texts. Abstracts should be 250 words, submitted through the form below or directly via email to Heidi Nobles, heidi.nobles@virginia.edu, by April 30, 2020.
But this year, we especially invite emerging scholars who want to (a) connect with others doing Bibliography+ work and (b) steward this panel into its coming years, taking on leadership and active participation roles, and really, envisioning what this work looks like for the future.
We of course welcome established scholars! At issue is that those established scholars have been doing the heavy lifting on this panel for many years, and we’d like them to know that they have the freedom to present without feeling they MUST continue to present or see the panel disappear. In recent years, we have been incredibly grateful to senior scholars who have so generously shared their wisdom and admirable work with us, when they have stretched themselves across multiple panels to make sure this panel remained active. This year’s emphasis on emerging scholars is meant in part to take that pressure off and prove that the panel has others who are willing and able to take it on.
As we seek to invigorate our panel, please feel free to be as traditional or creative as you like in your proposals—whether you’d prefer to present a traditional paper, co-present with other scholars, host a round-table event on a relevant issue, or take another approach. If you envision your presentation taking more than the standard 15-20 minutes, please indicate a time estimate in your proposal.
Contact us
Please send your email address, and if you feel like it, a brief note about why you’re interested in connecting with this group, and we’ll send you updates about this panel before and after the SCMLA 2021 conference, including invitations for at least one dedicated social event (dinner or coffee or whatever else we decide to do—may be physical or virtual, as needed by those who sign up) during the conference time.