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A Note on Texts
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
a n o t e o n t e x t s As more and more of the literary work of British women from the Romantic era has been published in modern editions, often with scholarly apparatus, and as these writers have also begun to appear in anthologies intended especially for college and university students, the world has gradually begun to be reacquainted with writers and texts that had long been neglected or marginalized for a whole host of reasons. But anthologies can provide only a piecemeal sampling of this vast body of diverse writing, and too often anthologies tend to repeat one another when it comes to selections, so that most of this writing remains largely invisible. At the same time, specialized scholarly editions of some of the poets have begun to appear, but economic considerations largely restrict such editions to those writers whose recuperated reputations make editions of their works financially feasible for publishers. Inevitably, this leaves the majority still on the outside, looking in. Many of the texts I discuss in this book are quite scarce; certainly most of them are not immediately available in most academic libraries, and some exist in only a handful of major libraries like the British Library and the National Library of Ireland , which makes them relatively inaccessible to many scholars and most students who might wish to consult the originals. Happily, some of these are starting to become available as a result of advances in digital and electronic technology. There is of course no substitute for examining original paper copies of books, both for appreciating their physical nature as books and for discovering the additional materials they contain in the form of marginalia, annotations, and corrections. Still, electronic versions of the originals at least provide one with access to the writing itself. For books published before 1800, a particularly valuable resource is the electronic archive, Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), where digital images of the original texts are available in PDF format. For books published after 1800, there is also the Chadwyck-Healy electronic archive, Nineteenth-Century Poetry, xii A Note on Texts although it is far more selective and contains relatively few works by lesser-known writers. Two electronic archives, published by Alexander Street Press and available through libraries (primarily academic research libraries) by subscription, contain electronic versions of complete volumes of poetry by women whose work is central to my book: Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period (2002) and Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period (2008). Although these two archives consist of keyed-in transcriptions of the originals rather than digital images of them (as in ECCO), the texts are nevertheless complete, accurate, and easily searchable. Several additional online archives and projects offer valuable resources for the further study of Romantic-era women poets. The first, housed at the University of California, Davis, and called British Women Romantic Writers, is still being developed and will eventually include all the Romantic-era volumes of poetry by women from the spectacular Kohler Collection of Nineteenth-Century British Poetry, which is held at the university’s Shields Library. A second archive, with broader chronological parameters, is the pioneering British Women Writers project at Brown University, which took an early and influential lead in making primary resources accessible in electronic format. In addition to these university-sponsored initiatives, many individual scholars around the world have begun to prepare and to post on their Web sites electronic editions of primary texts. The consequence of all this activity, which shows no sign of abating, is that we now enjoy increasing access to writers and works with which many–even most–of us have historically been unfamiliar. Many of the authors and works that I discuss in this book may be found in some of these resources, although, unfortunately, many are still to be found only in specialized libraries or through copies prepared from those originals. [3.236.18.23] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 14:02 GMT) British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community This page intentionally left blank ...