With an understanding of ‘bibliography’ in its original sense of writing about books, this chapter provides a genealogy of the British bibliographical essay, commencing with the medieval bibliophile Richard de Bury. It traces the development of that species of essay through the eighteenth century, when essays started widely appearing in broadsides, newspapers, and magazines as well as books, motivating essayists to reflect upon the material form in which they were publishing. Following the periodical essayists’ critique of commercial print culture, Romantic essayists like Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Thomas De Quincey turned their attention to old books, emphasising their tangible, material value, while at the same time upholding literature’s immaterial qualities. In the age of bibliomania, antiquarian books became an opportunity for the bibliographical essay to come into its own among an expanding audience of bibliophiles and collectors.

This volume’s introduction traces the longstanding interdigitation between American literature and sexuality studies broadly imagined, mapping the inseparability between queer American literature and the history of sexuality. In so doing, it offers an institutional history of gay and lesbian studies, queer studies, and trans studies and grapples with the theoretical question of how to understand queer American literature. Examining the mutual imbrication of “queer,” “American,” and “literature,” it provides an overview of the volume’s theoretical investments, conceptual choices, and organization in order to introduce the reader to the volume as a whole.

This chapter presents a brief overview of the status of and threats to the Little Owl. We then offer a conservation strategy for the owl that involves five critical success factors: Knowledge, Limiting Factors, Evolution of Landscape Conditions, Legislation and Policies, and People. Thereafter, we describe four main drivers to implement this strategy, focused on Monitoring, Management, Standardized Methodologies and Data Management. The long-term conservation of the Little Owl is complicated, as the species is largely linked to an agriculturally dominated landscape. This landscape condition can change rapidly and significantly due to human demographics, and changes in policies and management. The conservation strategy described in this chapter requires a multiscale, multidisciplinary approach, with collaboration between different stakeholders (conservationists, scientists, different authorities, farmers) and additional research into the ecology of the species. This strategy must be applied at different levels: local, regional, national and international. We encourage people involved in this conservation strategy to work broadly, openly and to freely co-ordinate on issues, data, and management efforts that will benefit the broader array of species and environments of which the Little Owl is a part.

Chapter 11 demonstrates that De l’Allemagne’s surviving 1810 texts are not identical, as had been thought. We have texts from all three proof runs. In Vienna sits a copy of the 1810 edition; the censors’ proof and the copy‑text for 1813 subsist. This makes a mockery of Napoleon’s efforts to obliterate the book, allowing a peek at the “lost” 1810 edition and tracing a remarkable interplay between four conflicting pulls on the author. Her desires to clarify imprecise or obscure passages, and to use key words from elsewhere in De l’Allemagne, confront her desires to be faithful to her sources and to the facts. Exerting its own pull on this interplay is the fierce pressure on Staël to tone down her polemic. These forced revisions fall in with her book’s slide from politics into literary history, which for two centuries now has dimmed the ringing attack on tyranny that caused its pulping.

Chapter 2 traces the balancing or buffeting of our author between private and public spheres, beneath the burning sky of the Revolution. It follows the appearance of her first published work, the Lettres sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in granular detail, amid the highly charged context of 1788–1789, as the French Revolution began; it then traces the publication in context of her story Zulma and her Recueil de morceaux détachés, in 1794–1795, arguing for a radical redating of several pieces in this collection.

An introduction to the book’s thesis of the role played in Virgil’s Aeneid by engagement with the Stoic, specifically Chrysippean, concept of human responsibility or freedom as a means to allow the poem’s gods and heroes to assent meaningfully to providential World Fate. This, it is suggested, becomes a model for Virgil’s guardedly optimistic conception of the Augustan Empire. A bibliography follows of the key pertinent modern literature on the field including works by R. Heinze, M. Bowra, M. Edwards, R. Rabel, M. Schauer, D. Quint, H.-P. Stahl, C. Nash, and J. Farrell. It is concluded that the literature so far has not adequately appreciated the full significance of Virgil’s adoption of Chrysippus’ belief in human responsibility and in World Fate and providence.

Explores the relationship between theatre history and dramatic criticism, exploring how the two were shaped by historiography’s embrace of English theatre and drama during the mid-seventeenth century. Responds to Richard Schoch’s argument that theatre history emerged as a field of study only with the “the weakening of the humanist paradigm that restricted history to public affairs.” Argues that historiography did not only lower its standards to include theatre; rather, the cultural and political upheaval of the 1640s and 1650s elevated theatre to the level of public affairs. Moreover, once the formerly reliable institutions of theatre and drama were threatened with oblivion, commentators were motivated to create and preserve records of the fleeting dramatic past. Describes how dramatic paratexts not only changed and became more prevalent after the closure of the theatres in 1642, but also became a medium for dramatic criticism, with prefaces assuming the role previously played by live conversation and verbal exchanges in the theatres. Attests to the lasting impact the closure of the theatres in 1642 had, and continues to have, on the reception and construction of English theatre history.

Feminist literary retrieval projects in Ireland quickly embraced the bibliographical and hypertextual possibilities offered in the early 2000s by the then burgeoning field of digital humanities. This essay examines the printed prehistory of projects such as the Women in Modern Irish Culture Database and the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (volumes IV and V), demonstrating how this genealogy has shaped the nature and impact of the online archive. The chapter argue that the continuing absence from university syllabi, and publishers’ lists, of many of the Irish women ‘discovered’ by digital research projects, indicates that presence is only the first step in securing real engagement with the literary archive of women’s writings. Looking to the future of the feminist digital, and the potential offered by big data, this chapter explores how long-standing digital questions of access, interoperability, and sustainability continue to influence the parameters of the field.

Like Johnson himself, the community of his devoted readers is divided in its attitude to the academy. Some Johnsonians are enthusiastic followers of the Great Cham striving to achieve the envied status of Johnsonianissimus without the taint of academic criticism; others are academics first and devotees of Johnson second. These humanistic scholars are often concerned with the text of Johnson, whereas the Johnsonians are concerned with his personality. A contest between these biographers, on the one hand, and those bibliographers, on the other, played itself out in the history of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, twenty-three volumes (1958–2018). The impetus for the edition came largely from Johnsonians, but as time wore on, the academics became gradually more influential, and their approach eventually prevailed. This chapter is a kind of archaeology of the edition and reveals this shift in emphasis over time and a difference between American and British approaches to literary criticism.

In offering a context for Benjamin Britten, we approached his milieu from vantage points that could adequately represent the fullness of his position in England and in the twentieth century. We were rewarded by the richness of Britten’s engagement with his contemporaries in music, art, literature, and film, British musical institutions, royal and governmental entities, and the church. Equally, his ground-breaking projects that intersected across diverse entities and explored his philosophical and ideological tenets provided food for thought.

This chapter tells the story of the exponential growth of Bishop studies, from its beginnings in the late 1970s until the present day. The chapter posits that for a field of author-studies to flourish, it must establish: (1) published access to a substantial and representative body of the author’s work, (2) an extensive body of criticism, (3) access to archival materials, (4) a regularly updated bibliography, (5) one or more sound biographical studies, and (6) a compelling articulation of the author’s role in literary history. The chapter shows how these elements have interacted over the course of the past four decades. It lays particular stress upon the 1990s, which it describes as the “decisive decade” of Bishop studies. The chapter also shows how the posthumous publication of each new primary edition of Bishop’s poems, prose, and letters has expanded our understanding and influenced our readings of Bishop’s life and work.

The turn of the century saw a massive effort to establish the category of “negro” authorship, centering African Americans not just as writing subjects but also as deeply involved in the project of building the infrastructure to recognize the existence of a long, dynamic, and expansive tradition of “Negro” literature. This chapter shows how, through their work in bibliography, familiar figures such as Daniel Murray, W. E. B. Du Bois, and later Dorothy Porter established the existence of an African American literature and sought to organize and categorize it to include a range of works that documented a “blackness” understood beyond “the Negro problem.” This chapter illustrates the constructed nature of categories such as “Negro literature” or “African American author,” while also bringing attention to the role of African Americans in imagining the possibilities of a much broader category of literature that would get constricted and delimited in subsequent iterations, reminding us that definitions of African American literature were not “inevitable” and that there was a moment at turn of the century when African American literary workers were imagining much broader possibilities.

Let us begin by considering how Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) made a way for himself in France between about 1855 and 1909. As for the posthumous international development of research into his music, that will be the focus of the latter part of this text.

Biblical theology is the systematic theological interpretation of the Bible, and Jewish biblical theology is the systematic theological interpretation of the Jewish Bible (Tanak). The Jewish Bible appears in its uniquely distinctive form as the Tanak, which enables the Jewish Bible to function as the essential and foundational work of Jewish thought and practice. In order to provide an overview of Jewish biblical theology, this essay treats several fundamental concerns, viz., the unique form of the Jewish Bible in contrast to the distinctive forms of the Christian Bible; the dialogical character of the Jewish Bible in relation to itself and to the larger context of Jewish thought; the eternal covenant between G-d and the Jewish people; the construction of the Jewish people and its institutions, such as the land of Israel, the holy Temple, and the monarchy; and the problem of evil, particularly the exile and potential destruction of the Jewish people, that calls the eternal covenant between G-d and Israel into question.

Long understood as purifying the church by rejecting worship routine and devotional ceremony, pious New England settlers in fact observed formal and informal rituals that defined lived religion within the Reformed tradition. Given that access to the vernacular word was central to puritan self-definition, literacy and reading became intensely ritualized. Thus, along with life-cycle rites (birth, marriage, death), annual and occasional ceremonies (fast days, thanksgiving days, election sermons, artillery sermons), and sabbath customs (the sacraments, the public confession, the audition of preaching), ritual was derived from the experience of books. The chapter demonstrates this experience by looking at moments of cross-cultural contact during Metacom’s War, where reading seeks to stabilize tradition. It studies reader annotations of devotional works as a means to understand the meditative, recursive, and extractive practices that grounded and routinized lay piety. And it examines the visual iconography of illustrations within devotional manuals, illustrations that idealize and demonize kinds of identity for the proper pilgrim reader. Ritual, routine, and iconography are not typically associated with puritan worship, but with an ear and eye to reading habits, we better understand experiential religion in early New England.