Literary Research: Strategies and Sources Series Editors: Peggy Keeran & Jennifer Bowers Every literary age presents scholars with both predictable and unique research challenges. This series fills a gap in the field of reference literature by featuring research strategies and by recommending the best tools for conducting specialized period and national literary research. Emphasizing research methodology, each series volume takes into account the unique challenges inherent in conducting research of that specific literary period and outlines the best practices for researching within it. Volumes place the research process within the period’s historical context and use a narrative structure to analyze and compare print and electronic reference sources. Following an introduction to online searching, chapters will typically cover these types of resources: general literary reference materials; library catalogs; print and online bibliographies, indexes, and annual reviews; scholarly journals; contemporary reviews; period journals and newspapers; microform and digital collections; manuscripts and archives; and Web resources. Additional or alternative chapters might be included to highlight a particular research problem or to examine other pertinent period or national literary resources. 1. Literary Research and the British Romantic Era by Peggy Keeran and Jennifer Bowers, 2005. 2. Literary Research and the Era of American Nationalism and Romanticism by Angela Courtney, 2008. 3. Literary Research and American Modernism by Robert N. Matuozzi and Elizabeth B. Lindsay, 2008. 4. Literary Research and the American Realism and Naturalism Period by Linda L. Stein and Peter J. Lehu, 2009. 5. Literary Research and Irish Literature by J. Greg Matthews, 2009.
Literary Research and the American Realism and Naturalism Period Strategies and Sources
Linda L. Stein Peter J. Lehu Literary Research: Strategies and Sources, No. 4
THE SCARECROW PRESS, INC.
Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK 2009
SCARECROW PRESS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Scarecrow Press, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.scarecrowpress.com Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by Linda L. Stein and Peter J. Lehu All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stein, Linda L., 1956– Literary research and the American realism and naturalism period : strategies and sources / Linda L. Stein, Peter J. Lehu. p. cm. — (Literary research: strategies and sources ; no. 4) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN-13: 978-0-8108-6141-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8108-6141-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8108-6242-5 (ebook) ISBN-10: 0-8108-6242-5 (ebook) 1. American literature—19th century—Research—Methodology. 2. American literature—20th century—Research—Methodology. 3. Realism in literature— Research—Methodology. 4. Naturalism in literature—Research—Methodology. 5. American literature—19th century—Information resources. 6. American literature—20th century—Information resources. 7. Realism in literature— Information resources. 8. Naturalism in literature—Information resources. I. Lehu, Peter J., 1980–. II. Title. PS217.R4S74 2009 810.9'004072—dc22 2008028963
⬁ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America.
Contents
Acknowledgments
vii
Introduction
ix
1
Strategies for Online Searching
2
Literary Reference Sources
15
3
Library Catalogs
50
4
Bibliographies, Indexes, and Annual Reviews
77
5
Scholarly Journals
108
6
Publishing History Resources
134
7
Magazines and Newspapers of the Period
170
8
Microform and Digital Collections
215
9
Manuscript and Archival Material
235
Web Resources
252
10
1
11 Researching a Thorny Problem
277
Appendix: Resources in Related Disciplines
289
Bibliography
297
Index
301
About the Authors
319
v
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank our co-editors Peggy Keeran and Jennifer Bowers for their patience, encouragement, and helpful advice. Our thanks also go to Martin Dillon for his editorial guidance and to Barbara Berliner for her work on the index. This book could not have been written without the superb collections of the University of Delaware Library. Our thanks go to Susan Brynteson, the May Morris Director of Libraries at the University of Delaware. Peter thanks his wife, Melissa, a fellow writer whose love, advice, and solidarity got him through the busier times. He also thanks his parents, grandparents, and the rest of his family who instilled in him from early on the value and joy of intellectual inquiry. He appreciates the support and assistance contributed by the staffs of the Philbrick Popular Library and the Literature Department of the Free Library of Philadelphia. Linda thanks her family for their love and support, especially her husband, Merrill, and son, David, who have always encouraged her to continue her writing and research. She would also like to express her appreciation to Charles Robinson, professor of English at the University of Delaware, for providing feedback on the content of the book. To our friends and colleagues who provided suggestions, title checks, inspiration, and advice on everything from pixels to phonographs—thank you.
vii
Introduction
This book, like the others in the Scarecrow Press Literary Research: Strategies and Sources series, is not simply an annotated bibliography of sources. Literary Research and the American Realism and Naturalism Period is a specialized guide to doing research that describes information sources and demonstrates how they contribute to search strategies. The volume covers the period of American literary history that begins with the start of the Civil War in 1861 and continues to the beginning of World War I in 1914. All literature represents change in society, but the literature of the American realism and naturalism period is especially characterized by its response to the political, economic, and technological changes that transformed the nation during the Civil War and postbellum years. American authors exchanged romantic, moralistic storytelling for a more pragmatic realism as the war ended and Southern Reconstruction began. Northern industrialism dominated the rural farm communities of the South, stimulating the growth of factories and the migration of farmworkers to cities. The transcontinental railroad and expansion to new territories in the West, Philippines, and Alaska boosted the economy. Most of the nation, however, did not share in the new wealth as weak government controls on business and industry fostered political corruption and monopolies. Industrial magnates Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan added to their fortunes, while European immigrants and black freedmen crowded into urban slums. Children worked long hours in factories for meager wages. Women, the working class, former slaves, and Native Americans were treated as second-class citizens and felt powerless to challenge the codes of nineteenth-century society. Authors of this period realized they were writing in an era of shifting social order facilitated by technological progress and the rise of big business. The general theme of literature during these years ix
x
Introduction
was the power of money and social position, and the effect of its loss or gain on the American character. The social injustices of the era spurred William Dean Howells, Henry James, and other writers to follow the lead of European realists and use novels to document and expose the psychological tensions underlying daily life, contrasting the lives of ordinary people with those of the wealthy. This was a radical departure from the folksy patriotism of the antebellum years, and editors often found realism’s candid subject matter difficult to market to a family audience. Willa Cather described the hardships of immigrant settlers in Nebraska, while Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Waddell Chesnutt explored the sensitive topics of racial prejudice and job discrimination for African Americans. Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Kate Chopin challenged women’s expected role as “Angel in the House” as their female protagonists yearned for more worldly ambitions. Criticizing American social order with less subtlety than the realists, naturalistic writers such as Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Stephen Crane focused on society’s fallen, depicting the poor and diseased as the unwitting victims of their environment. Upton Sinclair, David Graham Phillips, and other muckrakers exposed corruption in big business in their news articles and novels during the Progressive movement at the turn of the twentieth century, blurring the line between literary fiction and journalism. The rise of big business not only influenced the subject of literature of the American realism and naturalism period, its appearance in the printing and publishing industry reshaped patterns of readership and authorship in the United States. The invention of the steam-powered printing press and typewriter, as well as the expansion of the railroad, allowed for the mass production and dissemination of popular texts. The newspaper and magazine industries flourished; they became intimately tied to the book-publishing industry through affiliations and the inclusion of book reviews and advertisements. Novels were published serially in magazines before being sold as books. From New York to San Francisco, the educated public bought and read the same literature, leading to a more unified national culture. Book agents traveled the rapidly expanding West peddling the latest novel by the celebrity writer of the moment. Dime novels were published weekly for young readers with picaresque plots. Some, like the Horatio Alger stories, promoted a capitalistic moral, promising that hard work and honesty would bring success. Our book is intended to be a research companion to anyone doing extended research in the American realism–naturalism period. Among those who would find this volume useful are a graduate student writing a thesis or dissertation, or taking a seminar course on an aspect of the period; a professor who specializes in and writes about the period; or a librarian who regularly
Introduction
xi
assists researchers in finding materials relating to the period. The book will answer questions such as: • How does someone locate realism–naturalism material in a library catalog? • Which specialized dictionaries are most likely to define period terms and colloquialisms? • What reference tools—both print and online—are best suited to answering inquiries about writers and works of the period? • Where can someone find serialized versions of novels published in magazines? • Which archival repositories hold collections of papers of a particular author? • Where can one find dime novels and other ephemeral publications of the era? • What historical and other nonliterary materials may be needed to provide context to a study, and how are they located? Chapter 1 discusses basic online searching strategies, explaining skills key to finding one’s way through catalogs and databases. Chapters 2 through 10 each describe resources, organized by type, along with strategies for finding and using them. All the major categories of resources are covered: primary sources, reference books and databases, print and online bibliographies, microform and digital collections, archival collections, and websites. Strengths and weaknesses of resources are discussed, resources are compared with each other, and illustrations are included. Chapter 11 demonstrates how multiple strategies can be used to solve a single research problem related to Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle. An appendix provides an annotated bibliography of extra-literary reference resources. The guide is written in a narrative style making it conducive to reading from start to finish before starting an intensive course or writing project. Readers can also skip to specific chapters as needed or use the index to locate coverage of specific resources. The authors believe that this book is an important tool for any researcher of the American realism and naturalism period.
Chapter One
Strategies for Online Searching
The Web has changed the way we share information about the literature of the American realism and naturalism period. Students browse the catalogs of libraries across the country and the world, and view the digitized collections of novels and serial publications of the period that would have been difficult to find and use in previous years. Online versions of American Literary History, Nineteenth Century Literature, and other journals provide access to research in the field, while less formal discussions are held on blogs and e-lists. Scholars can ask questions about archival collections through the online reference services of libraries and locate the personal papers of authors with the help of finding aids published on websites. While many of the materials described in this book are made available in print format, their identification may require an Internet connection. Researchers need to be able to find information online, and choosing the right search terms and methods is the key to being able to navigate online systems. This chapter will introduce basic and advanced search strategies, and discuss how search software can be used to identify information in online databases and the database systems created by Web search engines. The methods for locating data in electronic collections are fairly standard even though the collections themselves vary considerably in content and structure. A word or a combination of words is selected to describe what is needed. The search interface displayed on the computer monitor accepts the words and issues commands to the search software. The software program searches the electronic collection, the database, which is deliberately organized so that individual items in data files can be easily identified and accessed. The database contains a series of indexes, or lists of acceptable search words, in addition to the information it was designed to store. When a database user enters search words into the interface, the software program 1
2
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matches them with the lists. Like the index terms in a book, the words direct the user to the specific item desired. The difference is that database users are not limited to searching a single index term; they can search multiple indexes at one time.
DATABASE INDEXES Most index terms for online databases are generated by computer programs. The programs extract the index terms from standard fields in the data files, such as the author, title, and journal fields in a citation. The types of fields found in data files vary according to the content of the database. The index terms are listed individually or as phrases, or both, depending on the type of field that contains them; they are then assigned to a particular index. In databases with full-text search capabilities, the indexes store words from the text, excluding the overly common “stop words” that have no retrieval value (e.g., of, and, a, in, an, the, and but). Indexes for Web search engines, essentially databases of webpage information, are created by computer programs but in a slightly different way. Web crawlers—specialized robotic or “bot” programs—methodically browse the Web according to their particular instructions and gather webpage information from websites. They retrieve the HTML-coded data and images they find on each webpage of the site, follow the page’s links to other pages in the site, and then traverse links to other websites. The search engine indexes the data extracted from the webpages by selecting the most frequently used words from all or a portion of the coded text, as well as their Uniform Resource Locators (commonly known as Web addresses), titles, sizes, URL references, headings, and subheadings. Since the Web is always growing and changing, the crawlers revisit the webpages on a regular basis to update the search engine indexes. The indexes they create are never static; they change daily. Not all of the index words in a database are automatically extracted by computers. While computers can process strings of characters and are particularly good at matching words, they are not capable of understanding intellectual content and meaning. A computer, for example, will not be able to assign the terms American Literature—19th Century, fiction, local color, and humor to Mark Twain’s story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” if the words are not already included in the text or its description. A computer also doesn’t have the capability of comprehending the underlying meaning and significance of a work of art. For these tasks, people, often professional indexers, must be hired to select the additional index words that describe the content of a literary work, a research article, a sound recording, or
Strategies for Online Searching
3
an art image. The descriptive index words that indexers assign can be unique; frequently, however, they are taken from a list of suggested terms, a controlled vocabulary created especially for the database. The list, or thesaurus, usually indicates hierarchical and associative relationships between the words and leads users from nonacceptable words to acceptable ones. An example of a controlled vocabulary list is the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), an approved list of standard subject headings used by libraries. All of the different parts of a database—the index terms, the fields in individual data files, the content, and the search interface design—contribute to the electronic collection’s unique characteristics. Researchers can look for the words humor, novel, and picaresque in the MLA International Bibliography because of the database’s literary content and specialized fields, which include folklore topic, genre, period, and literature topic. The index terms for document type assigned to many of the items in American Periodicals Series (APS) Online, a database of digitized images from early American magazines and journals, enable searchers to look for ads, comics, editorial cartoons, illustrations, letters, obituaries, poems, and recipes. Similarly, they can find words extracted from headlines, lead paragraphs, and captions in LexisNexis Academic, an online source of full-text newspaper articles from around the world. Each database has a different focus and requires individual consideration from the researcher.
SINGLE-WORD SEARCH QUERIES To construct a search query, the researcher should select a “key” word, or a combination of words, that best represents the desired information and is most likely to match the index terms and content of the database being searched. If he chooses to use a single-word query, the selected keyword must be specific enough to distinguish the requested items from the others in the database. Suppose, for example, that a student is seeking the definition of “realism” in an online encyclopedia of literary terms. Because the database is limited to definitions of literary terms, the single-word search for realism would be specific enough to obtain the desired results. If, however, he was looking for newspaper articles about the author Jack London in a full-text New York Times database, the search query for the keyword london would retrieve the thousands of articles that mention the word “London” somewhere in the text, regardless of whether they discussed the American author, the city in Great Britain, another person with the last name of London, or New London in Connecticut. The software program is only capable of finding the string of characters belonging to the keyword london (with or without capitalization) and matching that word to
4
Chapter One
the term in the database indexes; the program cannot differentiate between the various meanings of the word or search for the word in one specific index unless it is given additional cues from the searcher.
SEARCHING FOR PHRASES Because a single-word search is not always sufficient, database software allows researchers to use more than one keyword in a search query, often as a phrase. Since phrases are frequently selected as terms in indexes, someone will usually retrieve the needed information by typing the words together in a search box. If this strategy does not work, he may need to specify that he is looking for the words as a phrase by selecting the option for adjacency on the search interface, enclosing the words in quotation marks, or including a proximity operator between them. A proximity operator is a “connecting” word that directs the computer to look for words that are within a short distance of each other. Proximity operators are recognized by most search software programs. Instructions on the search interface and the search-tips or help page of a database will indicate the appropriate method for indicating adjacency between words in a query. jack london “jack london” jack with london jack near london Proximity operators vary from database to database. The most frequently used proximity operators are with and near, often abbreviated as w and n. The operator with or, sometimes, adj (meaning adjacent), tells the software program to find the keyword jack next to london in its indexes and stipulates that the words be in the exact order they were typed. The near operator asks for any occurrences of the word jack next to london, but the word london can either precede or follow jack. The searcher can add a number to the right of with or near in order to designate how many words can come between the two search terms (e.g., samuel w1 clemens). The operator with may help a searcher identify a title when he remembers only a few of the words. By typing moran w3 letty, he can locate items related to Frank Norris’s Moran of the Lady Letty. Near is particularly useful for combining keywords that represent names because names commonly include a middle name or appear in reverse order. The search software will ignore punctuation, such as a period after the middle initial or a comma after the last
Strategies for Online Searching
5
name. For example, the query charles n1 chesnutt will set the maximum number of intervening words to one middle name or initial and retrieve different variations of the author’s name. charles n1 chesnutt—Charles Chesnutt Charles W. Chesnutt Charles Waddell Chesnutt Chesnutt, Charles
COMBINING KEYWORDS WITH BOOLEAN OPERATORS The Boolean operators and, or, and not are “connecting” words that allow users to combine multiple keywords in a search query. The logic behind the operators was developed by the nineteenth-century mathematician George Boole, and then adapted seventy years later by computer scientist Claude Shannon to simplify computer operations. Boolean operators are now standard “connectors” in online database search queries and recognized by a number of Web search engines. And searches for files that include both words Or retrieves files that include either word Not excludes files that contain a particular word By selecting two or more keywords and connecting them with the Boolean operator and, a researcher is choosing to use a more specific query than a single-word search. Instead of being directed to locate items that only include one word in their list of assigned index terms, the software is commanded to find only items that have all of the words in the query assigned to them. The more words that are chosen for the search query, the fewer items the search will retrieve. If, for example, the single-word octopus retrieves one hundred items linked to this index term, thirty-five of the items may not be linked to the additional term frank norris. If the query octopus and frank norris is entered into the computer, a smaller set of sixty-five items would be retrieved. The first term octopus may be adequate if the researcher is searching a literature database, but the second would be necessary to obtain a successful search in a broad-based database that includes science articles. octopus and frank norris turn of the screw and henry james alcott and little women
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Chapter One
While multiple search words help to make a general keyword search more specific, too many words in a query may produce too few results. Consider the student looking for a feminist analysis of Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening. She may not locate articles in a literature database with the following search strategy because analysis may not have been selected as a suitable index term in a literature collection. feminist and analysis and chopin and awakening Although there may be a few titles that contain this word, the student’s list of results would be limited to these items. By focusing on fewer words that more specifically express the topic—feminist, chopin, and awakening—the student would retrieve a larger set of items. Another consideration is that The Awakening is a well-known work. If the student’s search is for a more obscure work by Chopin, she may not retrieve the results she expects if she includes the title of the work in the query. She may have to retry the search with only two keywords, feminist and chopin, and look for articles that discuss a feminist approach to Chopin’s works in general. Sometimes synonyms need to be substituted for selected keywords or added to the search if the results are still too limited. The student may want to consider using feminism as well as feminist and linking the two words together with the logical operator or. This operator helps to broaden a search by extending the query to include similar words, alternate spellings or titles, or pseudonyms. feminism or feminist local or regional color or colour twain or clemens If the or operator is added to a search query that already includes the and operator, parentheses must be used to “nest” or group similar keywords together. (feminist or feminism) and chopin and awakening Without the parentheses to give precedence to the expression containing or, most search programs will usually process and first; this order may bring an unexpected set of results. Not, the third Boolean operator, sometimes typed as and not, excludes designated words and reduces the number of items retrieved. This operator is not used as frequently as the others because potentially useful material
Strategies for Online Searching
7
can be eliminated. For instance, a searcher who types the query london not england may think she is asking the computer to eliminate any use of the name of the British city in order to focus the search on the author Jack London. However, what she is actually doing is eliminating database items that happen to have that string of characters (england) in their index terms rather than the subject of London, England. The city of London can be mentioned without reference to the word England, and someone named Claire England may be an important Jack London scholar. A search for the phrase jack london is more likely to provide the desired focus because the addition of the author’s first name is a better way to specify the particular London needed. The not operator is usually chosen when someone is frustrated with the number of results unrelated to the subject of the search and is willing to risk missing potentially valuable information. A student looking for topics related to John Steinbeck in the MLA International Bibliography, a database covering language and literature, may feel that too many of the articles focus on The Grapes of Wrath. A quick-and-dirty search for steinbeck not grapes of wrath eliminates any items that mention this novel and solves the student’s problem as long as he recognizes that articles comparing The Grapes of Wrath to other works of Steinbeck will also be eliminated. In addition, researchers can use the not operator to compare the results of two searches and look for differences in the list of items retrieved. For instance, Mark Twain’s story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was published under the alternate title of “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Although the MLA International Bibliography has assigned the first version of the title to the index terms of almost all of the appropriate items in the database, a search for notorious jumping frog not celebrated jumping frog highlights any citations that missed receiving this index term. All three Boolean operators are utilized regularly by students and scholars who have never heard of Boolean logic because and, or, and not are common choices in drop-down menus on advanced search interfaces with multiple search boxes. They choose multiple words and generally retain the default setting of and, even though all of the different operators are available as choices in the menus. The drop-down menu can change all of the and operators to or. If more than one operator is needed for three or more words in a query, the searcher has to remember that parentheses should nest the words connected by or. He will need to type the words connected by or in one of the search boxes. Parentheses will be added automatically.
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Figure 1.1. Advanced Search interface of MLA International Bibliography. Source: MLA International Bibliography (EBSCOhost).
TRUNCATION, WILDCARDS, AND FUZZY SEARCHES Truncation and wildcard symbols may be used as substitutes for the or operator. They allow database users to represent one or more characters in a search word with a symbol. The asterisk symbol (*) is frequently used to truncate a word. Truncation takes advantage of the fact that English-language words with similar meanings often share a common root. The symbol indicates that the searcher wants to look for items with index terms that begin or end with this root. Although it is mainly used to retrieve singular and plural forms of a word, the truncation symbol will also retrieve related words. For example, the root femin followed by * can substitute for the query feminism or feminist. The searcher must supply enough of the word root to avoid the retrieval of unrelated items. While the root natural* would obtain items with the related terms of naturalist, naturalists, naturalism, and naturalistic, the three letters nat* or even natur* may not suffice. Someone typing *ology may be able to retrieve items with the two different spellings of archaeology and archeology, but be overwhelmed with unrelated items linked to the index terms of psychology, paleontology, and anthropology. This problem can be solved with the use of a symbol as a “wildcard” to replace a single character within a search term (e.g., arch??ology). The search for wom?n can substitute for the longer query women or woman or womyn and cover all three possibilities. The appropriate symbols vary from database to database; some of the more common are ?, #, and !. The help or search-tips pages of a database will list the symbols that have been selected. Some search-tips pages may indicate the availability of two wildcard symbols. One symbol may be used to locate index terms with a single character in place of the wildcard; the other allows for terms with any one character or no character at all in its place, as in the case of the phrase “local color.” Both the British and the American spellings of the word “color” can be covered with a wildcard search for local colo#r. “Fuzzy search” software helps to expand the possibilities of a single search term. This enhanced database software can accept an approximate spelling and
Strategies for Online Searching
9
find the correct one by locating index terms with a similar character string. Programs have been designed to look for words with the same root and identify phonetically related words. A searcher typing naturlism as a query in the MLA International Bibliography database may see the question “Did you mean naturalism?” displayed on the interface. Literature Online currently offers its database users an option for selecting pre-1700 spellings. Searchers of the Nineteenth Century Masterfile database can look for the plural form of a word without adding a truncation symbol, and are able to obtain items with the words “color” or “colour” by typing the single word color. Although “fuzzy matches” can retrieve irrelevant as well as relevant items, they serve to remind database users of additional search possibilities and are particularly helpful in locating words with typographical errors in documents converted to electronic format through optical character recognition, or OCR (see chapter 8). Researchers may want to consider truncation, wildcards, and fuzzy search options when they encounter problems with searches in the full text of localcolor or regional stories of the period. Writers of the period (e.g., Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Finley Peter Dunne) often employed local dialect and slang to narrate their writings. Searchers looking for specific lines of dialogue or mentions of activities in the full text of these works may have trouble selecting an appropriate keyword query. Consider, for instance, the difficulties involved in selecting words to locate any of the following sentences from Finley Peter Dunne’s “A Little Essay on Books” in Observations by Mr. Dooley. Th’ longer th’ wurruld lasts th’ more books does be comin’ out. Day be day I rread in th’ pa-apers announcemints iv new publications that look like th’ dilinquent tax-list. They ’s a publisher in ivry block, an’ in thousan’s iv happy homes some wan is pluggin’ away at th’ romantic novel or whalin’ out a pome on th’ type-writer up-stairs. A fam’ly without an author is as contimptible as wan without a priest.1
Unfortunately, maximizing the retrieval of alternative spellings may be helpful only when someone is looking for simple truncations (e.g., prospectin* for both prospecting and prospectin’) and checking the consistent use of a particular word throughout an author’s work or different editions of a work. Spellings such as “wurruld” or “contemptible” in the dialogue above are too hard to predict, and the searcher would be better served with a query of publisher near block. FIELD SEARCHING A researcher can use the options offered on the search interface to specify that a word be retrieved from the index terms of a particular field in a record of a
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database, for instance, the author or title field in a library catalog record. Selecting a specific field helps to prevent the retrieval of inappropriate records by allowing the searcher to add a qualifier to the query. If he requests a list of books written by Jack London from a library catalog, he can ask the computer to retrieve only items that have the phrase jack london in the author field. This method would eliminate the possibility of retrieving records on books discussing the life and works of the author (unless they were autobiographical accounts) because the software would not look for jack london in the index terms of the title and subject fields. Depending upon the sophistication of the database software and field indexing, he may be able to use multiple terms in field searching to further limit his query to books authored by Jack London and published by Macmillan. In some databases, it may be necessary to invert the author’s name (e.g., london jack) when searching the author field. While all online library catalogs and many other databases should offer the option of field selections in drop-down menus on the interface, some menus limit the types of fields that may be chosen or allow certain fields to be searched only in combination with other fields. The latter are frequently the language, format, and date fields. If the menu choices are too restrictive in a particular database, the search-tips or help pages should be consulted for the possibility of a “command search” with Boolean operators and field abbreviations. With software that permits this kind of query, someone could look for a specific edition of Jack London’s Revolution, and Other Essays by typing jack london in au and revolution in ti and macmillan in pb and 1912 in py (with au as the abbreviation for author, ti for title, pb for publisher, and py for publication year). The abbreviations for fields vary from database to database. Some databases, such as the MLA International Bibliography, also allow searchers to choose an index term directly from a list of index terms organized by field name. A thesaurus page, if available, can offer the option of adding related, but “narrower,” terms in the hierarchy to their queries.
FIELDS IN MARC RECORDS Online library catalogs are databases that offer very detailed field indexing. Their bibliographic information is compiled in the form of MAchine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) records, which divide categories of information into fields and subfields. Each field in a MARC record is given a three-digit numeric tag, and each subfield an alphabetical tag. The fields provide a description of the item, the main entry (e.g., title or main author), the added en-
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tries (details such as alternate titles and pseudonyms), appropriate subject headings, and the call number that designates where the item should be shelved in order to be grouped with similar items on the same subject. The search software for a library catalog is designed to locate items in the catalog with a search for indexed terms in the tagged fields and subfields. Each MARC record contains a different set of fields depending on the type of item the record describes. A MARC record for a journal usually includes the International Standard Serial Number (ISSN), while a film record supplies the format, length, director, and performers. Designated fields may be utilized in order to provide details particular to a rare first edition or manuscript of an item held at a library, such as the autograph of its author, donor name, and number of copies printed. Figure 1.2 is an example of a modified MARC record for Jack London’s book The Son of the Wolf: Tales of the Far North. The record offers details such as book title, author name and dates, size, publisher, place and date of publication, copyright date, call number, and contents, but does not include an International Standard Book Number (ISBN). ISBNs were not approved for standard use until 1970. The tag numbers for each field are shown on the left side of the record. Most library catalogs do not show the detailed MARC records for retrieved sets of results unless a user selects the option for a display of this information. This level of detail is not required for a basic search of the catalog. However, literary researchers should understand the structure of fields contained in
Figure 1.2. Modified MARC record for The Son of the Wolf: Tales of the Far North. Source: Library of Congress Online Catalog.
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database records because they frequently need to look for a level of bibliographic detail that other scholars do not require. Library catalog records and the bibliographies described in chapters 4 and 6 help researchers to distinguish between the various editions and printings of American literary works. Chapter 3 provides an in-depth discussion of library catalogs and search techniques of particular value to literary researchers of the American realism and naturalism period.
SEARCH STRATEGIES FOR WEB SEARCH ENGINES The immense collection of websites on the Internet is an indexing challenge that is handled on a daily basis by the Web crawlers of search engines. Anyone may contribute to the collection of data as long as the webpage is created in the hypertext markup language (HTML) that computers can read and saved to a server, or host—one of the many powerful computers connected to this network of networks. The Web search engines locate and index the data in order to create an organized database that users can search. The index terms extracted and stored by the search engines tend to be different from those of the usual database. They are taken from the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), the page’s address on the Web; the metatags (HTML code that provides the title, description, and keywords for the page); and the most frequently used words from all or a portion of the text. Since the Web is constantly growing and changing, the task of indexing and organizing this information is never complete. Three current examples of Web search engines are Google, AltaVista, and Lycos, although there are many others; each has its own search software and index structure. Meta-search engines (e.g., Dogpile and Metacrawler) utilize the searching capabilities of multiple engines simultaneously. Some Web engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, offer searchable directories created by human indexers in addition to the indexing provided by their robotic Web crawlers. The directories are sets of links to websites that have been organized into subject categories and subcategories. While researchers may want to bookmark favorites on their computers, they do not need to try to maintain lists of these continually changing finding aids. Many college and university libraries maintain lists of the most current search engines and directories available, usually with accompanying descriptions and links to the websites. There are some basic search strategies common to most Web search engines. Most researchers know that keyword queries can be typed as chopin awakening
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as long as there is a space between the two words. Even if they have never heard of Boolean operators and do not realize that most search-engine software is designed to add the and operator between the words, they know from experience that a relevant set of results will be retrieved with this simple query. Search engines calculate webpage relevance with mathematical formulas using factors such as how closely together the requested words appear, how many times they appear on the page, how close to the top of the page they are, and how unique they are. The search query should include words most likely to be frequent in or unique to a webpage. A number of search engines allow searchers to type or and not operators. Most use and operators. By prefixing their terms with the sign, searchers can make sure that the webpages they retrieve contain these words—even if they are stop words. realism naturalism “call of the wild” london samuel clemens once upon a time The sign, on the other hand, is similar to the not operator and indicates that pages containing this word should be excluded from the search results. naturalism realism Phrase searches enclosed in quotation marks are often used by researchers who hope to locate a forgotten poem with only one remembered line or a sentence fragment. They know they can type the words “exult o shores and ring o bells” and obtain the rest of Walt Whitman’s poem “O Captain! My Captain!” Because of the particular type of indexing information extracted by the Web crawlers, searchers can usually limit a query to words found at a specific website, such as the Bartleby site. Bartleby.com, an award-winning site published by a private company, offers free e-versions of works of literature and classic literary encyclopedias, dictionaries, and handbooks. Quick access to the electronic version of Twain’s “Jumping Frog” story in The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction, as well as a brief discussion of the story’s history, can be obtained in one search query in a Web search engine. twain “jumping frog” site:www.bartleby.com Depending on the Web search engine selected, someone may have the further option of requesting websites similar to the Bartleby site or webpages that
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point to its URL. The specific instructions for these and other advanced queries vary from search engine to search engine. The help or search-tip pages should be consulted for details.
CONCLUSION Researchers who become proficient in the search methods described in this chapter will be able to locate the information they need in online databases. These basic techniques can be applied to any database, whether the database is an index to full-text journal, magazine, and newspaper articles; a library catalog; an online collection of nineteenth-century literary works; or a collection of webpages indexed by the “bot” Web crawlers of search engines. The best way to obtain the most relevant material is to select appropriate search terms for the query, keeping in consideration the specific content of the database and the organization of its index. A well-constructed query will only retrieve relevant information if the files searched contain this data. Since the choice of a database can be difficult given the wide range of online databases that are currently available, chapter 4 is designed to provide descriptions of the online bibliographies and indexes most applicable to the study of the American literary realism and naturalism period. Chapter 10 covers digitized collections and other Web resources.
NOTE 1. Finley Peter Dunne, “A Little Essay on Books” in Observations by Mr. Dooley (Project Gutenberg, 2003), bk. 4729, www.gutenberg.org/etext/4729 (24 July 2007).
Chapter Two
Literary Reference Sources
Encyclopedias, biographical dictionaries, vocabulary guides, and other reference sources provide easy access to information on American literature topics: the birth date and place of a writer, the plot summary of a novel, the definition of a term, or other similar facts that can be relayed in a few paragraphs or pages. They also help researchers identify other sources of literary information and start them on their way to exploring a particular topic. This chapter presents the most relevant reference sources for the study of the authors and literary works of the American realism and naturalism period, and suggests methods for identifying and utilizing these sources. The works range from biographical dictionaries and literary encyclopedias useful to the study of the period to more specific titles that highlight a group of writers, a particular genre, the literature of a region, or a time span encompassed by the period. Some of the reference works are included because they address specific idiosyncrasies of the period. Since many nineteenth-century authors wrote under pen names, pseudonym guides are recommended in addition to key biographical sources. Vocabulary guides are selected for their definitions of the regionalisms and archaic words found in local-color works, and historical sources for their explanations of unfamiliar cultural and political terms or related events. The chapter begins with general guides and strategies for researchers who are starting their search for reference sources, recommends the best combinations of sources appropriate for particular research needs, and finishes with a selection of more specialized sources that relate to specific authors and their works.
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METHODS FOR IDENTIFYING REFERENCE SOURCES The type of question posed by a researcher naturally influences the choice of a reference work. A general dictionary or encyclopedia will offer a quick definition or an overview of a literary topic, but a topic narrow in focus may require a more specialized reference source. In fact, if the topic is very recent, only newspapers, magazine articles, or the Web may be current enough to provide the answer to the question. Someone who is working at a computer some distance from a library may need to use an online rather than a print source, or call a library’s reference service for assistance. The most frequently used reference books and electronic resources are housed in a library’s reference room, convenient to the librarians who answer questions and recommend appropriate sources of information. Most of the time a simple keyword search in an online library catalog, such as literature and encyclopedia, is sufficient to pinpoint a few basic reference titles. If a keyword search obtains too many unrelated items, the person may want to narrow the search by limiting the results to works housed in the library’s reference collection, an option provided by many library catalogs. Choosing keywords from the author’s name, the title, or the subject heading also adds specificity to a search. Library of Congress subject headings may be used, but subject headings for reference sources are often overly long and complex (e.g., “American literature—19th century—Bio-bibliography—Dictionaries”). A searcher using a library catalog from home will not be able to refer to the multiple volumes of the Library of Congress Subject Headings, and probably will not be able to construct this type of heading without assistance. A keyword search for subject heading terms may solve the problem. american literature and 19th century and bio-bibliography Choosing keywords likely to be in a subject heading requires a basic familiarity with some of the typical terms used to describe literary reference sources. Encyclopedias and dictionaries are familiar terms. There are literary “companions” that serve as guides to a thorough exploration of a subject, either with essays on related issues or with an alphabetical arrangement of factual entries. Companions are usually classified as encyclopedias in a library catalog. Concordances are alphabetical indexes to the words found in literary works or letters, while lexicons are more specialized vocabulary guides or dictionaries. Biographies and bibliographies are frequently used resources; a bio-bibliography combines their features by offering biographical information about a selected group of authors as well as lists of works written by or about them. A dictionary can be any alphabetically arranged book of infor-
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mation on any subject; thus, a biographical reference source is often classified in a library catalog as a biographical dictionary or a bio-bibliographical dictionary. A catalog user who types the keyword search literature and dictionary should, therefore, expect to see these reference sources as well as guides to literary terms.
GUIDES TO REFERENCE WORKS American Reference Books Annual. Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1970–. Available online as ARBAonline (2002–) www.arbaonline.com/. Bracken, James K. Reference Works in British and American Literature. 2nd ed. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1998. Harner, James L. Literary Research Guide: An Annotated Listing of Reference Sources in English Literary Studies. 5th ed. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008. Updates available at www-english.tamu .edu/pubs/lrg/. There are a number of excellent guides to reference works that suggest titles related to specific areas of literary study, whether they are categorized by time period, genre, tradition, or a particular author. Two of the three guides above—Bracken and Harner—are standard sources of this information. Although there is some duplication in their coverage of suggested titles, they each express specific preferences and reasons for preference. Their combined use best allows scholars and students to identify essential resources. James L. Harner’s Literary Research Guide is particularly strong in its selection and description of reference titles, but the guide does not cover author-specific works. James K. Bracken’s guide is organized by author name, and focuses on descriptions of author-specific bibliographies with extra reference titles for canonical writers. However, there are no divisions for author nationalities, and British and American writers are blended together in one alphabetical sequence. James L. Harner’s Literary Research Guide (2008) is the most up-to-date guide to reference works related to English-language literature. The guide is especially valued for its evaluative and descriptive annotations. Annotations are organized in divisions of general literary reference works, national literatures, and literary topics, and subdivided by types of reference works and time periods. Comparative literature resources are discussed, as well as sources from related disciplines, including art, folklore, theatre, and film. Because Harner is covering an extensive range of resources, he is selective in his choices and chooses only the works he deems to be the most valuable print,
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microform, and electronic reference sources. Single-author works and general surveys are intentionally omitted. He describes the scope and limitations of the selected works, and compares them to similar sources of information. Each entry contains a citation and applicable Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal call numbers to provide researchers with general location information. Tables of contents at the beginning of each section and indexes for titles and names make it easy for readers to scan the types of resources covered. The fifth edition of the guide (2008) contains more electronic resources than the fourth edition (2002), especially bibliographic databases and text archives. While Harner does not offer a separate section on reference works related to the American realism and naturalism period, the Q section of the guide is devoted to American literature sources. The section is divided into subsections for “General works,” “Regional Literature,” “Ethnic and Minority Literatures,” “Early American Literature (to 1800),” “Nineteenth-Century Literature,” and “Twentieth-Century Literature.” All of the subsections cover sources that may interest realism–naturalism scholars, and readers should browse the annotations for general reference works at the front of the guide and follow the applicable cross-references in the section on American literature. For some, general resources may prove to be more useful than those specific to a period or genre. Students should not limit their bookmarks to the subsections on “Nineteenth-Century Literature” or “Twentieth-Century Literature” for easy reference. For descriptions of titles not covered in Literary Research and the American Realism and Naturalism Period, it is recommended that readers check Harner’s table of contents at the beginning of each section or use the indexes for titles and subjects at the back of the guide. The subject index, for example, lists “American literature” as an index term with a subcategory for “histories and surveys” that refers the reader to applicable entry numbers. James K. Bracken’s Reference Works in British and American Literature (1998) focuses on selected print reference titles related to individual British and American writers, especially bibliographies. For well-known names, such as Mark Twain, Henry James, Frank Norris, William Dean Howells, and Stephen Crane, Bracken provides annotations for handbooks, indexes, concordances, and bibliographies he feels are the most useful to his readers. There are annotations for some author-specific journals. Entries for John Kendrick Bangs, Finley Peter Dunne, and other minor period names are limited to lists of bibliographies or sources for these lists (e.g., Bibliography of American Fiction, 1866–1918). Since the entries are presented in one alphabetical sequence and do not indicate whether the writer is American or British, there is a nationality appendix at the back of the guide that lists all of
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the American writers with their individual date ranges. A chronological appendix of writers is also provided. These appendixes are not intended to function as indexes, and do not give the entry numbers in the guide. Bracken provides subject and author/title indexes. Readers can use the subject index to obtain entries corresponding to categories such as “American fiction—19thcentury—bibliographies” and “American poetry—20th-century—indexes and concordances.” The author/title index lists the authors and titles of the bibliographies mentioned in the guide. Although the most recent reference titles described are 1997 publications, Bracken’s Reference Works in British and American Literature is a key resource that complements the Literary Research Guide by covering the wide range of author-specific resources that Harner omits. Since guides to reference works are not updated on a yearly basis, library users may want to consider browsing the call-number locations provided by Harner for similar, more recent works. They may also want to consult the latest volume of the American Reference Books Annual (ARBA), published by Libraries Unlimited. ARBA has issued reviews of English-language reference works since 1970. The reviews are written by librarians for librarians, and cover electronic and print resources as well as selected websites. Reference works that are published annually are reviewed every few years or when significant changes are made. The categories for subject coverage are general reference, the social sciences, the humanities, and science and technology. Most libraries offer the print volumes of ARBA in their reference collections, and a number subscribe to ARBAonline, an online compilation of reviews from 1997 to present published by Libraries Unlimited at http://www.arbaon line.com/. The database is updated monthly; users are notified as reviews for new reference titles are added. ENCYCLOPEDIAS General Literary Encyclopedias Hart, James David. Oxford Companion to American Literature. 6th ed. With revisions and additions by Phillip W. Leininger. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Available online via Oxford Reference Online. www.oxfordreference.com/. Paddock, Lisa. The Age of Romanticism and Realism, 1815–1914. Vol. 2, Encyclopedia of American Literature. New York: Facts On File, 2002. Parini, Jay, ed. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. 4 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Available online via Oxford Reference Online. www.oxfordreference.com/.
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Serafin, Steven R., and Alfred Bendixen, eds. The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature. New York: Continuum, 2003. Encyclopedias are designed to “encircle” all branches of knowledge or all aspects of a subject and make the information understandable to nonspecialists. Literary encyclopedias usually condense essential information into articles on a variety of topics related to literature. They provide details such as the tenets of a type of literary criticism, a plot summary of a novel, a short biography of a writer, or the origins of a literary movement. The articles may be signed by a subject authority; they vary in length from a paragraph to several pages, depending on the treatment of the subject. A wide range of general literary encyclopedias is available. The four titles listed above were selected for their quality and representation of topics related to the American realism and naturalism period. Each encyclopedia varies in scope, access, and level of detail. The Facts On File Encyclopedia of American Literature (2002) offers the most concentrated coverage of the themes, characters, writers, and periodicals specific to the American realism and naturalism period. Since each of the three volumes of the encyclopedia addresses a particular time span, the second volume, The Age of Romanticism and Realism, 1815–1914, authored by Lisa Paddock, focuses specifically on topics related to this literary period. The volume is comprised of brief entries, usually one to five paragraphs long, for topics such as local color, dime novels, the Gilded Age, and Reconstruction, as well as characters like Ragged Dick and Cisco Kid, and writers Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, and Stephen Crane. Paddock also offers details on periodicals of the period, including Dial, Smart Set, and Atlantic Monthly, with date ranges, editors, and descriptions of the types of articles published. Resources suggested for further research are included at the end of most entries. The volume contains a selected bibliography, an index, and a brief chronology that combines historical events, birth dates of writers, publication dates, and the founding of serials. One caution: readers may not realize that topics of interest are contained in the other two volumes of the encyclopedia because there is no combined index for the set; the cross-references printed in capital letters do not key to entries in other volumes. For instance, the entry “Local Color” mentions the term regionalism, but there is no indication that a description of regionalism is given in volume three. Scholars and students who are interested in owning volume two have to buy the complete set as the volumes are not sold separately. For a broader coverage of topics related to American literature, library users can consult the Oxford Companion to American Literature (1995) and The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature (2004). The Companion
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is a one-volume encyclopedia intended for quick reference; it contains brief, informative entries on a wide range of topics. Authored by UC–Berkeley emeritus professor of English James D. Hart until his death during the preparation of the sixth edition, the Companion has been a core reference work since 1941. The volume offers its readers biographies of writers, summaries of major works, definitions of literary schools and movements, and details on a variety of peripheral topics related to social, economic, and cultural influences on American writing. In contrast, The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature is a new addition to the Oxford line of reference works. Edited by Jay Parini, the Encyclopedia complements the Oxford Companion to American Literature with its two- to ten-page, signed essays by leading scholars on the lives and works of selected American writers, literary movements, themes, and genres. The Encyclopedia lists bibliographies of primary works for writers, and each entry lists sources for further reading. Both reference sources examine topics related to the American realism and naturalism period. Due to its selective coverage, The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature concentrates mainly on the canonical authors and major literary trends of the period. The index should be used to locate mentions of more marginal figures and texts. The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature (2003), a singlevolume encyclopedia edited by Steven R. Serafin and Alfred Bendixen, complements The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature and the Oxford Companion to American Literature by publishing articles on a fairly extensive range of topics. The articles, written and signed by three hundred contributors, vary in length depending on the importance of the subject. Most of the entries are biographical, with full birth and death dates given for each individual. The articles contain summaries of the author’s work and brief bibliographies that suggest additional sources of information. Among the topical entries of particular interest to realism–naturalism researchers are those for “Slave Narrative,” “Folklore,” “Native American Literature,” “Naturalism,” “Realism,” “The Tall Tale,” “Language and Dialect,” and “The South.” Cross-references allow readers to move easily to articles on related subjects. Specialized Literary Encyclopedias Andrews, William L., Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, eds. The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Bauer, Dale M., and Philip Gould, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
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Bordman, Gerald M., and Thomas S. Hischak. The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Cox, J. Randolph. The Dime Novel Companion: A Source Book. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Davidson, Cathy N., and Linda Wagner-Martin, eds. The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Pizer, Donald, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Wilmeth, Don B., ed. The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. In addition to the broad-based general literary encyclopedias that cover a variety of topics, there are many specialized encyclopedias that have a narrower scope, such as the literary culture of a group of writers, a region, a population, or surrounding a genre. Like general encyclopedias, specialized encyclopedias usually consist of either autographed essays or short, signed entries and often incorporate supplementary material such as chronologies, bibliographies, and indexes. They should be consulted if details on a subject are scant in a more general reference text, if one is looking for information from a particular perspective, or to browse topics relating to a particular subsection of American literature. Encyclopedias of African American literature generally contain a great deal of information about the literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was in this era that African American literature changed from being a series of isolated works by literate slaves to being a reactionary movement depicting racial injustice led by career writers. The slave narrative or autobiography became a means for writers like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs to share their harsh upbringings with outside communities. Writers such as Charles W. Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar expressed the same theme of racial inequality through fiction and poetry, using their literary skills to attract a white readership. The latter half of the realism–naturalism period saw the emergence of great African American essayists on race, led by W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. A widely respected encyclopedic work on the subject is The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997), edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris. Because it is a specialized encyclopedia, readers will find more than the standard summaries of literary works and biographical articles. In addition to entries on well-known writers like Harriet E. Wilson, the author of the first novel published by an African
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American, the Companion provides information on minor figures, such as the expatriate and largely unpublished playwright Henry F. Downing (1846–1928). The Companion chronicles African American literature from the slave narratives of the 1860s (e.g., Life of James Mars, a Slave Born and Sold in Connecticut [1866]) to dialect poetry, which flourished from the 1890s through World War I. There are entries on figures from African American folklore (e.g., the “Trickster,” the “Badman,” and the “Devil”) as well as literary characters such as “Brer Rabbit” and Chesnutt’s “Uncle Julius McAdoo.” Essays discuss key themes—“Freedom,” “Slavery,” “Identity,” and “Race”—that are important to the literature, as well as tropes and motifs (e.g., “Conjuring,” “Names and Naming,” and “Signifying”). The literary researcher seeking a comprehensive familiarity with American fiction of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century will want to study the dime novel, the most popular form of deliberately sensational fiction of its day. Thousands of dime novels were published in numbered series from 1860 to 1920 until they were replaced by pulp fiction magazines and paperback novels. J. Randolph Cox, editor of the Dime Novel Round-Up, tackles this minor yet expansive genre in the unique encyclopedia The Dime Novel Companion (2000). The Companion offers 1,200 entries on authors, titles, publishers, themes, series characters, and subgenres, and is a good source for the pseudonyms associated with this genre. Entries on pseudonyms usually list the associated author (or authors), the periodical(s) that carried the stories, and related information. Asterisks indicate cross-references to other articles in the encyclopedia. Cox provides an entry for “Civil War Stories,” with information regarding such series as The Blue and Gray Weekly, the Five Cent Weekly Library (featuring Cavalry Jack and Union Dick), and the Red, White and Blue. Separate entries in the encyclopedia address the specific stories and characters mentioned in the discussion. Two encyclopedias tackle women’s writing of the period. The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995), edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin, consists of signed articles ranging in size from fifteen lines to a few pages. Longer articles present overviews of women’s literature for specific periods, ethnic traditions, and regions. There are over four hundred entries for specific writers, and many more are mentioned in articles and listed in the index. The introduction to the Oxford Companion indicates the editors’ intent to discuss women’s writing in a variety of forms, including domestic fiction, recipe books, advice books, spiritual narratives, biographies, travel accounts, and ghost stories. Articles address women’s clubs, newspapers, and presses as well as important themes in women’s writing (e.g., family, birth control, beauty and fashion, and body and health). Although the volume covers writing from past to present,
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realism–naturalism researchers will appreciate the wide range of writing forms, ethnic literatures, and topics because many were prevalent during the period. The Oxford Companion offers a chronology and an extensive bibliography. The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing (2001), edited by Dale M. Bauer and Philip Gould, targets women’s writing of the period. The guide complements the Oxford Companion by offering a historical context and essays on related topics (e.g., “Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry” by Elizabeth Petrino and “Women at War” by Shirley Samuels) and case studies (e.g., “African American Women’s Spiritual Narratives” by Yolando Pierce and “The Sentimental Novel: The Example of Harriet Beecher Stowe” by Gail K. Smith). The Cambridge Companion offers a chronology of works and events that covers more than the nineteenth century (1773–1925) and suggestions for further reading. The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London (1995), edited by Donald Pizer, is not a “ready-reference” encyclopedia of facts related to the period. Instead, the Cambridge Companion is a well-known compilation of essays related to the terms realism and naturalism that is cited by many works on the period. Pizer’s introduction seeks both to discuss the problems in the use of these two terms in relation to late nineteenth-century fiction and to describe the history of previous efforts to make the terms expressive of American writing of this period. The collection contains eleven essays on topics such as the American and European historical contexts of realism and naturalism, critical approaches to the movements since the early 1970s, and efforts to expand the literary era’s list of canonical titles. Included are full-scale discussions of twelve major texts: The Portrait of a Lady, The Rise of Silas Lapham, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, McTeague, Sister Carrie, The Awakening, The House of Mirth, The Call of the Wild, The Jungle, The Souls of Black Folk, and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Contributors are Elizabeth Ammons, Michael Anesko, Louis J. Budd, John W. Crowley, Blanche H. Gelfant, Barbara Hochman, Richard Lehan, J. C. Levenson, Tom Quirk, Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin, and Kenneth W. Warren. Most contributors provide an extensive listing of works cited after their essay. The volume ends with a bibliography of over fifty other key texts on the general study of American realism and naturalism. Two theatre-related encyclopedias may be of interest to American realism– naturalism researchers. The Oxford Companion to American Theatre (2004), edited by Gerald M. Bordman and Thomas S. Hischak, is a reliable source on American drama. The Oxford Companion consists of short articles about plays, theatre companies, playwrights, producers, actors, and other topics associated with the production of plays. Articles about people
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are often followed by a brief bibliography. Readers will find entries for famous actors such as Edwin Booth (brother of John Wilkes Booth), Matilda Heron, and Mrs. Minnie Maddern Fiske, an 1880s star of light comedy and melodrama, as well as the shows Under the Gaslight (1867), The Banker’s Daughter (1878), Salvation Nell (1908), and The Boss (1911). Although Bordman’s American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle (2001) should be consulted for information on the American musical theatre, the Oxford Companion contains entries for the actors, shows, and directors connected to this subgenre. The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre (2007), edited by Don B. Wilmeth, offers similar coverage of American drama. Readers who need a historical survey with key actors and performances will find this volume particularly useful. Realism–naturalism researchers should skim the section on “The Civil War to the First World War,” beginning on page 8 of the introduction to the book. Since not all of the actors and productions mentioned in the summary are discussed in main entries, readers may want to consult The Oxford Companion to American Theatre for details on some of the more obscure references.
CHRONOLOGIES Burt, Daniel S. The Chronology of American Literature: America’s Literary Achievements from the Colonial Era to Modern Times. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Chronologies provide a way to examine the literary history of the United States in terms of important historical events. One of the more recent and detailed of these sources of information is The Chronology of American Literature: America’s Literary Achievements from the Colonial Era to Modern Times (2004) by Daniel S. Burt. The reference work is divided into five chapters by period, with a time span from 1582 to 1999. There is a chapter devoted to the realism and naturalism period that groups literary works with significant historical events for each year from 1861 to 1914. The works are organized by genre, and are not limited to well-known novels. They encompass songs, poems, diaries, nonfiction, essays, criticism, and plays. Brief descriptions of the authors, works, and events make this chronology entertaining to browse and read. Birth and death dates of authors are given along with details about literary awards. Each of the five chapters begins with an overview of the historical period. Author and title indexes assist readers in locating specific details within the volume.
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BIOGRAPHICAL RESOURCES While literary encyclopedias supply quick access to short biographies of writers, additional biographical sources may be needed in order to obtain accurate details. In the fourth edition of his book The Art of Literary Research, Richard Altick urges researchers to be “thoroughgoing skeptics” because discrepancies continually occur in biographical accounts.1 Information originally obtained from contemporaries and even autobiographies can be dubious; new facts may be revealed in primary documents discovered at a later time. Individuals born in the nineteenth century generally present more of a difficulty than later writers do because vital records were not required in many states until the 1900s. While three biographical sources may report that a birth or death date is 1878, another four may state that it is 1879 or 1880. Even the spellings of names can vary. In addition to general biographical resources, scholars and students may require pseudonym dictionaries to identify the real names of lesser-known writers since many of the period’s literary figures wrote under pen names. General Biographical Resources American Biographical Archive. Series I edited by Garrance Worters. Series II and III edited by Laureen Baillie. Munich: K. G. Saur, 1981–. Series I through III are available on microfiche, and Series I and II online via the World Biographical Information System, at www.saur-wbi.de/. Baillie, Laureen, ed. American Biographical Index. 2nd ed. 10 vols. Munich: K. G. Saur, 1998. American National Biography. General eds., John A. Garraty and Mark Carnes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 24 vols. plus supplement. Available online at www.oup.com. Biography and Genealogy Master Index. Detroit: Thomson Gale. Available online at www.gale.com. Riggs, Thomas, ed. Reference Guide to American Literature. 4th ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. K. G. Saur Verlag. World Biographical Information System. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2004–. Only available online at www.saur-wbi.de/. Many researchers are familiar with the Biography and Genealogy Master Index (BGMI), published by Thomson Gale. Available in both print and online formats, the BGMI is an index to thousands of current and retrospective biographical sources, from classic, older dictionaries such as Allibone’s A Crit-
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ical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors to the more recent Encyclopedia of American Humorists (1988) and The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). By typing a name into the database or checking the cumulative indexes to the set of print volumes, searchers can identify the particular titles needed. BGMI does not supply the full text of reference works; however, the full text of many of these dictionaries and encyclopedias is made available in other Thomson Gale databases, such as the Literature Resource Center and the Biography Resource Center. BGMI also does not reference periodical articles and single-author biographies, but the index does examine the entries in Biography Index (H. W. Wilson), a source that covers this material. Besides its standard use as an index to biographical compilations, BGMI offers a means of identifying discrepancies in names and dates listed in dictionaries and encyclopedias. Searchers should not regard BGMI’s multiple spellings of names and varying birth and death dates as mistakes in the database. Instead, they should consider them as indications of variations in the literature. The index merely reports the information as it is found. Sources are grouped by form and spelling of names as well as birth and death dates. To obtain the most comprehensive list of results, users should type only the last name of the individual and select the “Start of Last Name” option. This will bring any name variations to the user’s attention. In the case of a common name (e.g., Smith or Jones), the first initial of the first name can be supplied. BGMI will automatically add a truncation symbol to the initial. Pseudonyms should be searched separately, even though BGMI will include a pseudonym dictionary among the sources if the entry in the volume is under the individual’s real name. As an example of this particular use of BGMI, a search for the name Chopin, K* obtains groups of reference sources that contain biographical information on this turn-of-the-century writer. The groupings indicate that her name is reported in several different ways—Kate Chopin, Kate O. Chopin, Kate O’Flaherty, Katherine Chopin, and Katherine O’Flaherty Chopin—and that her birth year is recorded both as 1850 and 1851. Among the sources recording the date as 1850 are the Encyclopedia of American Literature and The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States. The Encyclopedia of Southern Literature, The Oxford Companion to American Literature, and the Reference Guide to American Literature give the date as 1851. All of the sources mentioned in this guide are reputable, making a choice difficult. Realism, Naturalism, and Local Color, 1865–1917 lists both years and informs its readers that the birth year traditionally listed for Kate Chopin has been challenged due to new evidence from baptismal and census records found by Chopin scholar Emily Toth.2 By consulting only one of these encyclopedias or dictionaries, a
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Figure 2.1. Modified entry for Kate Chopin. Source: Biography and Genealogy Master Index (online version).
researcher would lose the opportunity to look for the most accurate biographical details available. The Web-based World Biographical Information System (WBIS Online), its print counterpart (the American Biographical Index), and the World Biographical Index on CD-ROM offer a similar service to period researchers. WBIS Online is an online index connected to a full-text biographical library based on the digitization of the microfiche editions of K. G. Saur’s Biographical Archives: American Biographical Archive, British Biographical Archive, French Biographical Archive, Italian Biographical Archive, German Biographical Archive, Russian Biographical Archive, Scandinavian Biographical Archive, Biographical Archive of the Benelux Countries, and Spanish, Portuguese and Latin-American Biographical Archive. The digitization project is due to be completed by 2009. Many libraries have the microfiche version of the American Biographical Archive, the American component of the Saur archives, in addition to the American Biographical Index, the print index designed to accompany Series I and Series II of this microfiche set, either in the first edition (1993) or the second (1998), edited by Laureen Baillie. Some libraries own the World Biographical Index that
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was published on CD-ROM, the electronic index to the archives without the digitized texts. For a time, the World Biographical Index was available free of charge on the Web. The American Biographical Archive is a “cut-and-paste” compilation of biographical articles taken from thousands of reference works published in the United States from 1702 to 2001. The individuals covered in the archive are both Americans and Canadians, and come from many classes, religious affiliations, ethnic groups, and professions. They encompass both famous figures and people with limited prominence because a number of the biographical dictionaries and encyclopedias have a local focus. Many of the sources were published in the nineteenth century and are difficult to obtain through interlibrary loan. Since graduate students and scholars often come across names of lesser-known individuals of the period when they are reading the correspondence, diaries, or notebooks of writers, they appreciate having access to these works. The search for biographical details can be even more difficult when the individual is referred to as “Mr. Smith” or “Mrs. Jones,” and the first name is not given. The index to the American Biographical Archive, whether in print (American Biographical Index), on CD-ROM (World Biographical Index), or online (World Biographical Information System), is a valuable tool for identifying unfamiliar names because it lists the occupations of individuals along with their names, variations of names, pseudonyms, and birth and death years. The occupation is often what locates the full name of the correct “Mr. Smith” in a long list of men with the same last name and similar dates. If, for example, a Mark Twain letter from Honolulu3 mentions a mysterious “Mr. Burlingame” in connection with “diplomatic circles” and “China,” the researcher can easily find “Anson Burlingame (1820–1870), Lawyer, Diplomat, Congressman” in a list of people whose professions include journalist, railroad superintendent, educator, clergyman, and mill manager. The names of titles in italics refer to sources indexed and listed at the front of the guide. The index entry indicates that biographical articles on Anson Burlingame (diplomat, and signer of the Burlingame Treaty [1868] with China) are to be found in sources such as Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American
Figure 2.2. Modified entry for Anson Burlingame. Source: American Biographical Index, 2nd ed., vol. 2, p. 552.
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Biography (1888) and Herringshaw’s National Library of American Biography (1909–1914). A fiche and frame number are supplied. “Mr. Burlingame” was a diplomat, and can be found in newspaper articles and the American National Biography (below). Other names, however, may not be listed except in older works of the period, which are offered in biographical dictionaries selected for inclusion in the American Biographical Archive. The American National Biography is a comprehensive, authoritative source of biographical information on more than 17,400 American men and women who influenced American history. The twenty-four-volume set, published by Oxford University Press with the aid of the American Council of Learned Societies, is essentially an updated, more comprehensive version of the Dictionary of American Biography (DAB), published by Scribner’s Sons between 1927 and 1936 (with additional supplements published sporadically until 1985). ANB Online, the Web-based version of the ANB, offers easy access and allows for quarterly revisions and updates. The database incorporates articles from The Oxford Companion to United States History and links to articles in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Each article is accompanied by an annotated bibliography that points users to further reading on the individual. Like the American Biographical Index, the ANB offers its users the opportunity to look for a name associated with an occupation. A search for burlingame, therefore, can be limited to government and politics. The ANB also provides full-text searching, so a keyword strategy of burlingame and china would also obtain the entry for Anson Burlingame. Other limiters are offered, such as birth or death date, the choice of male or female, birthplace, article contributor, a search of special heritage collections, and the publication date of the article. The latter gives updates to the original information. The most interesting limitation is by “Occupations and Realms of Renown,” which considers the possibilities of “Siamese Twins,” “Barbed Wire Manufacturers,” “Theatrical Agents,” “Privateers,” “fur traders,” and “U.S. Vice Presidents.” The ever-expanding Dictionary of Literary Biography series on British and American authors, published by Thomson Gale since 1978, encompasses numerous volumes that feature writers of the American realism and naturalism period. Each volume examines a single group of writers, time period, or genre, offering an introduction to the authors’ lives and work. Not only fiction or creative writers are included, but also journalists, publishers, history chroniclers, and other types of expository writers. Popular writers may have more than one entry in the DLB series with each entry focusing on his or her career from a different perspective. The articles run from three to ten pages; they offer illustrations as well as primary and secondary source bibliographies. Examples of titles in the series are American Humorists, 1800–1950
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and American Short Story Writers, 1880–1910. Documentary volumes present images of manuscripts and galley proofs, letters, notebooks, title pages, dust jackets, and author photographs. Formerly published as a separate series from 1982 to 1999, the documentary volumes are now issued periodically as volumes in the regular DLB series, such as the one dedicated to Walt Whitman (vol. 224). DLB Yearbooks, a discontinued feature, supplied updates by summarizing recent works published by a particular writer during that year and included a cumulative index to the DLB set. Information from the DLB volumes is available online as part of Thomson Gale’s Literature Resource Center. One of the highlights of the Literature Resource Center is the “Author by Type” option under “Other Searches” on the interface, which allows users to limit searches for DLB entries by writers’ birth and death dates, gender, nationality, ethnicity, genre, literary movement, and the themes about which they wrote. For searching by genre, users can opt to limit their search to “Native American literature,” “Political journalism,” “Political literature,” “Realism (literature),” “Realistic novels,” “Sentimental novels,” and “Serialized fiction,” among many others. The literary movement selection includes “American naturalism (literature),” “American realism (literature),” “Local color movement,” “Midwestern regionalism,” and “Muckraking movement.” Not only can these descriptors be selected to refine the search of a name, a user can also retrieve every writer indexed by a particular term by selecting it and leaving the author-name field blank. Reference Guide to American Literature (2000), edited by Thomas Riggs, is a one-volume source of “ready-reference” information. The guide contains biographical essays in the vein of the Literary Resource Center, along with lists of bibliographies and critical studies for each writer, synopses and critical readings of 138 canonical American literary texts, a chronology of literary and historical events, and a fourteen-page introduction that serves as an essay on the history of American literature.
Specialized Biographical Resources Realism and Naturalism Biographical Dictionaries Applegate, E. C. American Naturalistic and Realistic Novelists: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. Available online via the Greenwood Digital Collection, at ebooks.greenwood.com. Pizer, Donald, and Earl N. Harbert, eds. American Realists and Naturalists. Vol. 12, Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Research, 1982. Realism, Naturalism, and Local Color, 1865–1917. Vol. 2, Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Research, 1988.
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E. C. Applegate’s American Naturalistic and Realistic Novelists: A Biographical Dictionary (2002) presents biographical sketches of over one hundred writers who have written at least one naturalistic or realist novel. Not all of the writers in this biographical guide flourished during the turn of the century; readers browsing for period names will need to pay attention to the birth and death dates provided. The biographical articles are organized in alphabetical order; they vary in length from two to seven pages, each providing a brief summary of the writer’s life and works. Applegate lists representative works and sources for further reading for each novelist. The volume contains a selected bibliography and an index at the back of the guide. Biographical information for writers who are known by their pseudonyms is entered under their real names (e.g., Clemens instead of Twain), and the index does not include pen names. For biographical coverage of well-known writers of the American realism and naturalism period, researchers can use volume 12 of Thomson Gale’s Dictionary of Literary Biography series or volume 2 of the Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography series. American Realists and Naturalists (1982), edited by Donald Pizer and Earl N. Harbert, provides biographical and critical information for forty-two writers of the period, including the less well-known names Brand Whitlock, Frederic Remington, Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen as well as canonical figures such as Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, and Bret Harte. The concise volume Realism, Naturalism, and Local Color (1988), designed for high school collections, describes the lives and works of twenty-two of the best-known writers from the DLB volume. Both volumes offer a bibliography with additional sources at the end of each entry. Biographical Sources for African American, Native American, and Women Writers Champion, Laurie, ed. American Women Writers, 1900–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Available online via the Greenwood Digital Collection, at ebooks.greenwood.com. Hatch, Shari Dorantes, and Michael R. Strickland, eds. African-American Writers: A Dictionary. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2000. Knight, Denise D., ed. Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A BioBibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. Nelson, Emmanuel S., ed. African American Authors, 1745–1945: BioBibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Available online via the Greenwood Digital Collection, at ebooks .greenwood.com. Porter, Joy, and Kenneth M. Roemer, eds. Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature. Cambridge Companions to Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
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Wiget, Andrew, ed. Dictionary of Native American Literature. Vol. 1815, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities. New York: Garland, 1994. Also published as Handbook of Native American Literature. New York: Garland, 1996. Witalec, Janet, ed. Native North American Literature: Biographical and Critical Information on Native Writers and Orators from the United States and Canada from Historical Times to the Present. With the assistance of associate editors Jeffery Chapman and Christopher Giroux. New York: Gale Research, 1994. Two sources for biographical information about African American writers of the period are African American Authors, 1745–1945 (2000), edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, and African-American Writers: A Dictionary (2000), edited by Shari Dorantes Hatch and Michael R. Strickland. The first is a standard Greenwood Press bio-bibliography and—like others of its type—is made up of three- to six-page articles about writers consisting of four sections: “Biography,” “Major Works and Themes,” “Critical Reception,” and a bibliography. About half of the approximately seventy-five writers in the book were active during the realism–naturalism period. African-American Writers: A Dictionary is wider in scope, covering over five hundred figures. The volume encompasses all of the major writers of the realism–naturalism period, but is made up of much shorter entries and forgoes critical analysis of each writer’s works. Almost all the entries are biographical with the exception of the occasional article about a movement, genre, or popular magazine or literary journal. African-American Writers includes photographs, a subject index, and a table of contents that lists literary figures by the theme and genre of their writings. Two Greenwood Press volumes provide ample coverage of the lives of women writers of the realism–naturalism period. Most of the authors covered in Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers (1997), edited by Denise D. Knight, belong to the period. All are treated in the same way as the writers in African American Authors, American Women Writers, 1900–1945, 1745–1934 (2000), edited by Laurie Champion, adds to the list ten writers of the first fifteen years of the twentieth century: Gertrude Atherton, Mary Hunter Austin, Willa Cather, Rachel Crothers, Alice Maude Ewell, Ellen Glasgow, Gene Stratton-Porter, Sui Sin Far, Edith Wharton, and Zitkala-Sˇa. A number of literary reference works provide bio-critical information on Native American writers. The Dictionary of Native American Literature (1994), published as the Handbook of Native American Literature in 1996 (ed., Andrew Wiget), is a compilation of essays in three sections: the Native American oral tradition, early writing, and writing from 1967 to the present. Among the period authors discussed are Sarah Winnemucca, Zitkala-Sˇa, and E. Pauline Johnson. The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (2005),
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edited by Joy Porter and Kenneth M. Roemer, presents essays on historical and cultural contexts as well as “genre contexts,” with additional articles on individual writers. Although there are no articles on writers from the realism–naturalism period, the “context” essays may be of interest. Period writers can be found in the very brief bio-bibliographies at the close of the volume. Native North American Literature: Biographical and Critical Information on Native Writers and Orators from the United States and Canada from Historical Times to the Present (1994), edited by Janet Witalec, provides better coverage of both period storytellers and writers. There are separate entries for Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull, Sam Blowsnake, Zitkala-Sˇa, Francis La Flesche, Charles Alexander Eastman, E. Pauline Johnson, Simon Pokagon, Alexander Posey, and Sarah Winnemucca. Biographical information is briefly covered in a narrative introductory section, which is followed by a list of personal and career achievements with accompanying dates. Articles tend to focus more on each writer’s literary output, and contain excerpts from book reviews, criticism, and interviews. Aside from the excerpts, bibliographies after each article only refer readers to more comprehensive coverage of each writer in other Gale publications. A title index, author indexes by genre and tribe, and a map of Native American populations in North America allow for quick identification of works, writers, and their regions of origin. Pseudonym Dictionaries Hawk, Pat. Hawk’s Authors’ Pseudonyms III: A Comprehensive Reference of Modern Authors’ Pseudonyms. Edited by Donna Hawk. 3rd ed. Greenville, TX: Hawk’s Enterprises, 1999. Marshall, Alice Kahler. Pen Names of Women Writers: From 1600 to the Present, a Compendium of the Literary Identities of 2650 Women Novelists, Playwrights, Poets, Diarists, Journalists and Miscellaneous Writers, Fully Cross-Referenced. Camp Hill, PA: Copies from Alice Marshall Collection, 1985. Room, Adrian. Dictionary of Pseudonyms: 11,000 Assumed Names and Their Origins. 4th ed. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004. Many of the period’s literary figures used pen names to disguise their identities. Some authors, especially women authors, wrote anonymously or under pen names either to protect their privacy or to show that their writing was a genteel occupation rather than the work of a professional seeking personal fame. Thousands of writers of sensational literature used pen names both to hide the fact that they were publishing dime novels or lowbrow magazine fic-
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tion and because they found that they could sell many more stories by sending them to publishers under different names. Pseudonyms also came into use in the early twentieth century as dime novel publishers hired ghostwriters to write books for popular series under fictional “house” names. For instance, Edward L. Stratemeyer, creator of the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Tom Swift, used over twenty aliases himself, and in 1904 founded the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which published series of adventure novels under over a hundred fictional names. Some pseudonyms were slight variations of the real name or the writer’s initials (e.g., H. H. for Helen Hunt). Other authors signed under the generic pseudonym “Author of” to benefit from the recognition given to a series, such as the Author of “Diamond Dick,” Author of “Fred Fearnot,” and Author of “Handsome Harry.” A celebrity name, like that of Buffalo Bill, was often chosen by a number of anonymous writers. Edith Maud Eaton asserted her Chinese heritage by writing as Sui Sin Far, while Thocmetony (White Flower) preferred to use Sarah Winnemucca, the name she had taken when she left her tribe of Northern Paiutes to live with white settlers. Women writers wrote under men’s names, as did Harriet Beecher Stowe, who published three novels with Ticknor and Fields as Christopher Crowfield: House and Home Papers (1865), Little Foxes (1866), and The Chimney Corner (1868). While biographical dictionaries may list the pseudonyms associated with a writer, they may limit these mentions to only the most notable aliases. Library users can consult pseudonym dictionaries to identify the lesser-known aliases for a writer or to find the writer associated with a particular alias. It is usually easier to find the owner of a specific pseudonym than it is to locate all of the pen names for a prolific writer, and more than one dictionary may be needed to obtain the information. The three titles discussed here are only a small number of the pseudonym dictionaries available. To locate others in a library catalog, use the Library of Congress Subject Heading Anonyms and Pseudonyms. A keyword search for pseudonyms in the title or subject field will also obtain appropriate titles along with the subject heading. With over sixty-one thousand pseudonyms listed, Hawk’s Authors’ Pseudonyms III (1999) is the most comprehensive source for matching pen names with real people. A search for writers who used pseudonyms from the period (e.g., Samuel Clemens, Finley Peter Dunne, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair) reveals that it is a reliable resource for the realism–naturalism researcher. This large volume includes two alphabetical lists—one of writers and one of pseudonyms. The former mentions the nationality of the writer, a list of pseudonyms associated with the writer, lists of the works in which each pseudonym was
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used, and the source of the information. The pseudonym list reveals the writers who selected the name and includes demarcations that indicate whether the pseudonym is a “house” name, was used by more than one author, or whether the name is that of a real person used by a ghostwriter. Hawk covers nicknames, maiden names, spelling variations, and abbreviated names in his lists. Adrian Room’s Dictionary of Pseudonyms: 11,000 Assumed Names and Their Origins (2004) is not limited to writers and only examines eleven thousand names. While the dictionary is not all-inclusive, readers can find explanations of where a pen name originated and why it was used. For example, Room states not only that Joaquin Miller’s real name was Cincinnatus Hiner Miller but also that his pen name was originally a nickname coined from Miller’s defense of the Mexican Gold Rush bandit Joaquin Murieta in his early writing. Only pseudonyms are listed alphabetically, and the lack of an index disallows a reverse search. Alice Kahler Marshall’s Pen Names of Women Writers (1985) is a simple listing of 2,650 pseudonyms and the corresponding real names of the British and American authors who chose them. Names are listed alphabetically by pen name and by real name. This book is of interest to realism–naturalism scholars because many female writers before the twentieth century wrote under male names or ambiguous initials in order to increase their chances of being published. Marshall points out that about half of the pen names listed in her book were selected for this reason. Regional Biographical Dictionaries and Literary Encyclopedias Bain, Robert, and Joseph M. Flora, eds. Fifty Southern Writers after 1900: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. Available online via the Greenwood Digital Collection, at ebooks.green wood.com. Erisman, Fred, and Richard W. Etulain, eds. Fifty Western Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982. Flora, Joseph M., and Amber Vogel, eds. Southern Writers: A New Biographical Dictionary. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Flora, Joseph M., and Lucinda H. MacKethan, eds. The Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Movements, and Motifs. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. Greasley, Philip A., ed. The Authors. Vol. 1, Dictionary of Midwestern Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Encyclopedia of Frontier Literature. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1997.
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Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Encyclopedia of Southern Literature. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1997. Tuska, Jon, and Vicki Piekarski, eds. Encyclopedia of Frontier and Western Fiction. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983. Due to urbanization and Western expansion, the realism and naturalism era was the first literary period in which schools of writers were widely associated with different regions of the country. The culture, traditions, and dialects of, in particular, the West and the South were celebrated in the literature of these regions. Writing that focused on the entertaining idiosyncrasies of a region, referred to collectively as “local color” literature, contributed to a nationwide effort to reclaim a national identity after the destructive Civil War. Literature is grouped and defined by a region when it collectively exhibits topical and stylistic features influenced by the culture, history, and physical environment of that area. Therefore, regional reference works are more likely to relate writers and works to fields beyond writing. The major events of an author’s life might be couched in a larger discussion of the historical events that influenced it. The plotlines of a selection of novels or short stories may be employed to demonstrate a community’s reaction to a natural disaster. Researchers should turn to these specialized reference works when they require information about the literature’s social context. Regional literary encyclopedias generally include discussions about the Civil War, Reconstruction, industrialization, technological advancements, and other historical events that defined the times. In order to examine sample reference entries, library users can consult some of the sources mentioned in this chapter for articles about Charles W. Chesnutt, the African American short story writer and novelist. James D. Hart’s Oxford Companion to American Literature offers a brief entry about Chesnutt consisting of one-sentence synopses of his major works. The Oxford Companion to African American Literature credits Chesnutt with “almost single-handedly inaugurating a truly African American literary tradition in the short story” and emphasizes how his writings portray the psychological strains of African Americans brought on by racism and slavery.4 But only Fifty Southern Writers talks about his works in relation to the myth of the Old South and compares him with other Southern writers, both black and white. Similarly, the Dictionary of Midwestern Literature finds Chesnutt’s Ohio stories, with their emphasis on the new color line that had surfaced in the Midwest after the Civil War, to be a significant contribution to this body of literature. With this example in mind, literary researchers are cautioned not to turn to just any reference source to learn about a topic, but to try to match the focus of a particular resource with the context of their informational need.
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The vastly informative Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Movements, and Motifs (2002), edited by Joseph M. Flora and Lucinda H. MacKethan, has few articles that focus on a specific writer or work. Instead, the Companion approaches Southern literature by genre, with entries on “Folklore,” “Hymns,” “Magic,” and “Realism”; literary topic or motif (e.g., “Cotton,” “Deep South,” “Conjuring,” and “Domesticity”); and geographical location. There are entries that detail the literary history of each Southern state and others that discuss a historical event or era, including “Civil War,” “Reconstruction,” and its portrayal in Southern literature. The article “Happy Darky” talks about African American characters in the fiction of George Washington Cable, Mark Twain, and Thomas Nelson Page, among others. “Humor, Beginnings to 1900” discusses humorists from the realism–naturalism period, such as Twain, Chesnutt, and Joel Chandler Harris. Also included are two-page entries for “Realism,” “Naturalism,” and “Local Color.” A table of contents by subject in the front of the volume aids both researching and browsing. Southern Writers: A New Biographical Dictionary (2006), edited by Joseph M. Flora and Amber Vogel, is a useful source of “quick” information about more obscure writers of the period as well as the famous ones. The volume contains biographical entries and chronological lists of works for 604 Southern writers from the colonial period to the twenty-first century. Greenwood Press’s Fifty Writers series presents American writers by region. Articles in books from this series are approximately ten pages long and consist of a biography of the writer, a discussion of the major themes in his or her writing, a brief overview of the critical reception of the writer, and primary and critical bibliographies. About half of the writers discussed in Fifty Southern Writers before 1900: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook (1987) published works during the realism–naturalism period, while Fifty Southern Writers after 1900 (1987) includes articles about only five: James Branch Cabell, Ellen Glasgow, James Weldon Johnson, H. L. Mencken, and O. Henry. Both books were edited by Robert Bain and Joseph M. Flora, and contain articles written by scholars in the field. Fifty Western Writers (1982), edited by Fred Erisman and Richard W. Etulain, is similarly organized; it focuses on fifteen writers of the period who made their home west of the Mississippi. The editors state in their introduction that they distinguish between “Western” and “western” in the text, the former referring to the “popular, formulaic” tradition, and the latter to any text set in the American West. Mary Ellen Snodgrass is the author of The Encyclopedia of Southern Literature (1997) as well as several other literary regional encyclopedias. This is a similar type of reference work to the Companion to Southern Literature, but Snodgrass places more of an emphasis on writers and their works. There are entries for historical periods (e.g., “Civil War Era”), gen-
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res (“Poetry of the South”), and topics such as “Regionalism,” “Women in Southern Literature,” “Young-Adult Literature,” and “Theater in the South.” In addition, The Encyclopedia of Southern Literature has numerous author and title indexes, and offers a useful index of writers by state of origin. Her Encyclopedia of Frontier Literature (1997) consists of ninety-four essays relating to American settlement and expansion. Snodgrass presents essays on literary themes and motifs, along with entries on major works and their writers and characters. Topical essays of potential interest are “African Americans on the Frontier,” “Captivity Motif,” “Cowboys in Literature,” “Law and Order,” and “Prospecting.” There is a timeline and an extensive bibliography at the back of the book. The bibliography compiles the shorter bibliographic lists that follow many of the essays. The majority of entries discuss nineteenth-century authors, works, and topics—a focus that benefits realism–naturalism readers. The Encyclopedia of Frontier and Western Fiction (1983) consists almost entirely of biographical entries, but also offers articles on “Historical Personalities,” “House Names,” “Native Americans,” “Pulp and Slick Western Stories,” and “Women on the Frontier.” Editors Jon Tuska and Vicki Piekarski broadly define the focus of the text as novels about pioneer life on the North American continent. Entries, usually one to two pages, vary from topic to topic and contain bibliographies. The first volume of the Dictionary of Midwestern Literature (2001), edited by Philip A. Greasley, consists of more than four hundred articles about writers from the twelve-state Midwestern region and discusses the life, works, and significance of each. While some of the authors (e.g., Charles W. Chesnutt) are better known for their Southern fiction, their significant extended connection with the Midwest left a cultural legacy there as well. Each biographical entry contains a section entitled “Significance” that details the specific contributions made by the author that caused him or her to be considered an important influence on this body of literature. The text spotlights both popular and lesser-known Midwestern literary writers, journalists, and critics. A lengthy introductory essay by David D. Anderson discusses the origin, scope, and social context of the region’s literature. A second volume will resemble a general encyclopedia with entries for sites, centers, movements, influences, themes, and genres. A final volume will chronicle the history of Midwestern literature.
HISTORICAL SOURCES Buenker, John D., and Edward R. Kantowicz, eds. Historical Dictionary of the Progressive Era, 1890–1920. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988.
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Finkelman, Paul, ed. Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century. 3 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001. Gabler-Hover, Janet, and Robert Sattelmeyer, eds. American History through Literature 1820–1870. 3 vols. Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2006. Available online via the Gale Virtual Reference Library, at www.gale.com/gvrl. Kutler, Stanley I., ed. Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century. 4 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1996. Quirk, Tom, and Gary Scharnhorst, eds. American History through Literature 1870–1920. 3 vols. Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2006. Available online via the Gale Virtual Reference Library, at www.gale.com/gvrl. Salzman, Jack, David Lionel Smith, and Cornel West, eds. Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History. 5 vols. New York: Macmillan Library Reference, 1996. Supplement 2001. Literature, of course, is intimately associated with history, but a literary scholar or student is not necessarily fully learned in the historical context of an unfamiliar or moderately familiar literary period. When reading a literary text, criticism about literature, or even a reference source about literature, he or she may come upon a reference to a nonliterary person, place, or event that needs a brief explanation. Alternately, before exploring the literature of a period or place, it may be useful to brush up on the political, economic, intellectual, or cultural happenings surrounding the literature. The following resources can help to acquaint a researcher with areas of American history during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries without requiring a major time commitment. American History through Literature (2006) is a six-volume set published by Charles Scribner’s Sons. The set provides discussions of the era’s literary figures, texts, genres, movements, and institutions in their historical contexts. The volumes for 1820–1870, edited by Janet Gabler-Hover and Robert Sattelmeyer, focus on the years of the Civil War and its aftermath, while the companion volumes, edited by Tom Quirk and Gary Scharnhorst, cover 1870–1920. Articles do not just define or describe topics; they also discuss a wider cultural impact. There are illustrated articles on topics as diverse as book publishing, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” Darwinism, naturalism, periodicals, tourism and travel writing, and Woman’s Journal. The articles are written by literary scholars and range from 1,500 to six thousand words. Thematic outlines at the end of each set list the articles in subject categories. The online version, available through the Gale Virtual Reference Library, makes both sets fully searchable. When using the Gale Virtual Reference Library’s “Quick Search” feature, users must check the “within this publication” box to search only the American History through Literature ti-
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tle. There is an advanced search function that provides multiple search fields and allows limiting by subject. Articles are available as PDF files that can be printed or e-mailed. Since most African American literature of the era is intimately tied to historical events, Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History (1996), edited by Jack Salzman, David Lionel Smith, and Cornel West, is a source for investigating references in the literature. Its more than 2,200 entries are either biographical or about historical eras, legal cases, areas of cultural achievement, professions, sports, or places. Articles related to the realism– naturalism period abound, including “Black English Vernacular,” “Music,” “Freedman’s Bank,” and “Jim Crow.” Among the titles in Scribner’s series of U.S. historical encyclopedias are the Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century (2001), edited by Paul Finkelman, and the Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century (1996), edited by Stanley Kutler. The Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century addresses topics most relevant to the study of the period, including those related to literature. Entries on individual states, “Meatpacking,” “Labor Movement,” “Ku Klux Klan,” “The Gilded Age,” and “Indian Territory” are interspersed with those on “Women’s Literature,” “Book Publishing,” and “Dime Novels and Story Papers.” Each entry contains a bibliography. The table of contents at the front of each volume aids in the identification of articles as does the comprehensive index to the set. The Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century is less useful to realism–naturalism researchers as mentions of the Progressive Era years are scattered throughout discussions of modern issues. For quick reference to twentieth-century topics such as motion pictures, race riots, and federal income tax, it may be easier to consult the Historical Dictionary of the Progressive Era, 1890–1920, edited by John D. Buenker and Edward R. Kantowicz. The volume offers a chronology of the era and indexes of names, titles, and subjects.
VOCABULARY RESOURCES Cassidy, Frederic G., ed., and Joan Houston Hall, assoc. ed. Dictionary of American Regional English. Est. 5 vols. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985–. Craigie, William A., Sir, and James R. Hulbert, eds. A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles. 4 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938–44. Farmer, John S. Americanisms—Old & New: A Dictionary of Words, Phrases and Colloquialisms Peculiar to the United States, British America, the West
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Indies, etc., etc., Their Derivation, Meaning and Application, Together with Numerous Anecdotal, Historical, Explanatory, and Folk-Lore Notes. London: Privately Printed by Thomas Poulter & Sons, 1889. Reprint: Detroit: Gale Research, 1976. Hendrickson, Robert. The Facts On File Dictionary of American Regionalisms. New York: Facts On File, 2000. Lighter, J. E. Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang. 2 vols. New York: Random House, 1994. Major, Clarence, ed. Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. Mathews, Mitford M., ed. A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles. 2 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. 20 vols. CD-ROM and online: Oxford University Press at www.oup.com. Wright, John D. The Language of the Civil War. Westport, CT: Oryx Press, 2001. A reader of literature of the American realism and naturalism period may require more than a standard dictionary on hand to decipher both the archaic words of the time that are no longer a part of modern English as well as the dialects and idiomatic expressions that were commonly used by local colorist and regionalist writers. Some of the most cryptic language is found in the sensational literature of the dime novel Westerns. But even the more serious novel One of Ours by Willa Cather will cause readers to reach for a dictionary of historical words. What is a buckboard? A doughboy? A stereopticon or a vulcanizer? What does Huckleberry Finn mean by a “sugar-hogshead” when he says, “I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied”?5 And why does the “tattered soldier” of Stephen Crane’s novel The Red Badge of Courage call the dying Jim Conklin “a reg’lar jim-dandy”? “Well, he was a reg’lar jim-dandy fer nerve, wa’n’t he,” said he finally in a little awestruck voice. “A reg’lar jim-dandy.” He thoughtfully poked one of the docile hands with his foot. “I wonner where he got ’is stren’th from? I never seen a man do like that before. It was a funny thing. Well, he was a reg’lar jimdandy.”6
Fortunately, most of these unfamiliar terms can be found in The Oxford English Dictionary, the largest and most authoritative historical dictionary of the English language. The primary vocabulary reference tool for any literary researcher, the OED includes words from all time periods of both British and
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American origin. The twenty-volume dictionary provides the variations of spellings and meanings of words, and traces their development over time with detailed etymological analyses and quotations from English-language sources. Many words have more than one definition and associated group of quotations from cited sources. Specific page numbers and publication dates are given in each citation. Many libraries subscribe to the online version of the dictionary, which is simple and convenient to search. Unlike the print dictionary, the OED Online can be updated with new terms on an ongoing basis, and the advanced search option allows searchers to use Boolean operators to search across different fields, such as the full text; first cited date, author, and work; definition; etymology; language name; pronunciation; subject; quotation date, author, work, and text; and lemma. OED Online users can perform case-sensitive searches and restrict them to particular parts of speech. The option to search by quotation author or full text allows searchers to obtain all of the words illustrated with a citation from a work by Mark Twain. It is recommended the keyword be limited, if possible, to the last name of the author because only the initials of the first and middle names are used. For instance, the diary of Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut is cited many times in the OED Online, but she is referred to as “M. B. Chesnut.” A further keyword search for Chesnut can be limited to the “first-cited author” field to obtain the three phrases the OED Online finds were first mentioned in print by this writer: antebellum (“previous to the war, i.e. spec. the American civil war”), mauvais quart d’heure (“a short period of time which is embarrassing and unnerving; a brief but unpleasant experience”), and sortie de bal (“a woman’s evening cloak with a quilted lining, popular in the late nineteenth century”).
Figure 2.3.
Modified entry for “antebellum.” Source: OED Online.
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While the print and online versions of the OED include slang and regional terms, other dictionaries may be needed for more obscure words and phrases, or additional uses of these terms in particular contexts. For example, the OED provides details on the definitions of the word “janizary” referring to Turkish soldiers, and only a few references to citations related to “various allusive and figurative uses.” John D. Wright’s The Language of the Civil War (2001) places this word in the social context of the American Civil War by defining “janizary” as a “loyal or submissive soldier or follower” and citing its use by Southern U.S. senators complaining about the presence of General Winfield Scott’s “janizaries” stationed around Washington, DC after the secession of South Carolina. Wright adapts a more conversational style and does not provide the carefully documented citations of the OED, but he does define thousands of colloquialisms, slang terms, and archaic words of the 1860s. Although the terms are selected from works of nonfiction, the definitions and possible origins of words and phrases like “buzzard-bait,” “kissing cousin,” and “gutta-percha” may aid readers of period fiction. Wright discusses military terms as well as everyday terms, such as those related to food, buildings, entertainment, horses, geographical areas, and jobs. He also covers the possible origins of mottos, slogans, and nicknames. A “Guide to Related Topics” that lists words and phrases under these and other topic categories is provided, along with a bibliography of sources of Civil War terms. Published in incremental volumes between 1938 and 1944, William A. Craigie and James R. Hulbert’s Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles (1938–1944) is a standard reference work in four volumes that defines words of American origin or that have a connection with the development of the country. Only words that were in use before the twentieth century are covered by this work. John S. Farmer’s Americanisms—Old & New, published in London in 1889, and A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles (1951), edited by Mitford M. Mathews, are two other classic works on American words. Farmer defines words and phrases straight out of the nineteenth century, such as “scranny” and “green-goods.” Mathews’ work is a shorter, updated version of Craigie’s dictionary. This two-volume set was published to remedy the omissions and deficiencies of the OED and Craigie’s work. Unlike Craigie, Mathews defines only words and phrases that became standard English in the United States. According to the dictionary’s preface, this includes words invented in the United States, foreign-language words that became part of the English language in the United States, and words that were given additional meanings in the United States. Among those in the first category are “freedman” and Twain’s term “granddaddy longlegs.” The second encompasses Native American words such as “pow-wow”; the third a
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word like “car” in the sense of a railroad, an elevator, and an automobile. Definitions are followed by a generous number of citations from both literary and popular sources. A dictionary for slang terms and phrases throughout American history is the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1994), edited by J. E. Lighter. Lighter’s two-volume dictionary has etymologies and chronologically arranged citations from popular sources that track how a term’s meaning and usage have changed throughout the years. For definitions and the origins of African American slang, researchers should consult Clarence Major’s Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang. Clarence Major—novelist, poet, and the author of Dictionary of Afro-American Slang (1970)—compiles terms from older primary sources in addition to his own field research. Although Juba to Jive contains terms used as long ago as the 1620s, the majority of terms in the book were common in the twentieth century. Major identifies the culture in which terms originated (e.g., prison, Midwestern, jazz), states the range of years they were popular, and provides etymologies when known. The dictionary is useful for interpreting slang words in African American works of the period, such as Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman (1899) and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs. What, for example, is the “goopher” that frightens Henry in The Conjure Woman, and why would Aunt Peggy have to take it “off’n him”? Wen dey tole ’im ’bout de goopher on de grapevimes, he ’uz dat tarrified dat he turn pale, en look des like he gwine ter die right in his tracks. De oberseah come up en axed w’at ’uz de matter; en w’en dey tole ’im Henry be’n eatin’ er de scuppernon’s, en got de goopher on ’im, he gin Henry a big drink er w’iskey, en ’low dat de nex’ rainy day he take ’im ober ter Aun’ Peggy’s, en see ef she would n’ take de goopher off’n him, seein’ ez he did n’ know nuffin erbout it tel he done et de grapes.7
Juba to Jive reveals that a “goofer,” with a different spelling, can be “dirt from a grave or from a graveyard used in conjure work,” or a conjurer’s spell. The word evolved from the African verb kufwa, which means “to die.” An assigned “Geographical Locator” of “SU” means “Southern Use.” Major gives abbreviations for other works that define or use this word, including the more detailed entry in the multivolume set of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), listed as FGC, DARE (Frederic G. Cassidy, Dictionary of American Regional English). Someone who decides to pursue further research on “goofering” or conjuring in works of literature and requires more than the brief definition provided by a slang dictionary like Juba to Jive will want to consult the Dictionary of
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American Regional English (DARE). DARE is the most authoritative and comprehensive source of information on American regionalisms. Frederic G. Cassidy, emeritus professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, spearheaded the effort (initiated by the American Dialectic Society in 1899) to capture and record millions of regional expressions of Americans in a comprehensive reference work similar to The Oxford English Dictionary (see above). Years of interviews and the study of print literature—novels, diaries, and small-town newspapers—have resulted in four volumes that cover Aa–Sk. A guide to abbreviations is provided at the front of each volume, along with an explanation of the special letters and symbols used. For a convenient one-volume source that provides brief definitions for a variety of regional expressions, period researchers should consider The Facts On File Dictionary of American Regionalisms by Robert Hendrickson. Hendrickson has combined the five separate volumes of his Dictionary of American Regional Expressions series—Happy Trails, Mountain Range, New Yawk Tawk, Whistlin’ Dixie, and Yankee Talk—into a useful ready-reference work that will answer most questions. Regions are still separated into different sections, so readers can consult a particular regional section or look for a word in the combined index in the back of the volume. They can find “dursn’t” and “forth-putting” in the “Yankee Talk” section and then look up “deadwood” and “deadfall” in “Happy Trails.” Finding a term in slang or idiomatic dictionaries is largely a matter of luck. It is difficult to predict which dictionary is going to contain a particular term or definition of a term that matches its use in a particular primary source. Researchers will find that they need to have multiple slang dictionaries at hand in order to decipher older texts that heavily feature colloquial language.
AUTHOR RESOURCES Camfield, Gregg, ed. The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. MacKenzie, Cynthia J. Concordance to the Letters of Emily Dickinson. With the assistance of Penny Gilbert. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2000. Messent, Peter, and Louis Budd, eds. A Companion to Mark Twain. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2006. Newlin, Keith, ed. A Theodore Dreiser Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003. Ramsay, Robert L., and Frances Guthrie Emberson. A Mark Twain Lexicon. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963.
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Rasmussen, R. Kent, ed. Mark Twain A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Writings. New York: Facts On File, 1995. Robinson, Forrest G., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Twain, Mark. The Quotable Mark Twain: His Essential Aphorisms, Witticisms & Concise Opinions. Edited by R. Kent Rasmussen. Lincolnwood, IL: Contemporary Books, 1997. Twain, Mark. Mark My Words: Mark Twain on Writing. Edited by Mark Dawidziak. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Wright, Sarah Bird. Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Guide to the Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998. The most canonical literary figures of a time period are studied so extensively that a need has arisen for reference books that focus on their lives and works. Encyclopedias, companions, and guides are particularly useful for students and scholars doing in-depth research on an unfamiliar writer. They generally consist of short entries on people and places associated with the writers as well as his or her works, characters, and textual references. Entries for stories or novels written by the writer usually present a synopsis of the work. Keith Newlin’s A Theodore Dreiser Encyclopedia (2003) is made up of entries for each of Dreiser’s twenty-four books, his articles, essays, short stories, and poems as well as the people and places in his life. Some guides are even more comprehensive, such as Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Guide to the Life and Work (1998), which includes entries for her friends, family, and acquaintances and her influences, works, characters, hobbies, and special interests. A researcher may want to consult these resources when coming across the title of a work or character in a scholarly article, the name of an acquaintance in the writer’s correspondence, or to learn about the relationship one writer had with another. In addition to these encyclopedic sources, there are concordances of the letters, poems, and novels of a number of writers. Concordances allow scholars and students to track down every appearance of a specific word or phrase. As more literary texts become available online, the need for printed concordances has become less necessary. The search function of a Web browser can be utilized to locate the appearances of a term in a text. A student writing a paper on botanical imagery in Frank Norris’s McTeague, for example, can locate references by finding the online version of the text and searching for terms such as trees, leaves, and green. The difference is that he will not be able to browse the list of words to identify others that might be applicable. Another limitation of using a Web browser to search for words is that only one webpage can be searched at a time. A webpage of literary text usually
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contains only a single work or a chapter, or a passage contained in a single work. A printed concordance is therefore needed to quickly search for the occurrence of a word in multiple works or the complete works of an author. The Concordance to the Letters of Emily Dickinson (2000) by Cynthia J. MacKenzie covers the more than one thousand letters from the Thomas H. Johnson edition of Dickinson letters published by Belknap Press in 1958 and 1965, and Johnson’s 1998 edition. Along with a brief portion of the original sentence to provide context, the concordance gives the line number, page, letter number, Johnson volume, year, and the frequency of use for each word examined. Those investigating Mark Twain are particularly fortunate in the wealth of reference sources available to them. Literary companions such as The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain (1995) and A Companion to Mark Twain (Blackwell, 2006) offer essays in a cultural and historical context, while Mark Twain A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Writings (1995) provides thorough coverage of people, places, and topics associated with the author. The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain (2003) combines some of the alphabetical encyclopedic entries of Mark Twain A to Z with signed essays on related themes (e.g., Arthur Miller on “Performance,” “Mark Twain’s Reputation” by Louis J. Budd, and “Etiquette” by Judith Martin). Two collections of Mark Twain’s quotes were published within a year of each other: The Quotable Mark Twain (1997) and Mark My Words (1996). The latter compiles Twain’s quotes on the subject of writing, but The Quotable Mark Twain is the more comprehensive of the two sources. Edited by R. Kent Rasmussen, the book contains Twain’s remarks on over 1,500 subjects (from truth to tarantulas) and includes quotes from articles, interviews, and posthumously published works. Another unique reference text for a unique writer is A Mark Twain Lexicon (1963), a selective concordance of regional, dialectical, and invented words from Twain’s complete works.
CONCLUSION As this chapter shows, the domain of literary reference sources is vast and varied. While online resources can fulfill most simple informational needs (e.g., the definition of a common word from an online dictionary or basic biographical information about a popular author from the Literature Resource Center), many literary reference sources are still print-based. When researching a historical era like the American realism and naturalism period, the age of a resource does not necessarily correlate with its authority or usefulness, although the most recently published resource is most likely to recognize the
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latest scholarship or findings on a topic. A book published in the 1970s might be the most comprehensive resource on a subject, but it still might need to be supplemented with a Web resource for current information. The safest practice is to consult more than one resource since errors and inconsistencies are not uncommon in the print record. Researchers should get into the habit of not relying on the first resource they find. They should use the library catalog and literary research guides (such as this book) to get an understanding of the scope of resources available before deciding on a trustworthy source. Most of the reference sources discussed in this chapter include bibliographies that act as gateways for resources that allow for more in-depth research. The next chapter will discuss how to use online catalogs to identify these materials and others like them in the library systems of the world.
NOTES 1. Richard D. Altick and John J. Fenstermaker, The Art of Literary Research. 4th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 24. 2. Emily Toth, Kate Chopin (New York: Morrow, 1990), 24–25. 3. Samuel L. Clemens to Jane Lampton Clemens and Pamela A. Moffett, Honolulu, Sandwich Islands, 27 June 1866, in Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 1: 1853–1866, eds. Edgar Marquess Branch, Michael B. Frank, and Kenneth M. Sanderson, The Mark Twain Papers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 347–49. 4. William L. Andrews, “Chesnutt, Charles Waddell (1858–1932)” in The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 132. 5. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, complete (Project Gutenberg, 2006), bk. 76, chap. 1, www.gutenberg.org/files/76/76-h/76-h.htm (24 July 2007). 6. Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (Project Gutenberg, 1993), bk. 73, chap. 10, www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext93/badge10.txt (24 July 2007). 7. Charles W. Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969, 19–20.
Chapter Three
Library Catalogs
Library collections are difficult to use without the access points provided by their catalogs. This chapter discusses library catalogs and their role in identifying and locating research material. Readers will learn how to employ the strategies covered in chapter 1 to conduct and evaluate searches in catalogs, and advance from the location of brief records to the examination of the more detailed descriptions available in full and MARC records. These detailed descriptions frequently contain valuable notes on a work’s format, contents, and origin that aid literary research, especially investigations related to publishing history, edition verification, and material held in special collections. Chapter 3 will also demonstrate how Web-based tools can be used to explore beyond the physical collection of a local library to the research collections of libraries worldwide, including the catalogs of national libraries and the various union catalogs that incorporate the holdings of libraries within a consortium, region, country, or internationally. A discussion of library material accessibility and interlibrary lending closes the chapter.
CATALOG ORGANIZATION The library catalog is basically a list, regardless of whether it is produced in print or electronic format. In fact, the word catalog (or catalogue) is defined in The Oxford English Dictionary as being a list in a “systematic or methodical arrangement, alphabetical or other order,” accompanied by brief descriptive details to indicate “locality, position, date, price, or the like.”1 A catalog enumerates the materials a library has to offer. How this list is arranged and accessed depends on the form the catalog takes. A card file is usually orga50
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nized for author, title, or subject searches, while an online public access catalog (OPAC) offers many more access points, such as publisher name, series title, International Standard Book Number (ISBN), International Standard Serial Number (ISSN), and call number. Online catalogs can differ due to variations in search software and interface design, but the structure of their records follows certain standards. Widespread use of the revised AngloAmerican Cataloging Rules (AACR2r2002), Library of Congress subject headings, Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) records, controlled vocabulary, and Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal classification numbers help to maintain uniformity in the records of most libraries in the United States. Specialized libraries may use more simplified subject headings for organization, for example, the Sears List of Subject Headings and the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) of the National Library of Medicine.
BROWSING FOR TITLES IN THE CATALOG While search software varies from catalog to catalog, most interfaces are designed for maximum ease of use by first-time searchers. Catalog users should be able to browse the alphabetical index list of titles or search for title keywords and phrases. They often choose the browse search option when they know the exact name of a title. The entire title does not have to be typed as long as it begins with the first alphabetized word and contains no missing words. Subtitles are not required unless the title only consists of one or two words or the query obtains an overly long list of titles. For instance, the phrase europeans a sketch may be chosen as the search query for The Europeans: A Sketch by Henry James because the single word europeans retrieves too many entries. The inclusion of capital letters and the colon in front of the subtitle are optional in this basic query. Like most lists of alphabetized titles, the initial articles are eliminated from the alphabetizing sequence (e.g., “a,” “an,” and “the”). Some software programs are designed to ignore initial articles, but many are not. This can cause problems because catalog searchers may include the initial article, fail to obtain the title, and mistakenly conclude that the library does not own it. When in doubt, they should consult the instructions and examples given on the catalog’s interface or help pages. To find the desired item, the person identifies the correct title and appropriate publisher name and date in the list of search results. Sometimes two dates are supplied in the record. They are usually the original publication date grouped with the date of the reprint/facsimile or the publication date accompanied by the copyright date. The copyright date is preceded by a “c.” The
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Figure 3.1. Modified catalog record, basic display, for The Europeans: A Sketch (1879). Source: University of Delaware Library catalog.
catalog record for the U.S. edition of Henry James’s The Europeans: A Sketch in figure 3.1 contains both the date of publication and the copyright date as well as the name of the publisher Houghton, Osgood. Most catalogs do not display all possible fields in the initial record unless this is a particular display option that is selected. The initial record is generally a brief one intended to present the basic information about the item: the author, his or her dates, the title and subtitle, the place of publication, the publisher name, the publication date(s), format, and location in the library. Once the appropriate item is identified, the catalog user can then select the full record for more information. The full record generally has most of the details given in the MARC record without the field numbers. The MARC record that was utilized to create the brief and full displays is also available as a display option in many catalogs. Most catalog searchers read only the brief records, but those investigating the publishing history of literary works are encouraged to examine the full or MARC records for their notes about the origin and content of the work as well as details such as the International Standard Book Number (ISBN), language, and physical description. Descriptions in catalog records can be detailed, especially for works housed in special collections. In the case of the record for Henry James’s Lake George to Burlington: Two American Travel Sketches, both the full and MARC records offer information on the physical description, additional subject headings, and notes on the volume’s publication history and contents. The catalog user learns that the two stories of this volume, “Lake George” and “From Lake George to Burlington,” were originally contributed as part of a series of six unsigned articles to The Nation in the early 1870s; they were omitted when the others were reprinted in Portraits of Places by Henry James in 1885. Another general note states that the edition was “limited to one hundred & twenty copies” and published on Ingres d’Arches paper, and that this particular volume is number 3 of the numbered copies printed. Local notes indicate that the volume came from the collection of Alan Anderson of Tragara Press.
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Figure 3.2. Modified catalog record, full display, for Lake George to Burlington. Source: University of Delaware Library catalog.
BROWSING FOR PERIODICAL TITLES Library catalogs generally offer a separate search box for the titles of magazines, journals, and newspapers. The records for this type of material may give the International Standard Serial Number (ISSN), the title, the place of publication, publisher, dates, physical description, and frequency of issue. While library catalogs describe the periodicals offered by a library, they do not function as indexes to their articles unless they are connected with other electronic library databases to special software for federated searches. (See the section on federated searches below.) The library may own the 1878 volume of Atlantic Monthly, but a keyword search for europeans and henry and james will not identify Henry James’s novel as being published in a specific issue of the magazine unless this information happens to be provided in the notes field of a record for the novel, as shown in the example above. The searcher interested in this serialized version of the novel would have to locate the title atlantic monthly in the catalog, obtain its location, and find an index that identifies the specific issues. If the library owns the periodical in a variety of formats (e.g., microfilm, print, and electronic), there may be a catalog record for each format with different publishers or distributors. The catalog may also include separate records for issues of the same periodical that were published in a different location or under a variant title. If the library has a subscription for the online version of the periodical, the catalog record is likely to contain a URL that provides a direct link to the electronic magazine, journal, or newspaper. Some libraries link catalog users to databases that offer full-text
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articles from the periodicals. These are not strictly subscriptions because the entire issues are not available—only the articles.
TITLE KEYWORD SEARCHES While a keyword search for europeans and henry and james may not be able to locate the novel’s serialization in Atlantic Monthly, a keyword search is appropriate when the exact title and edition of a work are not known or if all possible editions in the library are needed. By typing the keywords europeans and henry and james instead of browsing for europeans a sketch, researchers can locate The Europeans: A Facsimile of the Manuscript. This would be a valuable addition to a survey of available editions. The full record for the facsimile would also be useful, as it lists the four locations of different portions of the manuscript. Kate Chopin scholars may need to compare the text of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening: Screenplay as Interpretation (UP of Florida, 1992) with The Awakening: An Authoritative Text, Biographical and Historical Contexts, Criticism (W. W. Norton, 1994) for variations. Since both titles would not be included under the standard title entry for “Awakening” or “Awakening, and other stories,” the quickest way to find them would be a keyword search. A keyword search will locate a title in an anthology if the MARC record for the volume contains a description of the anthology’s contents. MARC records do not always contain these descriptions, but they are valuable when they do, especially when the researcher is looking for an unfamiliar title that may be an essay, a short story, or a play. The works are frequently published in anthologies and are difficult to locate in a catalog without the aid of anthology indexes, such as Play Index and Short Story Index published by H. W. Wilson. A recent trend is to follow the business practices of online booksellers and insert a URL in catalog records that links to the table of contents provided by the publisher along with additional URLs that lead to webpages offering a short biography of the author or description of the book. While the webpages supply useful information, they are not searchable unless their contents are added to the catalog’s indexes. If the table-of-contents pages are generated from prepublication descriptions submitted by the publisher to the Library of Congress, the actual contents of the item may vary.
UNIFORM TITLES When a title or subtitle varies in different editions, a uniform title is added to a catalog record in order to allow searchers to identify all of the variant titles
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associated with the original work. For instance, Las aventuras de Huckleberry Finn, the Spanish-language edition of Twain’s novel, has the uniform title “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Spanish,” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” will be an added title for Huckleberry Dog, a juvenile version of the novel. A uniform title is also assigned when a collective title is used to tie together publications containing a number of works or extracts from several works (e.g., complete works or a compilation of works in a literary or musical form). A sound recording that includes selections from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn may be assigned the added entry title of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Selections.” Uniform titles are intermixed with main titles in a catalog’s alphabetical list.
SERIES TITLES A series is a group of separately published works that are issued by the same publisher and have a series title that applies to the group as a whole (e.g., Broadview Literary Texts and Dictionary of Literary Biography series).2 Despite the fact that library catalog records often contain both the series title and the individual title of a work, searchers should expect coverage of series titles in library catalogs to be irregular, especially for older records. Some catalogs are designed to retrieve series titles along with the main titles of works, while others allow for a separate search of the MARC record’s series field with a designated search box. There are catalogs that are designed to handle both kinds of searches.
BROWSING FOR AUTHOR NAMES Library catalogs are designed to facilitate author or, in the case of nontextual materials, creator searches. The catalog user may search for an author’s name to determine whether a library holds works by that author or to find a particular work if he is not certain of the title. If the browse option is selected, the user will be looking for the name in an alphabetical list, and the author’s last name should precede the first name. Many online catalogs do not require the comma after the last name. The author Ambrose Bierce would, therefore, be searched as bierce ambrose in the browse mode. Ideally, the library catalog will list all of the works by Ambrose Bierce under a single heading called an authority heading. If the information in the authority record for Bierce is complete, the birth and death dates will be given so searchers can differentiate between authors with the same name. Living authors have an open entry (e.g.,
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1950–). If there is some question about a date, as in the case for the death date of Ambrose Bierce, a question mark will be added at the end of the range of dates (“Bierce, Ambrose, 1842–1914?”). Most libraries use authority headings designated by the Library of Congress that standardize the name variations under which items are listed. For instance, works by Samuel Langhorne Clemens are generally listed under the author heading “Twain, Mark, 1835–1910.” The author record for his birth name and his lesser-known pen name Quintus Curtius Snodgrass have “seealso” cross-references directing users to the designated Library of Congress authority heading. Sometimes works are not attributed to their appropriate author because the author used a pen name or the name is misspelled. Researchers should consider pen names and popular variations of a name when searching a catalog for the complete list of the works of an author.
AUTHOR KEYWORD SEARCHES The names in a catalog’s author index are culled from specific fields in the MARC record, namely the main entry field and any additional author fields. To locate names that appear in any other place in the record, such as the contents or notes fields, it is necessary to run a general rather than an author keyword search. Each essay or short story writer in a volume of collected works may not be listed in an author field, but the names may appear in the contents or notes fields.
BROWSING FOR SUBJECT HEADINGS IN THE CATALOG The title or author name should be searched when someone is looking for a known item. However, when the topic is all that a student knows, he may choose to browse for a subject heading that describes his topic. The subject heading should be specific enough to obtain appropriate materials, yet not so specific that some appropriate material is left out. The process of selecting a subject heading generally takes more thought than a title or an author search. Most U.S. libraries utilize the hierarchical system of classification found in the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), currently in its 29th edition in 2006, although school libraries may use more simplified subject headings, such as the Sears List of Subject Headings. Medical libraries may prefer the more specialized Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) of the National Library of Medicine. An individual subject heading in LCSH may consist of one term or many. In the latter case, the first term is an umbrella term, and each subsequent term
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is a subcategory of the one before it. The subject heading becomes more specific with each term that is added to the others. American literature—19th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. A searcher who wants information sources about Mark Twain (e.g., biographies or critical analyses of his works) can either browse the list of alphabetized subject headings for twain mark in the online catalog or consult the print volumes of LCSH for an appropriate heading. The print volumes, once a standard tool of library patrons, are now requested infrequently because online catalog searchers have other means of identifying appropriate subject headings that were not available to card catalog users. The volumes provide lists of approved subject headings with suggestions for alternate terms accompanied by the symbols UF (used for), BT (broader term), RT (related term), SA (see also), and NT (narrower term). “May Subd Geog” means that place names may follow the heading. The print volumes also show the hierarchical arrangement of headings. The lists of subject headings in online catalogs often contain links to suggestions for alternative choices. Searchers can see how many items have been assigned a particular subject heading and choose between a broader heading (“Twain, Mark, 1835–1910”) or a more specific one (e.g., “Twain, Mark, 1835–1910—Aesthetics”). As with the catalog’s list of authors, it is necessary to scan the list for other applicable headings. Since the subject heading lists in the online catalog of a large library can be lengthy, the searcher looking for information about Twain’s characters may want to note the main heading of “Twain, Mark, 1835–1910” and the style of the hierarchical arrangement, and select twain, mark, 1835–1910—characters. This will take him to the appropriate place on the list, where he can choose the more specific subject of fugitive slaves and obtain the single record for The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn (UP of Mississippi, 1998) shown in figure 3.4. Obviously, this is not the only book in the library’s collection that discusses slaves as characters in Twain’s works. Someone who
Figure 3.3. Modified subject headings for Twain, Mark, 1835–1910—Characters. Source: University of Denver, Penrose Library catalog.
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Figure 3.4. Modified basic catalog record for The Jim Dilemma. Source: University of Denver, Penrose Library catalog.
requires more sources may want to consider books that discuss his African American characters (e.g., “Twain, Mark, 1835–1910—Characters—African Americans”) or a variety of Twain’s characters (those under the heading of “Twain, Mark, 1835–1910—Characters”) in addition to books with a broader perspective, such as critical interpretations of the author’s novels. To find the latter, the searcher can browse the alphabetical list of subject headings until he finds “Twain, Mark, 1835–1910—Criticism and interpretation.” Most items in a library’s collections are assigned more than one subject heading. When an appropriate record is found in the catalog, the user should
Figure 3.5. Modified catalog record, full display, for The Jim Dilemma. Source: University of Denver, Penrose Library catalog.
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examine all subject headings assigned to that work in case they may be useful. Sometimes there are too many headings to list in the brief record, and the catalog user must select the full or MARC record to view all of the assigned headings. Searchers who do not realize that there are additional subject headings are often surprised to see a brief record in their list of results that does not appear to contain the subject heading requested. These records should not be viewed as retrieval errors. For instance, the user only saw one subject heading when looking at the brief record of The Jim Dilemma, but there are many more assigned to the book.
SUBJECT KEYWORD SEARCHES A researcher who becomes familiar with the subject headings for a particular area of study and who understands their hierarchical structure is usually able to construct a subject search and identify the more specific subheadings. However, a catalog user who is unsuccessful with a browse search for subject headings may want to consider a keyword search for subject terms. A subject keyword search examines the subject index for words from the subject headings. This is often a useful tactic since it is difficult to predict exactly how subject headings will be organized in the hierarchical structure of the alphabetical list. Someone who is interested in items about the emancipation of slaves in the United States can search for the keyword emancipation and obtain records for items with a number of headings, including the following list. Slaves—Emancipation—United States United States. President (1861–1865: Lincoln) Emancipation Proclamation Slaves—Emancipation—New England—History—19th century A more specific search for emancipation and slaves would eliminate headings for “Jews—Emancipation,” but it would also prevent the searcher from finding “United States. President (1861–1865: Lincoln) Emancipation Proclamation.” A catalog user can also search for topic-related keywords in the title field. By choosing this method, the searcher is assuming that, if the topic-related terms are included in the title of a book, the book should relate to the topic. Even if there is only one applicable record that contains the two words emancipation and slaves in the title, that record should suggest a subject heading for topic exploration. In the case of the previous record, the searcher can choose “Slaves—Emancipation—United States” for further subject searching by selecting the heading from the subject list in the record. The records for all
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of the items with this heading will then be listed, some containing other subject headings of interest.
ADVANCED CATALOG SEARCHES As mentioned before, MARC records can hold a wealth of information beyond the title, creator, and subject of an item. There are fields for publication information, physical descriptions, tracking numbers, and content information. Many library catalogs not only allow users to view these secondary fields in individual records, they can search for terms within them by selecting an advanced or expanded search interface. The interfaces generally consist of multiple search boxes connected by Boolean operators, each associated with a drop-down menu of searchable MARC fields. Other search functions, such as limiters (defined in chapter 1), may be available. If these options are useful, catalog users can bookmark the advanced search page. Using an advanced search option broadens the search possibilities because users can create complex queries across multiple fields. For instance, a student can search for a copy of Leaves of Grass published in 1898 by Putnam, all of a library’s holdings of books published by Scribner’s in 1891, or all film adaptations of The House of Mirth. Items can be identified by ISBN or ISSN, and scribbled library call numbers lacking references can be matched with their titles. In some advanced search interfaces, fields such as publication year, language, and material type are represented by limiters. In these cases, a catalog user is prohibited from searching the fields exclusively; they must be accompanied by a query from one of the main fields. A user may not, for example, be able to identify all the items published in the French language in 1914, but if an author’s name is added to the search, the search becomes feasible. Some catalogs permit users to substitute two asterisks (**) for a term from a main field, allowing them to avoid the problem. Limiter restrictions also can be bypassed to a certain extent by the use of a command search, an option offered by many catalogs. Command searches use Boolean operators and keywords with codes for specific categories of information in records. The codes should be explained on the catalog’s help pages.
ACCESS VERSUS OWNERSHIP At the beginning of the chapter, library catalogs were described as lists of what libraries have to offer. This definition was deliberately vague because advances in computer technology and networking have produced catalogs
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that are much more than simple author, title, and subject lists of the items housed in a building. In addition to providing access points for minute details in their records for library material, online catalogs now extend outward to include websites, electronic journals, databases, and electronic books available through the Internet. “Ownership” frequently means access and a paid subscription rather than the actual possession of print items on shelves. If these subscriptions are canceled, the online “library” disappears. Even free websites and periodicals are not permanent; the award-winning sources of information applauded one year may be dead links the next. Current trends find library catalogs acting increasingly as portals to online information rather than as itemized lists, emphasizing access rather than ownership, blurring library boundaries, and raising some difficult questions. If records in a catalog provide links to individual works of literature found in a digitized collection on the Web, are these works “owned” by the library? If the records describing print items available through a consortia or subscription agreement with another library are loaded into a catalog, does the library consider membership and entitlement to delivery of these items as the same type of ownership that is associated with a subscription database or electronic journal?
FEDERATED SEARCHES As a different aspect of the movement toward consolidation, a number of libraries are adapting what is called a federated search or meta-search of their online resources. In this arrangement, one search engine—usually located on the library’s homepage—can be designed to examine the online catalog in addition to, or in combination with, the subscription databases, digital collections, and locally created databases. An example of this kind of meta-search interface can be found on the homepage of the Boston College Libraries (http://www.bc.edu/libraries/). Although the tool can save time, literary researchers should be aware that the current software associated with these search engines does not generally offer the same range of search functionality and precision as the software connected with the library’s catalog or an individual database. Inclusion of the library catalog in searches of databases often brings an overwhelming number of results, so cross-searching may be limited to the databases that can be linked for this purpose. Searchers should also consider that cross-searches of subscription databases and library catalogs can be offered only to those patrons affiliated with the library’s institution. At the present time, a number of libraries have reported difficulties with this technology to the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS), a division of the American Library Association. Some of the
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difficulties mentioned are the lack of uniform user-authentication standards for databases, the large number of duplicate citations retrieved, and the high maintenance costs.3 Libraries are also combining the records of their catalog with the records of other libraries to form local, national, and worldwide union catalogs. Some librarians question whether individual libraries should continue to create and maintain their own catalogs, and wonder if there should be only one large union catalog that records the holdings for all libraries in the United States— or the world. They believe that the loss of individuality would be worth the reduction in staff time devoted to cataloging. Others dislike the idea as the loss of individuality could mean the elimination of detailed notes on special editions and one-of-a-kind items, such as books signed by the author or owner. Literary researchers often look for these descriptions.
CATALOGS OF OTHER LIBRARIES Libdex, at www.libdex.com (accessed 28 May 2006). Lib-Web-Cats, at www.librarytechnology.org/libwebcats (accessed 28 May 2006). If the development of one universal catalog is not imminent, certainly there is increased awareness of holdings in other libraries and interlibrary-loan delivery services. Online catalogs allow scholars and students to explore the collections of libraries from a distance. Directories of online library catalogs, such as Libdex or Lib-Web-Cats, offer quicker access to online catalogs than a standard search engine, especially if bookmarks have been created for the websites. Libdex is a directory of over eighteen thousand library websites worldwide. Links are provided to give users direct access to their catalogs. Lib-Web-Cats, maintained by Marshall Breeding (Vanderbilt University), focuses primarily on American libraries but features an advanced search interface that allows people to search for a library by type, location, collection size, and automation software used. Even with access to one of the largest research libraries in the country, someone will, at some point, require items from another library. There are numerous ways of gaining access to this material. A local library may offer interlibrary loan and document delivery services, particularly if it is a research library. A special collections facility at another library may send photocopies of a document or pages of a book for a fee. A reference librarian may be able to provide information about an item over the telephone or through e-mail. In addition, nearby libraries within traveling distance may allow noncommunity
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members to access their collections. Public libraries are, by definition, open to the public, and borrowing privileges for noncommunity members are sometimes available for purchase for a monthly or annual fee. Academic libraries may or may not allow members of the public to use their facilities depending on their security conditions, their status as a state institution, and the access they are required to provide as a depository library for U.S. government documents. Borrower cards may sometimes be purchased at academic libraries, although entrance may be limited to certain hours or days. Private libraries, too, have varying policies concerning facility use and borrowing privileges. They frequently require membership to an organization as an entrance fee. A good strategy is to ascertain as much information about the particular item and the library before planning a visit. The library’s website and reference librarians should be consulted for answers to questions about policies and hours. Will the library be open at the time of the visit? Where are the materials located? Are they currently checked out or available for use? Is the building open to visitors? Where do they have permission to park? Are there certain hours during which they can visit? If the building is only open to members of the organization or institution with identification cards, calling ahead for a letter of permission from a library administrator may help a scholar gain special access to a collection. A preliminary investigation of the situation increases the likelihood of a successful visit.
INTERLIBRARY LOAN SERVICES Unless someone plans to travel in order to use manuscripts and other rare materials, the easiest way for him to obtain material from other libraries is to use the interlibrary loan (ILL) and document delivery services of his local library. The library will handle the transaction and be responsible for the return of the item and any payment necessary. Since copies of periodical articles or chapters in books are often faxed or transmitted digitally, they are delivered quickly from one library to another. The loan period for books, microforms, and other non-photocopy items is determined by the lending institution. In most cases, the loan period is two weeks. Some items may be renewed for another two weeks with permission from the lending institution, although libraries that loan material from their collections reserve the right to recall items at any time for their clientele. Of course, not all items may be borrowed. Libraries rarely loan videocassettes and CD-ROMs, entire journal volumes or issues, and items published before 1900. Other materials that may not be available through interlibrary loan include full-text articles available in subscription
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databases, reference works, rare materials, bulky or fragile materials that are difficult to ship, items that would violate copyright limitations, and current course textbooks. Some libraries allow dissertations to circulate; others will not send them out on loan.
THE CENTER FOR RESEARCH LIBRARIES Center for Research Libraries, at www.crl.edu/ (accessed 28 May 2006). The Center for Research Libraries is a fee-based consortium of universities, colleges, and independent research libraries. The CRL facility, located in Chicago, Illinois, provides its member libraries with free and unlimited use of the collections through interlibrary loan and electronic document-delivery services. The loan service is often valued by members over other borrowing because the loan period is not limited to the usual two weeks. According to the CRL website, unless an item is recalled, it can be borrowed for up to three months and renewed indefinitely. Researchers from member institutions may borrow items that are usually difficult to obtain, such as print newspapers and microfilm sets, enabling them to fully utilize these materials for research and teaching. Nonmember institutions may borrow items through interlibrary loan, but the substantial fee associated with the service must be considered. Interested library users can check with interlibrary-loan or reference staff to see if their institution is a member. They can also consult the CRL website, which maintains a list of current members. The CRL facility emphasizes international materials, especially publications from developing nations, but its extensive offerings of newspapers, large microfilm sets, and special collections are valuable resources for literary scholars. A borrower who needs information related to nineteenth-century newspapers may request the microfilm copy of Daniel J. Kenny’s 1861 American Newspaper Directory and Record of the Press from UMI’s American Culture Series, or ask for microfilm reels of Daily Chattanooga Rebel. He can examine and compare the issues of newspapers such as Daily Argus from Portland, Maine; Daily Bee of Sacramento, California; and Daily Central City Register from Central City, Colorado, without worrying about the limitations of a short loan period. The CRL website offers an online catalog of its holdings that is searchable by keyword, title, author, subject, and various identification numbers (e.g., ISBN and ISSN). Since members can easily obtain research materials for long periods of time, some library consortiums, such as the consortium of University of California libraries, add the holdings of the CRL facility to their catalogs to make their students and faculty more aware
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of the materials available to them. Other academic libraries give the link to the CRL catalog a prominent position alongside their library catalog on their websites.
LOCAL UNION CATALOGS LOUIS Union Catalog, at search.louislibraries.org/ (accessed 28 May 2006). Melvyl, at melvyl.cdlib.org/ (accessed 28 May 2006). PACSCL, at www.pacscl.org/ (accessed 28 May 2006). Summit, at summit.orbiscascade.org/ (accessed 28 May 2006). Tripod, at tripod.brynmawr.edu/ (accessed 28 May 2006). Union catalogs combine the holdings of libraries within a consortium, a region, a country, or multiple countries. Usually created cooperatively, they allow researchers to obtain information on the holdings of these libraries with the search of a single catalog rather than numerous searches on individual catalogs. The level of detail for catalog records varies. Sometimes users can see the individual library holdings and their current circulation status; other union catalogs merely list a library symbol or code indicating ownership. The local consortiums contributing records to the catalog may have reciprocal borrowing agreements that allow each of the member institutions to expand its resources by including the holdings of every library in the consortium. Melvyl, for example, allows students and faculty from any University of California campus to see the collective holdings of the libraries of the ten UC campuses, the California State Library, the California Historical Society, and other state research libraries, plus the Center for Research Libraries. The identification card associated with each of the UC campuses permits borrowing from the other UC libraries, and interlibrary loan services handle loans from the rest of the libraries and the CRL. Similar borrowing agreements have been negotiated for the members of LOUIS, the consortium of Louisiana’s academic libraries. The consortium’s union catalog allows users to search any or all of the libraries’ catalogs at the same time and identify material of interest. Cooperative efforts may extend beyond the state level to regions or focus on the libraries of a particular city. Tripod, for example, describes the combined holdings of the libraries of Bryn Mawr College, Haverford College, and Swarthmore College in Southeastern Pennsylvania. By clicking on a request button in a catalog record, students and faculty from any of the three colleges can ask that items from another Tripod college be delivered in one to two days. Summit, the union catalog of the Orbis Cascade Alliance, brings together the holdings records of a large number of academic libraries in the
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Pacific Northwest, as well as thousands of records from the CRL catalog. In a similar fashion, the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries PACSCL online union catalog contains the records of nine libraries in the city, including such distinguished libraries as the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Those interested should inquire about the reciprocal borrowing agreements and consortiums that may be associated with their institutions.
NATIONAL UNION CATALOGS Library of Congress and the National Union Catalog Subcommittee of the Resources Committee of the Resources and Technical Services Division, American Library Association. The National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints: A Cumulative Author List Representing Library of Congress Printed Cards and Titles Reported by Other American Libraries. 754 vols. London: Mansell, 1968–81. National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC), 1997–, at www.loc.gov/coll/nucmc/ (accessed 28 May 2006). The National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints, the venerable 754-volume union catalog of the United States, contains bibliographic information on the holdings of the Library of Congress and titles reported by over one thousand North American libraries. Generally called the NUC or “Mansell” (after the name of its publisher), the catalog compiles reproductions of catalog cards for books, pamphlets, maps, broadsides, conference proceedings, government documents, microforms, music scores, and other print materials. Audiovisual material is not included in the catalog. The images of the cards are alphabetized by author name or, in the case of anonymous works, by title. Varying editions of the same work are arranged chronologically by publication date, and similar categories of literary works may be grouped together. At the bottom of the main-entry cards are codes for the libraries that reported holdings for the work, with DLC as the code for the Library of Congress, District of Columbia. The most frequently used library symbols are provided in each volume; the full list is given in volumes 200, 560, and 754. The main set of volumes (1–685) covers works published through 1955; the supplemental volumes (686–754) address material that arrived at the Library of Congress through the late 1970s. They also provide corrections and additional library locations for the works given in the main set of volumes. Despite the years of labor that went into the NUC, the source was regarded by many as a bibliographic “dinosaur” as soon as it was completed due to the
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advent of electronic catalogs.4 People tend to assume that everything in the NUC is included in WorldCat, its online replacement (described below), but an exhaustive search may still require an examination of the entries in these print volumes.5 A recent statistical sample of the NUC suggests that 27.8 percent of the material is not represented by records in WorldCat, which indicates that conversion of catalog card records to online records is not yet complete in all U.S. libraries.6 While the average WorldCat searcher will not be concerned with this situation, someone completing a comprehensive study of the works of a nineteenth-century author may want to check both the main and supplemental volumes of the NUC. An additional consideration for literary researchers is the use of the NUC as a supplementary source to verify authorship and edition when descriptions in other reference sources vary. Another national catalog, the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC), is the result of a cooperative cataloging program coordinated by the Library of Congress. The program helps U.S. repositories generate and store catalog records for archival material. Thousands of catalog records have resulted from the program, which began in the 1950s. Records from 1986 to the present are freely available online at the NUCMC website of the Library of Congress, and earlier records can be accessed through ArchivesUSA, an online subscription database, or through use of the twentynine print volumes published from 1959 through 1993. The print indexes for personal names and subjects/corporate names aid in the selection of appropriate volumes. (For information about the use of NUCMC for manuscript research, see chapter 9.)
INTERNATIONAL UNION CATALOGS Copac, at www.copac.ac.uk (accessed 28 May 2006). The European Library, at www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/portal/index.htm (accessed 28 May 2006). WorldCat. Dublin, OH: OCLC FirstSearch. www.oclc.org/firstsearch. WorldCat: University of Washington Libraries. uwashington.worldcat.org/. WorldCat.org. Dublin, OH: OCLC. www.worldcat.org. While it may never become the universal catalog for all of the world’s libraries, WorldCat, a subscription database produced by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), is certainly one of the largest online union catalogs available to researchers. As of May 28, 2006, the catalog contained over sixtyfour million records and listed the reported holdings of thousands of libraries in more than eighty countries and territories, including the major academic
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libraries and research centers in the United States. The OCLC system, originally designed for library operations such as cataloging, acquisitions, and interlibrary loan, has emerged as an important research tool for descriptions and locations of books, audiovisual media, microforms, periodicals, and other material. At this time, most holdings are reported by institutions in the United States due to the intricacies involved in international agreements, along with nonconforming technology and catalog record standards. There are ongoing initiatives to overcome these barriers that may bring major changes in the upcoming years. The transfer of the records from the union catalog of the Research Libraries Group (RLG) to OCLC’s WorldCat brings a wealth of new information to the database. The Research Libraries Group, formerly a separate organization of major university and national libraries, archives, museums, and historical society libraries, became a division of OCLC in 2006. The RLG’s member list contains European libraries such as the Biblioteca Nacional (Spain) and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Germany), although the majority of the contributors to the union catalog are U.S. libraries. A number of the RLG libraries hold special collections material related to key writers of the American realism and naturalism period (e.g., the University of California at Berkeley and the Huntington Library in San Marino, California). Since WorldCat holds information from the catalogs of large research libraries, it is a useful tool for confirming bibliographic information and tracking the publication histories of literary texts. The database may be used to answer obscure questions. What are the physical dimensions of the first edition of Frank Norris’s novel Blix? Who illustrated the 1901 edition of American Indian Stories by Zitkala-Sˇa? What is the alternate title of Ben’s Nugget, Horatio Alger’s 1882 dime novel? Someone searching the WorldCat union catalog for the first time sees an interface that allows basic keyword searches in the fields of keyword, author, title, ISBN, and publication year. Like Google, the system automatically places the Boolean operator and between words when it searches and ignores articles (e.g., “a,” “an,” and “the”), so a search for the call of the wild in the title field is actually read as ti: call and ti: wild. Words in a title query will only be read as a phrase if they are placed within quotation marks, such as “call of the wild.” The keyword search box allows users to look for words or phrases in the combined author, title, notes, and subject indexes. The year index may be searched for either a single year or range of years, but only in combination with at least one other keyword in the other search boxes. WorldCat’s listings are so extensive that a single word or phrase, even limited to the title field, will bring hundreds of hits. A search for “call of the wild” will retrieve many different editions of the work—electronic books, audio record-
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ings, artwork, video adaptations, and adaptations of the text for children. Use of more than one search box may help to create a more specific query. The search results are listed in order of relevance rather than by title or author name. A series of tabs sorts the results into formats: “books,” “sound,” “visual,” “Internet,” “computer,” “archival,” “scores,” and “article.” Results can be further sorted in ascending or descending order by title, author, date, or number of libraries with holdings. They may be e-mailed, printed, or exported in conjunction with EndNote and RefWorks if the user has access to either of these software packages. Users can choose to look at the choices for “Related Subjects” or “Related Authors” by clicking on these buttons. The system provides percentages to give them an idea of how frequently these particular subject headings or authors occur in the search results. While author, title, subject, ISBN, and year are the most popular search categories, literary researchers will frequently need WorldCat’s “Advanced Search” interface because the “Basic Search” interface for keywords does not examine the indexes related to imprint information. Publisher name and location are crucial details for identifying particular editions of literary works. The “Advanced Search” interface provides numerous points of access, including language, and allows searches to be limited to items in the user’s library or a specific member library. The “Expert Search” interface requires the use of command language, but it offers an even longer list of field choices for searchers who need to locate items by uniform titles, call numbers, and Library of Congress subject headings. Examples of command-language searches are given up front so that users can copy the strategies. Each record in WorldCat shows the number of libraries holding the item and links to a list of these libraries. There may be more than one record for the same item if some libraries chose to describe the physical details in different ways or if the item is available in a number of formats. This may be important to note if someone is compiling descriptions of editions or looking for the closest source of a particular work. The best possible copy may be a digitized version on the Web or a microfilm copy if the original cannot be borrowed. A work published in either of these two formats would be given a different descriptive record in the catalog. Consideration should be given to the fact that records in WorldCat are reports of holdings provided at a given time, and items in library collections are frequently lost, stolen, or in circulation to borrowers. Unless someone is using his library’s interlibrary loan service to obtain an item, he should check the holding library’s online catalog for current status. This is especially true for periodical holdings if specific issues are desired. A direct link often connects the WorldCat record to the holding library’s catalog or website. Clicking on the library’s title may connect the user to the item record in the local
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catalog. Even if the item appears to be available, a call or e-mail will verify its status if a visit to the library is planned. Local catalogs are more reliable than union catalogs, but even a local catalog can only report where an item is supposed to be located. In 2003, OCLC collaborated with Yahoo! and Google (described in chapter 1) to offer Open WorldCat, a free co-branded service that allowed anyone to search “the most popular” records in WorldCat and locate an item in the nearest library’s online catalog if that library subscribed to the main WorldCat FirstSearch database. Continuing its efforts to make library resources more accessible to Web users, OCLC released WorldCat.org in beta form in August 2006. WorldCat.org is a freely available service that allows Web users to search the holdings of thousands of libraries. By selecting a specific geographic site, a user can obtain a list of nearby libraries that own an item and connect to the online record in one of the library catalogs. WorldCat.org does not display records from libraries that do not subscribe to the main WorldCat FirstSearch database even though searches examine the full WorldCat collection of records. New features continue to be introduced, such as citation tools and the ability to add a WorldCat plug-in or search box to any website. Figure 3.6 is an example of the catalog information for The Portrait of a Lady, which consists of the title, author, type of book, publisher and location, publication date, ISBN, OCLC identification number, and subject headings. The physical description of the book is not reported. WorldCat.org provides subject headings in its records that may be selected to find similar materials, and the “editions” tab under the descriptive record gives a list of other editions of the novel. By typing the applicable zip code, state, province, or country into the Location search box, someone can identify a copy of the book in one of the nearest OCLC member libraries. If a query for country retrieves too many library holdings, as in the case of The Portrait of a Lady, the system requests a narrower search for state or zip code. As in WorldCat, each library name is an active hypertext link to the item record in its catalog or the library’s webpage. The system responds to zip code searches by informing the user of the number of miles he will have to travel to each of the libraries listed. Like Amazon.com, WorldCat.org offers its users the opportunity to post a personal review of James’s novel. WorldCat Local is a new service that is being piloted by OCLC. WorldCat Local will provide libraries with the ability to search the WorldCat database and obtain results that begin with the items most accessible to the library user, whether they are items in the local library’s collections or in open-access or consortium collections. In the years to come, OCLC plans to add millions of article citations and social networking services to WorldCat Local. Those interested in the service may want to visit the site of the University of Wash-
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Figure 3.6.
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Modified record for The Portrait of a Lady. Source: WorldCat.org.
ington Libraries (http://uwashington.worldcat.org/), the first library system to pilot the service. This particular version of WorldCat Local allows users to search for title, subject, or author on the initial interface. Other options such as keyword, ISBN, ISSN, and OCLC Number are available on the “Advanced” interface along with limits for language, publication date, and format. Despite the fact that it is less useful for library holdings related to American literature, Web users should also be aware of Copac, another important union catalog that is available free of charge. Copac provides access to the combined online catalogs of major university research libraries in the United Kingdom and Ireland, along with the catalogs of the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, and the National Library of Wales/Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru. Among the participating libraries are Cambridge University, the University of Edinburgh, Glasgow University, Leeds University, Oxford University, and Trinity College, Dublin. Copac offers author/title and subject search options along with the opportunity to limit queries by library, publication date, or language. American realism–naturalism researchers may need to consider the holdings of British libraries when they investigate the works of authors, especially expatriate writers like Henry James, whose writings were published on both sides of the Atlantic. Currently, the union catalog contains holdings from many but not all of the national libraries of Europe. There are links to the individual catalogs of the other participating libraries that plan to add their collections to the union catalog in the upcoming years. There are additional links to the individual catalogs of other national libraries. They are participants in the program and plan to add their collections to the union catalog in the upcoming years. The European Library offers digital images of some of the most unique treasures
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held by the national libraries, such as the Gutenberg Bible and the Magna Carta. Among the images that may interest realism–naturalism scholars is the “penny dreadful” collection, the digitized versions of the British equivalent to the American dime novel.
INDIVIDUAL NATIONAL LIBRARY CATALOGS British Library Integrated Catalogue, at catalogue.bl.uk (accessed 28 May 2006). Library of Congress Online Catalog, at catalog.loc.gov (accessed 28 May 2006). Located in Washington, DC, the Library of Congress (LOC) is the closest equivalent to a national library in the United States. Despite the fact that the library is one of the largest in the world, it is not considered a “true” national library because it is not required by law to hold a copy of every item published in the United States. LOC offers material of significant interest to literary scholars. American realism–naturalism researchers in particular value the library’s collections of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century material, as well as its world-renowned collection of Civil War material, the Thomas Biggs Harned Walt Whitman Collection, and the Archive of Folk Culture. Intended as a universal source of information for Congress and the American public, the vast holdings of the Library of Congress were gradually built around Thomas Jefferson’s famous collection, which was acquired after the original library burned during the War of 1812.7 Unfortunately, most of Jefferson’s books were destroyed in a second fire in 1851; it took librarians years to replace them and reconstruct the library’s valuable collections. Despite the damage sustained in 1814 and 1851 plus the financial strains caused by the Civil War, expansion of the collections has continued to the present time.8 The Library of Congress now offers access to more than a hundred million items in a wide variety of formats housed in three buildings: the Thomas Jefferson Building (built in 1886–1897), the John Adams Building (1930–1939), and the James Madison Memorial Building (1965–1980).9 The Library of Congress Online Catalog provides descriptions of most of the items in its vast collections, but there are other separate catalogs that must be considered. The Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) is an online catalog for prints and photographs. The Sound Online Inventory and Catalog (SONIC) describes many of the library’s 78 rpm discs, and nearly all the 45 rpm discs, cassettes, and other sound recordings. A special interface is offered for the online catalog of the National Service
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for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. The Library of Congress retains its card catalog of older items because the records for these items contain outdated subject headings and descriptions that will take years to edit. In addition, the LOC online finding aids at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/faid/ may be needed to identify special collections of interest, as many items are not listed in the online catalog or have only collection-level records. The finding aids allow searching by title, personal name, subject, date span, and repository. Users should consult the “About the Catalog” pages and the pages devoted to “Frequently Asked Questions” before selecting an LOC online catalog. Searching the main online catalog for items cataloged after 1980 is relatively straightforward. “Basic” and “Guided” search interfaces are available. The former is designed for searches by author, title, subject, keyword, and call number; the latter offers options for constructing queries in more obscure fields and using Boolean operators. Among the options for limiters are date ranges, language, material type, library location, and country or state of publication. A help page provides directions on how to use search symbols, such as truncation, wildcard, phrase searching, and nesting. There is a list of index codes that can be used to define terms in command keyword searches. Once a record has been retrieved, it can be displayed in brief, full, or MARC format as well as saved, printed, or e-mailed. Online records for most of the older books and periodicals cataloged between 1898 and 1980 have been loaded into the online catalog, although many of the records contain subject headings that are no longer in use. The records (labeled “from old catalog”) contain only brief descriptions and need to be edited so they comply with current standards. The page of “Frequently Asked Questions” on the library’s website indicates that a researcher doing an exhaustive search of the literature may have to check the library’s main card catalog.10 In an effort to make some of its unique collections accessible to all, the Library of Congress has created the American Memory Collection, an extensive online resource that features many of the library’s rare print and multimedia items in digitized form. The entire American Memory Collection is indexed by subject and keyword. The Nineteenth Century in Print project consists of fifteen hundred digitized books and the runs of twentytwo periodicals published between 1815 and 1900, including extensive runs of Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Living Age, and North American Review. The book collection covers topics such as the Civil War, slavery and abolition, faith and science, and self-improvement. Poetry books make up a portion of the collection, featuring collections by American writers Bret Harte, Richard Hovey, and Ella Wheeler Wilcox. The “Culture and Folklore” section of the collection offers material of value to the
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literary researcher, such as “California as I saw it”: First Person Narratives of California’s Early Years, 1849–1900 and First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860–1920. Comprehensive searches of the Library of Congress collections frequently require consultation with the reference staff and visits to the library, as key materials may not be available to visitors without advance notice or borrowed through interlibrary loan services. Online users can contact a librarian through an e-mail reference service on the library’s website. Congressional representatives are given priority over any other borrowers, so items are not always available for interlibrary loan. Due to this priority, libraries generally request materials from the Library of Congress only if no other library holds them. The British Library is the official depository library for the United Kingdom and Ireland. Located in the St. Pancras neighborhood of London since 1998, the British Library serves British citizens and visiting researchers. Although its collections date back to 1752, the library is a relatively recent national institution compared to other national libraries. The British Library Act that designated the library as a national depository was passed by Parliament in 1972 and took effect on July 1, 1973. Under the Act the following institutions were administratively combined to form the British Library: the library departments of the British Museum (which includes the National Reference Library of Science and Invention), the National Central Library, and the National Lending Library for Science and Technology (the center for interlibrary lending, located at Boston Spa in Yorkshire). In 1974 the British National Bibliography and the Office for Scientific and Technical Information joined the United Kingdom’s new national library. Two additional institutions subsequently became part of the library and increased the breadth of its collections: the India Office Library and Records (1982) and the British Institute of Recorded Sound (1983).11 The British Library Integrated Catalogue combines the records for a number of the library’s specialized catalogs for reference, serials and periodicals, and other collections in one online catalog. The catalog is accessible from the British Library’s website and is easy to search. The “Basic Search” interface allows keyword searching in the fields for author, title, publisher, publication year, ISBN or ISSN, subject heading, and shelfmark (call number). The catalog offers the usual options for advanced searches that utilize multiple search boxes and limiters. American realism–naturalism researchers may want to examine the library’s separate online catalogs for newspapers, manuscripts, photographically illustrated books, and bookbindings as well as Nineteenth Century, ProQuest’s freely available online index to nineteenth-century ma-
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terial found in the immense collections of the British Library. In 1986 the library and the company initiated a thirty-year program to preserve many of these items on Chadwyck-Healy microform. Their images are being reproduced in the microfilm set The Nineteenth Century.
CONCLUSION As this chapter has shown, library catalogs are no longer isolated directories; rather, through the reach of online union catalogs, they have become the network that consolidates the world’s library collections. The success of interlibrary efforts from the local to the international level expands both the possibilities and expectations for literary research. Researchers with access to a major academic library would be hard-pressed to argue that they cannot locate a primary work or piece of scholarship related to their field of inquiry. The challenge is to keep track of developments in catalog integration and be familiar enough with catalog functionality to be able to negotiate new interface trends. It is no longer enough to be familiar with one’s local library catalog. Instead, it is necessary to become comfortable with a range of catalog types as research leads students and scholars to the larger universe of information.
NOTES 1. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “Catalogue.” 2. The ALA Glossary of Library and Information Science, s.v. “Series.” 3. Brian Surratt, “Federated Search Engines, 2001–2003,” Association for Library Collections and Technical Services, www.ala.org/ala/alctscontent/alctspubsbucket/ webpublications/cataloging/researchtopics/federated.htm (accessed 29 May 2006). 4. Danelle Hall, “Mansell Revisited,” American Libraries 35, no. 4 (April 2004), 80. 5. Thomas Mann, The Oxford Guide to Library Research, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 177. 6. Jeffrey Beall and Karen Kafadar, “The Proportion of NUC Pre-56 Titles Represented in OCLC WorldCat,” College & Research Libraries 66, no. 5 (Sept. 2005), 434. PDF Online as E-LIS reprint, at http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00010023/ (accessed 14 April 2008). 7. Library of Congress, “About the Library: History,” www.loc.gov/about/history/ (accessed 29 May 2006). 8. Jack Y. Cole, “Jefferson’s Legacy: A Brief History of the Library of Congress,” www.loc.gov/loc/legacy/loc.html (accessed 29 May 2006).
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9. Library of Congress, “On These Walls: Inscriptions and Quotations in the Buildings of the Library of Congress, Introduction,” www.loc.gov/loc/walls/intro.html (accessed 29 April 2008). 10. Library of Congress, “The Library of Congress Online Catalog Help Pages: Frequently Asked Questions,” catalog.loc.gov/help/faq.htm (accessed 1 June 2006). 11. The British Library, “About Us: History of the British Library,” www.bl.uk/ about/history.html (accessed 29 May 2006).
Chapter Four
Bibliographies, Indexes, and Annual Reviews
The word bibliography is derived from the Greek biblion (book) and gráphein (to write).1 Defined variously as the history of books or works related to the history of book publishing, the word is also used for the descriptive lists of books and other writings that help researchers to identify, verify, locate, and select appropriate resources.2 Bibliographies generally have a focus. The focus can be as narrow as the works of an individual author or as broad as the publications of a country or century. Some lists of publications are annotated with summaries of the physical appearance and intellectual content of the works examined. Indexes, another type of bibliographic list, are designed to identify the location of the topics, titles, and names mentioned within a publication or group of publications. They can be combined with bibliographical descriptions and, sometimes, the digital images of publications to create special finding guides to the literature of an academic field.3 Annual reviews are bibliographies that overview the scholarship or creative works of a particular year. All three types of bibliographic lists may be current or retrospective, comprehensive or selective. Like library catalogs, they facilitate research by promoting awareness of the works they describe. They bring together and record the existence of related materials that may be scattered in collections all over the globe, often supplying information about their locations. This chapter will explore the various types of bibliographies, indexes, and annual reviews of interest to literary researchers and, in particular, students and scholars of the American realism and naturalism literary period. The most basic type of bibliography is found at the end of a book or journal article. The list cites the works consulted or sources that offer further reading on the subject. Biographies about authors frequently contain bibliographies in the front matter or end matter of the book, and reference guides to the literature suggest sources of information at the end of each article or chapter. 77
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Often finding the first article or book on a subject allows someone to discover additional publications. These publications, in turn, lead to more sources until comprehensive coverage is acquired. Library catalog users searching for books with bibliographies can try a command-language query for the phrase bibliographical references or the word bibliography in combination with topic keywords. For example, the query wno=bibliography and wsu=wharton may retrieve catalog records related to Edith Wharton that mention a bibliography in the notes field (if wno specifies the notes field and wsu the subject field in a MARC record). Separately published bibliographies are categorized by their content and purpose. Primary bibliographies are lists of works that are unrelated in subject matter, but are related by date or place of publication, such as the national bibliographies described in chapter 2 and the trade bibliographies of items in print or for sale covered in chapter 6.4 Secondary bibliographies and indexes, the main focus of this chapter, compile the writings by and about authors and/or works on a specific subject or genre. The content of both types of bibliographies can be primary, secondary, or tertiary material. Primary material includes the creative works of authors, such as novels, poems, letters, diaries, and manuscripts. Secondary material encompasses works about authors and their creative output, such as biographies, scholarly monographs, journal articles, bibliographies, and book reviews. Bibliographies of bibliographies— essentially, lists of lists—enumerate secondary sources that identify primary works and other secondary material. They are sometimes referred to as tertiary sources of information.
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE TIME PERIOD: Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue (NSTC). Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England: Avero, 1984–95. Series I, Phase I, 1801–15. 6 vols. Series II, Phase I, 1816–70. 56 vols. Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue (NSTC). Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England: Avero, 1996–2002. Series I, II, and III on 2 CD-ROMs. Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue (NSTC). Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 2004–. Series I through IV online at nstc.chadwyck.com. Linked to C19: The Nineteenth Century Index. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 2005–. c19index .chadwyck.com. The Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue (NSTC) is a key primary bibliography for nineteenth-century research. The NSTC compiles the records for
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British books printed from the beginning of the century (1801) to the end of World War I (1919). The records are divided into four series: Series I for 1801–1815, Series II for 1816–1870, Series III for 1871–1919, and Series IV for additional records from 1801 to 1919. The NSTC is of interest to American realism and naturalism researchers because the project, which was established in 1983, defines not only British books as being “all books published in Britain” but also “its colonies, and the United States of America; all books in English wherever published; and all translations from English.”5 Years of compilation and indexing have resulted in the indexed collection of more than 1.2 million bibliographic records drawn from the catalogs of eight major research libraries: the Bodleian Library (Oxford), Cambridge University Library, Trinity College (Dublin), Newcastle-upon-Tyne University Library, the National Library of Scotland (Edinburgh), and the British Library (London) in the United Kingdom along with the Library of Congress (Washington, DC) and Harvard University Library (Cambridge, Massachusetts) in the United States. (The two U.S. libraries contributed records to Series II and Series III, but not Series I. As of June 2006, only the British Library has supplied records for Series IV.) Some of the library catalogs are only available as in-house tools, so NSTC helps to increase awareness of the nineteenthcentury collections of these libraries. The Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue has been published in a variety of formats. Initially, the records were published in print format by Avero Publications and distributed by Chadwyck-Healey. Avero published six volumes for Series I, Phase I, 1801–1815 and fifty-six for Series II, Phase I, 1816–1870. Series III was published only as a CD-ROM product. A series of discs were mailed to libraries as new titles were brought to the NSTC until (in 2002) the final two CD-ROMs covered the items in all three series. In January 2003 ABC-CLIO, the distributor of the CD-ROM product, acquired the NSTC records and converted the data to an online database.6 ProQuest acquired the NSTC database from ABC-CLIO in 2004.7 The launch of Series IV in 2006 brought twenty-five thousand British Library records for works from the period 1801–1919 to the database. The works were added to the library’s holdings after 1976 when the last supplement to the print General Catalogue of Printed Books was issued. ProQuest plans to obtain additional records from other research collections in the future. The NSTC is currently offered separately and in conjunction with ProQuest’s C19: The Nineteenth Century Index, a bibliographic “spine” that links the offerings of a number of databases related to the nineteenth century for cross-searching: the NSTC and The Nineteenth Century for books; The Wellesley Index, American Periodicals Series (APS) Online, British Periodicals, and Periodicals Index Online/Periodicals
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Archive Online for periodicals; the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers for official publications; and the Palmer’s Index to “The Times” for newspapers. Many libraries hold the CD-ROM version of the NSTC. Designed to operate with Microsoft Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 with BookMarc software for searching and printing, the first disc contains the records for Series I and Series II; the second holds Series III. As Series IV records were added after the product was discontinued, these records are not available on the CD-ROMs. The first disc allows searching by author, title, publication date and place, epithet (e.g., Captain, Lord, or Doctor), classification number, NSTC reference number, keyword, and subject heading. The second disc (Series III) offers the additional search choices of language, country of publication, author life span, series title, and location (name of library). A keyword search for Series III records looks for words in the language index as well as the author, title, publication, location, epithet, and subject indexes. Although the majority of the items in the NSTC were published in the English language, there are items in other languages from colonies in the British Empire. The ability to search by language may be a consideration for those who are looking for translations of American works of literature or obscure works published in Native American languages. The online version of the NSTC allows simultaneous searches of records from all four series. Since the database is a Web-based product, records can be e-mailed as well as printed and downloaded. Users have the same search options that are offered in the Series III CD-ROM product. They cannot, however, retrieve records from Series I and Series II when they search by language, author life span, series, country of publication, and location (name of library) because the fields were not included in the records. Publisher and printer information also varies from series to series. Series I and Series II records contain only the place of publication and date, while Series III and Series IV records give the name of the printer and/or publisher and date. The variation is due to the lack of printer–publisher information in library catalog records for works from the earlier time periods. The decision was made by project editors to provide no details rather than inconsistent coverage.8 Following the practice of other short-title catalogs, NSTC records give shortened versions of overly long titles, with ellipses to indicate missing portions of titles. The records provide the names and/or epithets of the authors in addition to the names of editors and translators, the number of volumes, format, and size of the items. NSTC users need to remember that the item descriptions are derived from library catalog records rather than from the examination of the publications themselves. They may contain errors depending on the reliability of the methods employed to compare the library records
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with the actual items. Another consideration is the generality of the subject headings due to the difficulties encountered by the project in consolidating the wide variety of cataloging styles and descriptions encountered, especially in the records for the earliest works. The inclusion of Dewey Decimal numbers improves subject access, but only if users are familiar with these numbers. NSTC reference numbers allow users to pinpoint specific items if they know the number assigned to the record. NSTC reference numbers from Series I and Series II contain both letters and numbers. The initial “2” in 2R3940 indicates Series II, and the letter “R” represents the first letter of the author’s name. Series III and Series IV reference numbers contain only numbers. Cross-references in the records refer people from one NSTC record to another. Library locations are identified in the records, although the complete list is given only in the main entries. Symbols are utilized in the print version of the NSTC, such as “H” for Harvard University Library and “E” for the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. While the symbols have been replaced with the names of the libraries in the electronic products, some of the notes in the records still mention them.9 Someone who is having trouble remembering that the symbols refer to the first letter of a city can consult the introduction provided in the front matter of the print volumes. The introduction also gives information on the specific library catalogs used to complete the project (e.g., the pre-1920 slip catalog of the Bodleian Library and the pamphlet catalog of the Cambridge University Library) as well as some of the methods chosen to ensure accuracy. The details may help researchers to judge the potential reliability of a record. Chapter 6 will discuss other primary bibliographies for publishing history studies in more detail, such as The American Catalogue of Books, Bibliotheca Americana, American Catalogue, The American Book Publishing Record, and The United States Catalog: Books in Print.
STANDARD BIBLIOGRAPHIES OF PRIMARY WORKS Blanck, Jacob, comp. Bibliography of American Literature. Completed by Michael Winship and Virginia L. Smyers. 9 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955–91. Bruccoli, Matthew J., series ed. First Printings of American Authors: Contributions toward Descriptive Checklists. 5 vols. 1st ed. Vol. 5, with cum. index, ed. by Philip B. Eppard. Detroit: Gale, 1977–79. Literary Writings in America: A Bibliography. 8 vols. Millwood, NY: KTO Press, 1977.
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Smith, Geoffrey D. American Fiction, 1901–1925: A Bibliography. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Winship, Michael, comp. Bibliography of American Literature: A Selective Index. With Philip B. Eppard and Rachel J. Howarth. Golden, CO: North American Press, 1995. Winship, Michael, comp. Epitome of Bibliography of American Literature. With Philip B. Eppard and Rachel J. Howarth. Golden, CO: North American Press, 1995. Wright, Lyle H. American Fiction, 1851–1875: A Contribution toward a Bibliography. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1957; rev. 1965. Wright, Lyle H. American Fiction, 1876–1900: A Contribution toward a Bibliography. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1966. Period researchers are fortunate in having a number of descriptive bibliographies about American literature, most notably the authoritative Bibliography of American Literature (BAL), compiled by Jacob Blanck (b.1906–d.1974), a respected bibliographer and author of studies on old books. Blanck died in 1974 after completing six volumes of the BAL and compiling the data for nine. Librarian and bibliographer Virginia L. Smyers and Michael Winship, professor, University of Texas, Austin, completed and edited volume 7; Winship finished the work on the last two volumes in 1991. The Bibliography of American Literature is valued for its accurate and detailed physical descriptions of nearly forty thousand works of literature written by 281 popular authors from the American Revolution until 1930. The list for each author is divided into three sections: “Principal Works,” containing the first and revised editions of texts of which the author was the main contributor; “Reprints”; and “References,” a selective list of reference material about the author. Among the types of principal works listed are books, pamphlets, broadsides, and sheet music. Since Blanck’s focus was on belle-lettres, he rarely describes scientific and historical works, juvenile literature, sermons, and textbooks; he also excludes material published in magazines. A title-page transcription is provided for each primary work in the bibliography as well as details about pagination, collation, binding (including cloth grain), and publication history. The descriptions help scholars, booksellers, and collectors to distinguish between the various editions; symbols for locations of some of the editions are given so that they can find and examine them. First editions of major works appear in all capital letters; revised editions, reprints, and texts in which the author is not the main contributor are typed in lowercase. Entries and their arrangements can be complex, and researchers should consult the preface of the first volume of the set or the help pages of the online database to fully understand how to utilize this resource.
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The preface provides lists of bibliographic sources commonly referred to by the editors in the entries along with location symbols, periodicals consulted, pictures of binding cloth grains and their symbols, and pseudonyms of authors. Figure 4.1 is a modified record in BAL for Old Creole Days by George Washington Cable (1879). Michael Winship, with the collaborative assistance of Philip B. Eppard and Rachel J. Howarth, published the Epitome of Bibliography of American Literature and the Bibliography of American Literature: A Selective Index in 1995. The Epitome is essentially an abridged version of BAL that contains shortened entries of only the separately published literary texts of the authors covered by Blanck. Ephemeral, nonliterary, and privately printed items are not mentioned. The number that begins each entry in the Epitome corresponds to a numbered entry in BAL; the number is accompanied by an asterisk if BAL offers substantially more information about the
Figure 4.1. Modified record for Old Creole Days by George W. Cable. Source: Bibliography of American Literature, p. 1.
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title. The Selective Index contains title, publisher, and date indexes for BAL. The title index is divided into two alphabetical sequences: one for primary work titles and one for series titles. The publisher index has three divisions: United States, foreign, and all publishers from A to Z. Corrections and additions to BAL are published by the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America and Studies in Bibliography from the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia. For more information on BAL and its use in publishing history research, see chapter 6. First Printings of American Authors (FPAA), edited by Matthew Bruccoli and compiled by numerous scholars, librarians, and book collectors, describes the first printings of the works of American authors. Bruccoli defines a first printing as the first press run of a first edition and identifies the particular attributes of texts that qualify them as first printings, such as markings on the title page or appearance of the book cover. If a title was also printed in England, this is noted; later editions of texts are only mentioned if they include new primary material. All entries in FPAA contain publication information and brief descriptions of textual idiosyncrasies; some entries present illustrations of the title page, cover, and/or dust jacket. The checklists of certain authors in the book have been designated as featured lists and include the full publication details of British as well as American first printings. Authors whose works are given this extra coverage are distinguished by an asterisk next to their name in the table of contents. The introduction in the first volume explains that the compilers have made attempts to select authors for whom bibliographies are not available, although they caution that their checklists are not intended to serve as comprehensive bibliographies of the authors’ complete works. Following each checklist is a brief list of references (mostly bibliographies) intended to point a reader to additional sources on each author’s writings. One reviewer found a number of omissions in the descriptions, so users may want to consider comparing the entries in BAL and First Printings of American Authors if their author is covered in both sources.10 For further suggestions on the use of First Printings of American Authors in publishing history research, see chapter 6. Literary Writings in America: A Bibliography was produced by one of the many Works Progress Administration groups during the New Deal era of Franklin Roosevelt. The group attempted to compile a comprehensive list of creative works published by Americans between 1850 and 1940 along with the critical reviews they received. Fifty workers were trained at the University of Pennsylvania to record the author names and dates, titles, and review citations for thousands of literary works on 3x5 cards. The workers looked through periodicals, volumes of literary history, and bibliographies for five years (1938–1942) in order to identify works of literature, biographies, bibli-
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ographies, and critical studies. The resulting card file was housed in a catalog at the university until photo-offsetting produced the eight-volume print bibliography in 1977.11 Entries in the volumes are organized first by author, then type of work (e.g., separately published or published in a periodical), and then alphabetically by title. Reviews are listed twice, under the name of both the creator of the work being discussed and the reviewer. Each work in a volume of collected works (e.g., short stories or poetry) is assigned a separate entry. Many entries indicate genre. While Literary Writings in America is not completely comprehensive, and its citations contain numerous errors, the bibliography is unique because of the unusually large amount of citations that were gathered by fifty people in five years. The long list of periodicals consulted is given at the front of the first volume of the set. Someone studying a lesser-known nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century writer who is not the subject of detailed bibliographies may appreciate this additional checklist of American writings and source of critical reviews. The three-volume set American Fiction by Lyle H. Wright is considered the most comprehensive bibliography of American adult prose fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wright, a librarian at the Huntington Library (San Marino, California), examined the fiction collections of eighteen libraries and compiled citations for thousands of titles published between 1774 and 1900. Volume 1 of the set covers the years 1774–1850; volume 2, 1851–1875; and volume 3, 1876–1900. In his preface, Wright states that his examination of fictional works encompasses “novels, novelettes, romances, short stories, tall tales, tract-like tales, allegories, and fictitious biographies and travels, in prose.”12 While he does not give detailed descriptions of the physical appearance and content of the fictional titles, he does provide helpful notes, such as one-sentence descriptions of topics, alternative titles, and symbols indicating location. Entries in the bibliography are listed under author’s name when that is known; otherwise, they are entered under the title. There are cross-references from pseudonyms to the real names of authors; a title index is provided in each volume. Scholars of the American realism and naturalism period will be most interested in the second and third of Lyle Wright’s volumes, which list works by major writers such as Bret Harte, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edward Eggleston, Edward Everett Hale, Mark Twain, and Louisa May Alcott as well as minor writers of the period. Due to his efforts, these nineteenth-century titles have been located, microfilmed and/or digitized for preservation, and made available to students and scholars all over the world. The microform products have a number of titles because several companies published them, and there are different titles for the various time segments covered in the series.
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(See chapter 8 for details.) Currently, Wright American Fiction, 1851–1875, a website hosted by Indiana University, features images of 2,887 volumes— 1,763 unedited, 1,124 fully edited and encoded—by 1,456 authors (see chapter 10). The Literature Online (LION) database contains Early American Fiction 1789–1875, a set of facsimile page images and searchable full-text works based on Wright’s bibliography. The collection was made possible through collaboration between ProQuest and the University of Virginia Library (Charlottesville). The library was the recipient of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to digitize and publish its unique collections of early American fiction. Geoffrey D. Smith’s American Fiction, 1901–1925: A Bibliography continues the work of Lyle Wright with similar criteria, organization, and descriptions. The volume of over thirteen thousand bibliographic entries covers the first printings of original fiction for adults by American authors published in the United States from 1901 through 1925. The entries are arranged alphabetically by author name (or title if by an anonymous author) and assigned a citation number with the first letter of the main entry and a number indicating progressive alphabetical order (e.g., A-5 for A Frigate’s Namesake by Alice Balch Abbot comes before A-6 for The Little Gentleman Across the Road by Prentice Abbot and A-7 for A Charming Story by Austin Abbott). Entries consist of the citation, imprint, pagination, special notes, cover title (if different), table of contents (if the entry is for a short-story collection by a single author or an anthology), Library of Congress copyright date, citation for the Publishers Weekly announcement, information from the British Integrated Library Catalogue on the British edition, and references to mentions in standard bibliographies. OCLC location codes for libraries are given if items were obtained from libraries other than the Ohio State University Libraries where Dr. Smith is head of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Department. Smith’s bibliography begins with the later works of nineteenth-century writers (e.g., William D. Howells, Henry James, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Edith Wharton, W.E.B. Du Bois, Owen Wister, and Charles W. Chesnutt). The volume includes title, illustrator, publisher, and pseudonym indexes.
AUTHOR BIBLIOGRAPHIES Bickley, R. Bruce, Jr., and Hugh T. Keenan. Joel Chandler Harris: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1977–1996: With Supplement, 1892–1976. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. Bradbury, Nicola. An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Henry James. Brighton, Sussex, England: Harvester, 1987.
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Budd, John. Henry James: A Bibliography of Criticism, 1975–1981. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983. Edel, Leon, and Dan H. Laurence. A Bibliography of Henry James. 3rd ed. Rev. with the assistance of James Rambeau. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Funston, Judith E. Henry James, 1975–1987: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. Green, Suzanne Disheroon, and David J. Caudle. Kate Chopin: An Annotated Bibliography of Critical Works. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Joshi, S. T., and David E. Schultz. Ambrose Bierce: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary Sources. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. McColgan, Kristin Pruitt. Henry James, 1917–1959: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. Phillips, Le Roy. A Bibliography of the Writings of Henry James. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1906. Ricks, Beatrice, comp. Henry James: A Bibliography of Secondary Works. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1975. Scharnhorst, Gary, and Jack Bales. Horatio Alger, Jr.: An Annotated Bibliography of Comment and Criticism. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1981. Scura, Dorothy McInnis. Henry James, 1960–1974: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. Stallman, R. W. Stephen Crane: A Critical Bibliography. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1972. Taylor, Linda J. Henry James, 1866–1916: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Author bibliographies can be simple checklists of their most well-known writings or comprehensive lists that attempt to describe everything by and about the author from the unpublished writings, biographies, and critical interpretations to reviews and archival collections of papers. Some of the bibliographies offer detailed descriptions of both primary and secondary works, enabling scholars to identify standard editions and become acquainted with past scholarship on the texts and their authors. Researchers should find that most, if not all, canonical writers are the subject of separately published bibliographies. Searching the subject index of a library catalog for a writer’s name followed by bibliography (e.g., James, Henry, 1843–1916—Bibliography) locates author-specific bibliographies in a library’s collection. James K. Bracken’s Reference Works in British and American Literature (see chapter 2) and volumes 1 and 2 of the Facts On File Bibliography of American Fiction (below) describe bibliographies and indexes related to specific authors. Library users can also browse their library’s shelves for appropriate titles. This
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can be a more difficult process since separate, book-length bibliographies are not always cataloged with the rest of the works on a particular author. Bibliographies are generally found in the Z1201–Z8999 section of libraries using Library of Congress call numbers and in the 011–016 section of those using the Dewey Decimal Classification system. Researchers should consider locating all available bibliographies, both older and more current, in order to obtain a full chronology of the scholarship. Authors are not infallible, and there may be omissions and errors despite their attempts to achieve total comprehensiveness and accuracy. Comparisons between the various kinds of bibliographies help to pinpoint errors and identify additional works discovered or published over the years, such as anonymous and pseudonymous writings not previously covered in other bibliographies. Currency is difficult to achieve since most print bibliographies are already missing the most recent scholarship by the time they are published. Online sources are easier to update than print sources and more likely to describe current material. The bibliographies available on Henry James are a good example of the range of print sources available on canonical authors. As James was a prolific writer who published in Boston, New York, and London and was the subject of a considerable body of scholarship, there have been numerous bibliographies to record his work. A Bibliography of Henry James (1982) by Leon Edel and Dan H. Laurence describes the various editions of the author’s works: original works, contributions to books and periodicals, published letters, translations, and miscellaneous writings, including English-language foreign editions, braille, and talking-book editions, Times Book Club and colonial issues, and manuscripts. Entries contain the text of cover pages, meticulously detailed physical descriptions, the total number of copies published, and, sometimes, the events surrounding the edition’s publication. Edel and Laurence’s volume builds on the work of Le Roy Phillips, the compiler of A Bibliography of the Writings of Henry James (1906). Phillips attempted to record James’s writings during his lifetime, completing his original bibliography in 1906 and publishing an augmented edition in 1930. Other bibliographies focus on James scholarship produced through the years. Beatrice Ricks was the first to publish a secondary bibliography: Henry James: A Bibliography of Secondary Works (1975). Ricks categorizes the various types of scholarship and provides separate chapters for biographical studies of James; scholarship on his novels, stories, and plays; scholarship on his letters; and general criticism. Annotations are limited to one sentence. In contrast, An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Henry James (1987) by Nicola Bradbury offers more fully annotated entries in chronological order to outline the developments in studies on James. The four volumes
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in the G. K. Hall Reference Guide to Literature series, published between 1979 and 1991, employ a similar chronological approach. Each succeeding volume on James scholarship covers another set of years: Henry James, 1866–1916 (Linda Taylor), Henry James, 1917–1959 (Kristin Pruitt McColgan), Henry James, 1960–1974 (Dorothy McInnis Scura), and Henry James, 1975–1987 (Judith E. Funston). Judith Funston’s bibliography adds to the work of John Budd, who covered the scholarship published between the years 1975 and 1981 in Henry James: A Bibliography of Criticism, 1975–1981 (1983), which uses a categorical rather than a chronological approach. All volumes in the G. K. Hall Reference Guide to Literature series provide annotated entries for James’s reviews and scholarship for their designated time span, with the first volume covering commentary published during his lifetime. Like the volumes for Henry James, each bibliography for an author of the American realism and naturalism literary period has its own idiosyncrasies and unique methods of collation. R. W. Stallman’s Stephen Crane: A Critical Bibliography (1972) lists the writer’s works by individual title rather than by published text. Each of Crane’s short stories and articles has a separate entry, which is followed by a listing of the periodical issues and collected works in which it appeared. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz approach their task differently in Ambrose Bierce: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary Sources (1999). They list Bierce’s publications and include a table of contents for each entry. An index is provided so that individual poems, articles, and short stories can be located. Horatio Alger, Jr.: An Annotated Bibliography of Comment and Criticism (1981) by Gary Scharnhorst and Jack Bales features a bibliography of the dime novelist’s manuscripts and letters in the form of an essay detailing the circumstances surrounding their writing. Some author bibliographies of criticism, such as Kate Chopin: An Annotated Bibliography of Critical Works (1999) by Suzanne Disheroon Green and David J. Caudle, along with Joel Chandler Harris: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1977–1996 (1997) by R. Bruce Bickley Jr. and Hugh T. Keenan, contain listings enhanced by short abstracts of each article. In these cases, the authors play a value-added role, offering their own expertise on each article to help the reader select the most useful material. The many volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography series published by Thomson Gale contain author bibliographies. Both Gale’s Dictionary of Literary Biography and Literature Resource Center databases provide online indexing plus the full text of the bibliographies in the DLB print volumes. Users can type an author’s name into the author search box, select the appropriate name/date range from the list of results, and choose “Bibliographies” from the categories at the top of the page. (For information on the DLB
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series and specific volumes of interest to American realism–naturalism researchers, see chapter 2.)
GENRE BIBLIOGRAPHIES Afro-American Poetry and Drama 1760–1975: A Guide to Information Sources. Detroit: Gale Research, 1979. Available as the Database of African-American Poetry 1760–1900 on CD-ROM, and African American Poetry in Literature Online, lion.chadwyck.com. Bragin, Charles. Bibliography of Dime Novels, 1860–1928. Brooklyn, NY: Bragin, 1938. Later published as Bibliography of Dime Novels, 1860–1964 in 1964. Clements, William M., and Frances M. Malpezzi, comps. Native American Folklore, 1879–1979: An Annotated Bibliography. Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1984. Hatch, James V., and Omanii Abdullah, eds. and comps. Black Playwrights, 1823–1977: An Annotated Bibliography of Plays. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1977. Hixon, Don L., and Don A. Hennessee. Nineteenth-Century American Drama: A Finding Guide. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1977. Jason, Philip K. Nineteenth-Century American Poetry: An Annotated Bibliography. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 1989. Ljungquist, Kent P., ed. Facts On File Bibliography of American Fiction through 1865. With the assistance of Judith S. Baughman. Vol. 1 of Facts On File Bibliography of American Fiction. New York: Facts On File, 1994. Matthews, Geraldine O. Black American Writers, 1773–1949: A Bibliography and Union List. Compiled by Geraldine O. Matthews and the AfricanAmerican Materials Project Staff. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1975. Nagel, James, and Gwen L. Nagel, eds. Bibliography of American Fiction 1866–1918. Vol. 2 of Facts On File Bibliography of American Fiction. New York: Facts On File, 1993. Parsons, Henry S., Copyright Office, Library of Congress. Dramatic Compositions Copyrighted in the United States, 1870–1916. 2 vols. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918. Roden, Robert F. Later American Plays, 1831–1900: Being a Compilation of the Titles of Plays by American Authors Published and Performed in America since 1831. New York: Dunlap Society, 1900. Yellin, Jean Fagan, and Cynthia D. Bond, comps. The Pen Is Ours: A Listing of Writings by and about African-American Women before 1910 with Secondary Bibliography to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
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A wide range of genre bibliographies are available, and many relate to the literature of the period. While most of the bibliographies focus on volumes of fiction, poetry, and drama, they also describe specialized works, such as diaries, dime novels, folk tales, and letters. Genre bibliographies sometimes can be more difficult to identify than author bibliographies because there are a variety of descriptive terms used in the Library of Congress subject headings. For example, the volume Black Playwrights, 1823–1977 may be listed under the heading “Drama—Black authors—Bibliography” and/or “American drama—African American authors—Bibliography,” while the bibliography on a related subject, The Pen Is Ours: A Listing of Writings by and about African-American Women Before 1910, may be classified differently under “American literature—African American authors—History and criticism— Bibliography” plus subject headings related to women authors. Researchers interested in all available bibliographies related to African American writers of the period may have to consult bibliographies of bibliographies and subject guides to the literature as well as utilize the subject headings assigned to the bibliographies they have already identified to expand their findings in their local library catalog and WorldCat. A useful source for lists of American fiction works is the four-volume Facts On File Bibliography of American Fiction. The set features author bibliographies of both major and minor American writers. Each entry consists of an introductory biographical paragraph and lists of bibliographies and catalogs (when available), primary works, and secondary works. Primary works include American first editions of books, book-length collections of letters and other personal writings, standard editions and collections of the writer’s works, manuscript and archive collections, and other writings that the author considered significant. The bibliographies of secondary works consist of concordances, biographies, interviews, critical articles, books, book-length essays, and collections of essays. Bibliography of American Fiction is particularly helpful when someone is looking for resources about authors that do not have separately published bibliographies. The first volume of the set, Bibliography of American Fiction through 1865 (1994), edited by Kent P. Ljungquist, is of equal value to the realism– naturalism researcher as the second volume, Bibliography of American Fiction 1866–1918 (1993), edited by James and Gwen L. Nagel, because the authors listed in the volumes are categorized by the publication date of their first work. Each volume begins with “A Vade Mecum for Students of American Literature,” a list of one hundred works and ten periodicals deemed essential to the study of American literature. The lists include histories, biography series, indexes, bibliographies, and directories. Also provided in each volume is a general bibliography with broader coverage that lists general
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histories, bibliographies, and works specific to genres, regions of the United States, and the literary period covered by the volume. (For information regarding the use of these volumes in publishing history studies, see chapter 6.) Nineteenth-Century American Drama: A Finding Guide (1977) was published as a guide to “American Plays, 1831–1900,” the portion of Readex Corporation’s microprint collection English and American Drama of the Nineteenth Century, now a microfiche collection. In designing the guide, authors Don L. Hixon and Don A. Hennessee decided to offer more than a simple checklist of plays by title. The bibliography allows its readers to locate titles of works in the collection of approximately 4,500 plays by author name, title, subject, and series title. Many of the entries contain valuable notes regarding alternate titles or other relationships between titles. Hixon and Hennessee attempt to correct errors identified in the filmed collection and supply cross-references from pseudonyms to author names. They note that some of the plays in the microform set are actually foreign works translated or adapted for the American stage. The main portion of the volume is composed of a combined author and title list. The first appendix provides the series list, and the second arranges the plays into categories for ethnic and racial groups (e.g., Germans in cast) to help scholars find examples of plays exhibiting nineteenth-century prejudices. The third appendix classifies plays through subject or form (e.g., United States—History—Civil War). Hixon and Hennessee’s bibliography was chosen as one of the sources for Literature Online’s American Drama 1714–1915 collection. One of the key bibliographies used to create the microform set English and American Drama of the Nineteenth Century is Robert F. Roden’s Later American Plays, 1831–1900: Being a Compilation of the Titles of Plays by American Authors Published and Performed in America since 1831. Reprinted in the 1960s, the bibliography was originally published in 1900 and intended as a complementary volume to Early American Plays, 1714–1830, a checklist compiled by Oscar Wegelin. Later American Plays lists titles of dramatic works written by American authors and performed in the United States between 1831 and 1900. Entries are organized by author and then by date of publication. Roden states in his prefatory remarks that his checklist is intended as a selective list of important examples of period drama rather than a comprehensive inventory of dramatic works. For broader coverage of dramatic works of the period, including unpublished plays, students and scholars may want to locate a copy of Dramatic Compositions Copyrighted in the United States, 1870–1916 (1918). The two-volume set, produced by the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress under the supervision of Henry S. Parsons, was published by the U.S. Government Printing Office in 1918. Dramatic Compositions lists the large num-
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ber of dramatic works registered with the Library of Congress between July 21, 1870 and December 31, 1916. Basic entries are organized by title of work and state the author and his or her city of origin, date of deposit of title and registration, date of publication (when applicable), date of deposit of a copy, and a designated entry number. Slight variations in the entry format are explained in the preface of the first volume, and alternate and translated titles are cross-referenced. A name index that refers to entry numbers rather than page numbers composes much of the second volume. Readers should note that close to one third of the more than sixty thousand works registered were never actually in the possession of the Library of Congress since only the submission of a title page was required for registration; in fact, many of the plays were never published. Copyright registration numbers can be used to locate unpublished play scripts in Copyright Deposits, 1901–1944: Class D Dramas (1975–1981), a microfilm owned by the Library of Congress. The bibliography Afro-American Poetry and Drama 1760–1975 (1979) by William French and others is the source for the more than 2,500 full-text poems contained in the CD-ROM Database of African-American Poetry 1760–1900 and online database African American Poetry in ProQuest’s Literature Online (LION). The print version is volume 17 of the Gale series American Literature, English Literature, and World Literatures in English and provides coverage for poetry and drama written by African American poets. The citations for poetry and drama are listed separately and were compiled by different editors, although they are indexed collectively by subject, title, and author. Each bibliography has two parts. The first covers general sources such as anthologies, bibliographies, and other reference sources. The second part lists author-specific primary and secondary texts. These are divided first by time period, making it convenient for realism–naturalism researchers to locate the pre-1900 and 1901–1950 sections. The entries are then listed alphabetically by poet or playwright with selective biographical and critical resources following first editions of the authors’ works. James Harner (Literary Research Guide, 2002) identifies the poetry section of Afro-American Poetry and Drama 1760–1975 as the most complete listing of individually published poetry collections by African Americans.13 Transcribed oral literature, such as folk songs and spirituals, are covered in the bibliography. Occasional entries contain content notes and other brief annotations. The drama section, edited by Genevieve E. Fabre, is more heavily annotated; many of the entries offer short synopses of the plays. Only playwrights with published works have been selected for inclusion, but unpublished plays are listed after published ones when known. A similar but more comprehensive source than Fabre’s compilation is James V. Hatch and Omanii Abdullah’s Black Playwrights, 1823–1977: An
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Annotated Bibliography of Plays (1977). Because pre-1914 African American playwrights are few, both bibliographies are largely devoted to mid- and late twentieth-century texts. Readers should utilize the citations of both sources since information on the works of African American playwrights for this time period is scant and often not conclusive. Black Playwrights offers citations for over 2,700 plays by approximately nine hundred playwrights. The bibliography is arranged by author name and offers a title index. Most entries provide publication details, a brief description of the play, and original production data. A selective bibliography of anthologies containing scripts by African American playwrights is included. Black American Writers, 1773–1949: A Bibliography and Union List (1975), compiled by Geraldine O. Matthews and the African-American Materials Project Staff, is the result of a grant-supported cooperative project to locate writings by African Americans that document the black experience in America. The bibliography lists the published monographs of over 1,600 authors. Journal articles and unpublished theses are not covered in the volume. This is a selective bibliography that focuses on ten subject areas: general works, philosophy, religion, social science, language, science, technology, fine arts, literature, and history. The compilers do not attempt to provide the complete works of the authors selected, and entries consist of a brief citation. The Pen Is Ours: A Listing of Writings by and about African-American Women before 1910 with Secondary Bibliography to the Present (1991), compiled by Jean Fagan Yellin and Cynthia D. Bond, is a title in The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers series. The volume is organized into five parts. Part 1 begins the book with a list of writings by and about African American women who produced separately published works. Part 2 pertains to writings by and about ex-slaves whose dictated narratives or biographies were published before the end of 1910. Part 3 covers African American women whose writings were published in periodicals and collections, and whose earliest publications appeared before the end of 1910. Part 4 is devoted to notable African American women who were not writers, but were the subjects of published writings. The entries note archival collections that hold their papers. Part 5 offers a selection of period writings about African American women concerning subjects such as education, women’s suffrage and feminism, marriage and the family, and religion. While not exclusively dedicated to textual study, Native American Folklore, 1879–1979: An Annotated Bibliography (1984), compiled by William M. Clements and Frances M. Malpezzi, can be of great use to those studying Native American oral and written traditions. The bibliography enumerates articles and books about Native American culture (oral and written literature,
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songs, dances, rituals, religions, and other aspects of culture) in the United States and Canada. Pre-1879 scholarship is listed as well, but not nearly as comprehensively. Entries are listed first by geographical region (Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Plains, Southwest, Great Basin, California, Northwest Coast, Plateau, Sub-Arctic, and Arctic) and then by tribe. Name and subject indexes offer additional access points. Dime novels are of interest to many period researchers. Since bibliographies for this genre are scarce, an older list by Charles Bragin, a Brooklyn collector of dime novels, is still valued and held by the special collections departments of a number of libraries. Bragin published reprints of dime novels in the early 1900s and self-published his selective bibliography of these titles, first as the Bibliography of Dime Novels, 1860–1928 in 1938, and then as the Bibliography of Dime Novels, 1860–1964 in 1964. The bibliographies offer brief descriptions of 108 dime novel series. Entries include physical dimensions, cover design, and key points regarding the characters or plots of the novels. The descriptions are followed by citations for selected issues of the series accompanied by the estimated value of the book. The bibliography can be used as a checklist of dime novel series and publishers, but not of individual books. Philip K. Jason’s Nineteenth-Century American Poetry: An Annotated Bibliography (1989) is an example of a bibliography devoted to scholarship on American poetry. The first section in the volume focuses on general treatments of poetry, while the second covers works on individual poets. The poets are listed in order of birth date, so realism–naturalism researchers can easily choose names from the nineteen poets included. There are entries for general studies on each poet, followed by descriptions of studies on individual poems. The brief annotations not only describe but also evaluate each critical source. Although users of the bibliography still need to consult more current bibliographies of scholarship, e.g., the online MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB) and the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL), the databases do not contain the annotations that make Jason’s bibliography a valuable resource. An index to the authors of the critical studies is located at the back of the volume.
INDEXES TO WORKS OF LITERATURE Black Literature, 1827–1940 Index on CD-ROM. 1 CD-ROM. Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, 1994. The Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991–. www.columbiagrangers.org/grangers/.
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Kale, Tessa, ed. The Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry in Anthologies. 13th ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Former titles: An Index to Poetry and Recitations, Granger’s Index to Poetry and Recitations, Index to Poetry, Granger’s Index to Poetry, and Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry. Literature Online (LION). Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 1996–. lion.chadwyck .com/. Newton, Keith, ed. The Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry in Collected and Selected Works. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. The Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry is an essential tool for identifying poetry. The first of numerous editions of the print index was published by Edith Granger in 1904 with the title An Index to Poetry and Recitations, Being a Practical Reference Manual for the Librarian, Teacher, Bookseller, Elocutionist, etc., Including over Fifty Thousand Titles from Four Hundred and Fifty Books (Chicago: A. C. McClurg). The volumes are not cumulative, so a comprehensive search requires an examination of the entire set. After the tenth edition (1994) there are separate volumes for poems in anthologies and for single-author collected and selected works. The most recent editions at the time of this writing are The Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry in Anthologies (13th edition, 2006), edited by Tessa Kale, and The Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry in Collected and Selected Works (2nd edition, 2004), edited by Keith Newton. Library users can utilize the title, author, first- and last-line, and subject indexing as well as the bibliographic lists of poetry sources. Granger’s index is also available as an online subscription database and a CD-ROM. Those using The Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry, the online version, will find the index convenient to search, although the database only provides access to information from several of the more recent titles in the series: The Classic Hundred Poems, The Top 500 Poems, The Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry in Anthologies (editions 8–12), The Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry in Collected and Selected Works (1st and 2nd editions), and The Columbia Granger’s Index to African-American Poetry. The World of Poetry is designed to be a multiservice product and offers short biographies on major poets, a glossary of terms, sources for critical context, and the full text of many of the indexed poems in addition to the traditional indexing. Searches can be limited by author nationality, ethnicity, and time period as well as by title, author, first and last line, and subject. There is a separate set of search boxes for anthologies that offer options for limiting by editor or title. Although the interface defaults to a keyword search, users can choose to browse specific indexes by selecting the option for “Alphabetized.”
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Unlike the search software of most databases, The Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry searches for a series of letters, whether or not they form an entire word. Already mentioned several times in this book is Literature Online (LION), a “searchable library” produced by Chadwyck-Healey, a division of ProQuest. Users can search for words contained in the online collections of thousands of works of English and American poetry, drama, and prose, along with full-text journal articles and citations to primary and secondary works. Among the collections of interest to American realism–naturalism students and scholars are African American Poetry (based on French’s bibliography), American Drama 1714–1915 (partially based on Hixon and Hennessee’s bibliography), American Poetry, and Early American Fiction, 1789–1875 (created from the American Fiction bibliographies by Wright). The Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL), another collection in LION, contains hundreds of thousands of records for articles, monographs, and dissertations from 1920 to the present. The online bibliography provides links to the full-text articles of many literary journals and the thirty-eight volumes of the New Essays on the American Novel series by Cambridge University Press. Literature Online also offers access to the online versions of a number of print reference works, such as the Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998). Users can create a personal file of fifty records and up to twenty-five different searches by selecting “My Archive.”
ONLINE INDEXES TO SCHOLARSHIP Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL). Leeds: Maney Publishing for the Modern Humanities Research Association, 1921–. Annual. Available online via Literature Online. www.chadwyck.com. Arts & Humanities Citation Index. Philadelphia, PA: Institute for Scientific Information, 1975–. Currently available online via Web of Science from ISI/Thomson Scientific. scientific.thomson.com/products/ahci/. JSTOR: The Scholarly Journal Archive. New York: JSTOR, 1995–. www .jstor.org/. Literature Resource Center. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 1990s–. www.galegroup .com. Modern Language Association of America. MLA International Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and Literatures. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1922–. Other titles: MLA Bibliography, MLA American Bibliography, American Bibliography, and
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MLA American Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and Literatures. Annual. Bibliographies covering the years 1921 through 1968 were issued in PMLA. Available online through various vendors. Project MUSE: Scholarly Journals Online. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993–. muse.jhu.edu. Any comprehensive search for scholarship on a topic relating to American literature should begin with the Modern Language Association of America’s MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB), available in online and print formats. MLA International Bibliography is an extensive listing of articles from thousands of journals as well as monographs, book chapters, and published dissertations on the subjects of literature, linguistics, and folklore from around the world and in over sixty languages. Article topics range from analyses of literary texts to the history of the book trade, writing, and literary pedagogy. The bibliography includes both critical texts and reference materials, although it excludes book reviews and letters to the editor. The print version of MLAIB is released annually in a two-book set. The first book is divided into five subject volumes and contains an author–editor index. The second book provides a comprehensive subject index. Each of the five volumes in the first book has a different focus: (1) British and Irish, Commonwealth, English-Caribbean, and American Literatures; (2) European, Asian, African, and Latin American Literatures; (3) Linguistics; (4) General Literature and Related Topics, including literary theory, literary movements, and bibliographical topics; and (5) Folklore (folk literature, ethnomusicology, and material culture). Entries within the five volumes are divided into sections that are particularly appropriate for the subjects covered. The entries in volume 1, which includes American Literatures, are classified first by national literature (e.g., American literature), and then by century (1900–1999), author (Wharton, Edith), genre (novel), and title of the work (The Age of Innocence). Each entry is assigned at least one subject descriptor or phrase that serves to further define the topic (e.g., treatment of the unspoken). MLA International Bibliography was first printed as a bibliography in PMLA (formerly known as Publications of the Modern Language Association of America) in the 1920s. Originally called the “American Bibliography,” the list brought together citations to articles published by Americans related to English, American, Romance, and Germanic literatures. The scope of MLAIB was gradually extended over the years until coverage became international, and the bibliography became a separate print publication (1969–). Indexing from 1963 to present has been available for many years through Dialog, a commercial dial-up database service (http://www.dialog.com). CD-ROM ver-
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sions were published during the late 1980s and early 1990s by companies such as H. W. Wilson, and now a number of online database providers currently offer the bibliography as a Web-based product (e.g., OCLC, Thomson Gale, ProQuest, and EBSCO). The database is updated ten times per year; the backfile was recently expanded in April 2006 to include the years 1926 to 1963. The addition of the backfile means that students and scholars now have improved access to older materials on language and literature. They can easily locate articles from the early 1900s and compare them to more recent sources of information. Researchers may have to rely on interlibrary loan services if their local library collections do not contain full ranges of literary journals back to this time period. The online version of MLAIB is available at most academic libraries. Since the database is carried by a number of vendors, users may encounter a different interface each time they visit another library and need to consult the help pages. We viewed the EBSCOhost interface, which allows for searches of the standard indexes (i.e., author, title, subject, ISBN, ISSN, journal title, language, editor, and publisher) and offers the ability to search other record fields, such as notes, table of contents, page number, and volume number. Among the specialized fields in each record are “Genre Classification,” “Folklore Topic,” “Literature Topic,” and “Literary Source” (the literary work being discussed). The online MLAIB comes with a controlled vocabulary thesaurus that allows users to be precise in choosing subject terms. The thesaurus offers cross-references and the ability to “explode” broad subject terms into lists of narrower terms and related terms. Users should be aware that names are listed in a separate “Names as Subjects” index rather than MLAIB’s main subject index. The “Names as Subjects” index includes cross-references for pseudonyms and variant name forms and spellings. Subject indexing is more comprehensive for works published since 1981 due to recent changes in indexing policies. Results can be limited to articles from peer-reviewed journals, dissertations, books, and book chapters, along with specific dates of publication. For more detailed instructions on searching the bibliography, MLAIB users can consult the online manual “How to Use the MLA International Bibliography” (http:// www.mla.org/howtouse_mlabiblio), which is offered on the Modern Language Association’s website. The MLA Directory of Periodicals is available from the MLAIB database, and can be searched in conjunction with the database or separately. The directory offers descriptions of the journals and series indexed by the MLA International Bibliography. Journals are alphabetized by title, and entries provide publishing history, subscription information, editorial description, submission requirements, and advertising information. Four indexes allow
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access by journal abbreviation, subject, sponsoring organization, and editorial personnel. The print version, entitled MLA Directory of Periodicals: A Guide to Journals and Series in Languages and Literatures, was published biennially by the Modern Language Association of America from 1979 until it was discontinued in 1999. While MLAIB offers indexing for many journals, books, and dissertations, the database does not cover everything of relevance to literary studies. Researchers should consider searching both MLAIB and ABELL when searching for scholarship. The Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL) is compiled under the auspices of the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA) in the United Kingdom, and indexes materials on English literature from Anglo-Saxon times to the present, with selective coverage back to 1921. Material in languages other than English is examined, along with unpublished doctoral dissertations from 1920 to 1999. Although ABELL indexes fewer journals than MLAIB, the database provides access to journals, books, critical editions, and reviews not indexed elsewhere. ABELL is available in print form and online either as part of the Literature Online database or separately. The online version is more current because it receives monthly updates. The interface of the database offers search options for keyword, title keyword, subject, author/reviewer(s), publication details, ISBN, ISSN, and year(s) of publication. Each field is accompanied by a “select from a list” link that leads to searchable and browsable indexes for each access point. To make sure that all relevant records are found, ABELL searchers are advised to use these indexes to identify the most appropriate terms. Checkboxes follow the array of search fields that permit users to limit results to articles, books, or reviews, and to full-text documents only. Small icons next to each record on the list of results identify items that are available in full text either as HTML text, scanned portable-document-format (PDF) images, or page images available through JSTOR (see the description of JSTOR below). As stand-alone products MLAIB and ABELL only provide bibliographic information about literary scholarship. However, online partnerships have made it possible to link their bibliographic records to full-text documents. Two online journal aggregator services that are currently linked to MLAIB and ABELL are JSTOR: The Scholarly Journal Archive and Project MUSE: Scholarly Journals Online. Both services offer subscribers electronic journals in a variety of subject areas, including language and literature. They may be accessed either through the online bibliographies or through their own interfaces which, like the bibliographies, can be linked to any subscribing library’s website. Links to JSTOR and Project MUSE articles from MLAIB and ABELL appear as small icons next to the article titles in the search results.
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At this time, JSTOR supplies the full text of back issues of fifty-eight literary journals (e.g., American Literary History, American Literature, ELH, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Twentieth Century Literature). JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization, established with the help of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Journal coverage dates back to the nineteenth century, but stops three or four years prior to the most recent issues due to contract stipulations. Project MUSE, the product of a not-for-profit collaboration between university press/scholarly society publishers and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University, currently contains the full text of sixtynine literary journals and four folklore journals. Among the titles that may be of interest to realism–naturalism researchers are American Periodicals, ELH, Studies in American Indian Literatures, and Henry James Review. Since Project MUSE has more recent issues of scholarly journal titles, a cooperative agreement allows the two online journal services to link together and offer full runs of the titles that they share. JSTOR’s “Advanced Search” interface is designed to accept Boolean and proximity operators, wildcard and truncation symbols, and fuzzy searches. (See chapter 1 for descriptions of these search options.) Users can search the full text of articles or limit their queries to specific fields, such as author, title, and abstract. They can also select particular subject categories or journal titles. The “Advanced Search” interface for Project MUSE also encourages the use of Boolean operators and truncation symbols; results can be limited by document type, date, and journal title. The advantage to JSTOR and Project MUSE searches is that they can find a name, title, or phrase that is mentioned anywhere in the full text of the journal articles they offer. Since a search for a common name or phrase may retrieve an overwhelming number of citations, a narrow search query should be considered. Literature Resource Center (LRC), another Gale product, is an online library of literary biography and criticism. Along with Gale publications such as Contemporary Authors and the Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB) series, the database offers indexing to the full text of selected criticism from Gale titles that include Poetry Criticism, Drama Criticism, Short Story Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, and Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Indexing is also provided for full-text articles from literary periodicals (e.g., Explicator, Studies in American Fiction, and Southern Literary Journal). Coverage of most of the full-text journal articles begins in the 1990s and continues to the present. LRC subscribers may elect to add content from the MLA and the Macmillan Library Reference modules to the Literature Resource Center for an additional fee. The MLA module brings access to the citations from MLA International Bibliography and entries from MLA Directory of Periodicals, while the Macmillan module covers the bio-critical
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information contained in The Scribner Writers series and Twayne’s United States Authors series. Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) is one of the three online citation indexes of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Science; the other two are the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED). The ISI indexes are also available in print format. Arts & Humanities Citation Index consists of bibliographic information published in arts and humanities journals from 1975 to the present. AHCI indexes the full content of core journals in this subject area, with their research and scholarly articles; book, film, and theatre reviews; editorials; and biographies. What makes the database unique is the list of works cited that is linked to each article citation. Database users are not only able to see the standard citations for articles related to their topic, they can also view the lists of sources that these articles have cited in their bibliographies. At the same time, they can obtain a list of articles that have cited the original articles in their bibliographies. By following the citation trail, researchers can obtain both older and current articles on a topic. They can ascertain the value of a particular article by counting how many times that article has been cited by others in the literature. Scholars frequently utilize Web of Science indexes to observe the impact of their research on others in their field, although the citation method is generally more reliable when scientific citations are examined. Science Citation Index Expanded is a larger database that indexes many more journals and covers the years 1900 to present. When using AHCI as a standard bibliography, researchers have the choice of typing a “Quick Search” in one search box or using the General Search interface that offers separate boxes for topic, author, source title, publication year, and other fields. They can also choose to use the “Advanced Search” option, which allows for command searching. Since the same interfaces are used for all three ISI citation indexes, literary researchers must be sure to de-select the other two indexes before searching to limit the results to articles found in AHCI. They also need to consider the controlled vocabulary requirements of AHCI. Authors are indexed by last name and their first and middle initials in capital letters (e.g., SMITH JA). A truncation symbol may be substituted for an unknown middle initial, but searchers who do not know the first name of an author should use the drop-down menu on the General Search interface to select the name from the index. Source titles and author affiliations also call for specific abbreviations (e.g., AM LIT REALISM for source title and NYU for New York University), and one or more should be selected from the appropriate list. Boolean operators and wildcard symbols are accepted, and results can be limited by language and document type.
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Selecting a title from the list of search results displays the article’s full record and the option to select “Find Related Articles,” “Cited References,” or “Times Cited.” The first feature lists other articles that cite some of the same sources. The articles that share the most citations with the original article are listed first. “Cited References” displays the list of the sources that the article cites; selecting “Times Cited” provides a list of articles that cite the original article. Users who only want to search for “Times Cited” can go directly to the index of citations by clicking on the “Cited Ref Search” button when they first connect to the database.
ANNUAL REVIEWS OF THE LITERATURE American Literary Scholarship: An Annual. Durham: Duke University Press, 1963–. Available online via Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu. The Year’s Work in English Studies. Oxford: Published for the English Association by Oxford University Press, 1921–. Annual. ywes.oxford journals.org/. The Year’s Work in English Studies (YWES) is a hardcover annual review published for the English Association by Oxford University Press. Each volume gives the highlights of literary scholarship from a particular year. In recent volumes chapters 15 and 16 cover American literature to 1900 and after 1900, respectively. The chapters are written in narrative form, with each paragraph focusing on a separate critical text. New volumes of YWES are published approximately three years after the year of coverage. YWES was first published in 1921, but began the examination of American literature in volume 35 (1954). An online version is available to subscribers at the Oxford University Press website. The online YWES starts with volume 1 for 1919 and continues to the present. A subscription to the Oxford Digitized Journals Archive is required in order to view issues prior to 1996, although short-term access may be obtained on a pay-per-article basis if the user is willing to set up a personal account. Users can also request that Oxford send them the table of contents of the latest issues via electronic mail as they are posted online. To make the Web version more current than the print, chapters of forthcoming volumes are released as they are written. Available in print and also online through Project MUSE, American Literary Scholarship (ALS) focuses exclusively on the American literary scholarship published each year by over five hundred periodicals and publishing houses. The information gathered from these sources, listed at the front of
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each volume, helps researchers to discern critical trends in the study of a text, an author’s writings, and works of a time period or genre. The realism–naturalism period is well represented in the annual publication, as volumes feature entire chapters on the study of Mark Twain and Henry James, and half-chapters on the study of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather. Summaries of the scholarship available on many other period writers have been issued, among them William Dean Howells, Pauline Hopkins, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Sarah Orne Jewett, Ellen Glasgow, and Rebecca Harding Davis. Each chapter offers a few paragraphs on general trends before beginning the summaries of scholarship on individual books, articles, essays, and critical editions. Among the chapters of interest to realism–naturalism researchers are “Late-19th-Century Literature”; “Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s”; “Poetry: 1900 to the 1940s”; “Drama”; and “Themes, Topics, and Criticism.” The chapters are divided into sections by writer or literary movement. Each volume contains an author and a subject index. Those hoping to publish an article or book may want to consult this series to get a sense of what topics and theoretical approaches are popular—and which are not—in their area of study.
BIBLIOGRAPHIES OF BIBLIOGRAPHIES Altick, Richard Daniel. Selective Bibliography for the Study of English and American Literature. 6th ed. New York: Macmillan, 1979. Besterman, Theodore. Literature, English & American: A Bibliography of Bibliographies. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1971. Gohdes, Clarence Louis Frank. Bibliographical Guide to the Study of the Literature of the U.S.A. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1970. Nilon, Charles H. Bibliography of Bibliographies in American Literature. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1970. Tanselle, G. Thomas. Guide to the Study of United States Imprints. 2 vols. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1971. Select classic bibliographies are still valued by literary scholars despite their datedness. Charles H. Nilon’s Bibliography of Bibliographies in American Literature (1970) is among these classic titles, and has not yet been replaced by a more current equivalent. Nilon’s slim, one-volume bibliography is unique in that the author examines an unusually wide range of sources, from critical journals and bibliographical lists of special libraries and presses to literary histories and exhibition catalogs. The volume is divided into four sections: general bibliographies (including library catalogs), author-specific bib-
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liographies, genre-specific bibliographies (e.g., drama, fiction, poetry), and an “Ancillary” section that lists bibliographies of almanacs, chapbooks, annuals, biographies, diaries, and genealogies, as well as language, music, religion, folklore, and myth resources. The fiction list contains numerous bibliographies of interest to American realism–naturalism researchers, such as Mimes and Miners: A Historical Study of the Theatre in Tombstone and Fiction in Public Libraries, 1876–1960. Each section offers a simple list of citations with no library holdings or abstracts, although a few entries are given short annotations. There is a table of contents in the front of the volume and a combined personal name–title index at the back along with a list of abbreviations for the journals mentioned in the bibliography. Complementing Nilon’s work is G. Thomas Tanselle’s two-volume Guide to the Study of United States Imprints (1971), a bibliography of bibliographies and scholarship related to United States printing and publishing. As Tanselle explains in his introduction, he has chosen to assume two definitions of “imprint”: the publication information at the bottom of the title page and the printed work itself.14 James Harner identifies Tanselle’s work as the fullest list of published research through 1969 on printing and publishing in the United States, although users will see some citations for volumes published in the early 1970s.15 Works are grouped by the scope of their research or coverage. Separate sections address the publications related to a state, genre, author, auction, dealer, library catalog, or a particular printer or publisher. Other sections cover state and nationwide copyright records, book trade directories, general books and essays on American bibliography, and checklists of secondary works. Within each section, titles are listed chronologically, making it easier to identify works related to a specific literary period. Users will find interesting bibliographies on publishers (e.g., Beadle & Adams and Dodd, Mead & Company) and checklists for state imprints and authors. Genre lists contain some unusual categories, such as desert literature, fishing and boxing books, and type-specimen books. The parameters of each of the nine sections are complicated, and readers are advised to consult the guide’s detailed introduction and the index at the back of the second volume to avoid overlooking items of interest. In addition to Nilon and Tanselle, three other literary bibliographies of bibliographies are worthy of note. The American section of Theodore Besterman’s Literature, English & American: A Bibliography of Bibliographies (1971) is a good source for older bibliographies as it contains book lists published during and soon after the realism–naturalism period. In addition to bibliographies of general, selective, and regional bibliographies, Besterman covers manuscripts, translations, and secondary works on American literature. Book lists from periodicals are included along with the number of the pages
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on which they appear in each issue. The second half of the volume is devoted to author-specific bibliographies, though few listings are not also found in Nilon and/or Tanselle. Richard D. Altick’s Selective Bibliography for the Study of English and American Literature (1979) and Bibliographical Guide to the Study of the Literature of the U.S.A. (1970) by Clarence Louis Frank Gohdes are general American literary reference guides designed to help students of literature find reference tools of all types. Most of the chapters in these books are outdated, and readers should refer, instead, to James Harner’s Literary Reference Guide to locate current reference sources. However, the bibliography of bibliographies sections of these books list useful reference works not contained in Nilon, Tanselle, or Besterman.
CONCLUSION Bibliographies allow researchers to locate and sort through a vast amount of textual material. The quantity of primary and secondary writings published during the realism–naturalism period is extensive, and there is more than a century of scholarship to be considered. Both the online and print bibliographies discussed in this chapter offer the necessary access points to identify specific works of interest. They describe their physical appearance and location, and categorize them by genre, period, subject, or the characteristics of their writers. The descriptions provided by key bibliographies have spurred important efforts to preserve the literary works of the American realism and naturalism period as digitized and microform images so they can be readily available to students and scholars around the world.
NOTES 1. Charles Barrett Brown, The Contribution of Greek to English: With Special Attention to Medical and Other Scientific Terms (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1942), 29, 78. 2. William A. Katz, Basic Information Services. Vol. 1, Introduction to Reference Work, 8th ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2002), 77. 3. Joan M. Reitz, Dictionary for Library and Information Science (Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2004), s.v. “index.” 4. American Library Association, The ALA Glossary of Library and Information Science (Chicago: American Library Association, 1983), s.v. “primary bibliography.” 5. The Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue. Vol. 14 of Series II, Phase I, 1816–1870 (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England: Avero, 1986–95), iii.
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6. Kimberly Shigo, “ABC-CLIO Has Launched NSTC Online (New & Improved Databases),” Computers in Libraries 23, no. 8 (Sept. 2003): 48. Expanded Academic ASAP Plus, www.gale.com. 7. “ProQuest Bulks Up on Content; Adds Databases of 19th Century Short Title Catalogue and NY Times,” Library Journal 129, no. 12 (July 2004): 28. Expanded Academic ASAP Plus, www.gale.com. 8. The Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue. Vol. 14 of Series II, Phase I, 1816–1870 (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England: Avero, 1986–95), v. 9. Angela Courtney, “Nineteenth Century Short-Title Catalogue,” Victorian Studies 46, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 683. Expanded Academic ASAP Plus, www.gale.com. 10. William Matheson, “American Literary Bibliography—FPAA Style,” Review 1 (1979), 173–81. 11. Literary Writings in America: A Bibliography (Millwood, NY: KTO Press, 1977), 1: vii. 12. Lyle H. Wright, American Fiction, 1851–1875: A Contribution toward a Bibliography (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1957), 2: ix. 13. James L. Harner, Literary Research Guide: An Annotated Listing of Reference Sources in English Literary Studies (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002), 445. 14. G. Thomas Tanselle, Guide to the Study of United States Imprints (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), xiii. 15. James L. Harner, Literary Research Guide: An Annotated Listing of Reference Sources in English Literary Studies (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002), 605.
Chapter Five
Scholarly Journals
Literary journals vary widely in subject scope. Some publish articles on literature from around the world and in every time period; others focus on a specific literary era, national or ethnic literature, genre or subgenre, or the writings of a particular author. While there are few journals that cover the realism–naturalism period and its writers exclusively, many general literature, American literature, and genre-specific journals publish material pertinent to the study of the period. It is beneficial for students and scholars to monitor the journals that publish content on their area of specialization. Browsing new issues of journals for articles and book reviews is the best way to keep abreast of the latest research and scholarship, and reading articles published by other researchers in the field frequently sparks ideas for future studies and writings. Chapter 5 identifies scholarly journals that offer the most content related to the American realism–naturalism period. The journals are organized into six different categories: period-specific, American literature, genre-specific, regionspecific, author-specific, and general literary journals. Brief descriptions contain bibliographical information and content details. Their inclusion in the major electronic-journal subscription databases is noted (i.e., JSTOR for archival issues and Project MUSE), as well as indexing coverage in MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB) and the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL).1 We also note when a journal’s website supplies tables of contents and/or abstracts for recent and back issues. The Web address is given along with the bibliographic citation at the beginning of each section. Researchers may be surprised to find that only one literary journal, American Literary Realism, focuses exclusively on the writings of the realism– naturalism period. Published since 1967, American Literary Realism has been 108
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the key source of critical literature on the period for decades. A second forum for scholarship became available when Dreiser Studies expanded its scope in the summer of 2006 to become Studies in American Naturalism. The periodical offers articles related to the “texts and contexts” of naturalism from its origins during the nineteenth century to its current transformations. Due to the lack of other publications specific to the realism–naturalism period, students and scholars often read journals that focus either on nineteenth- or twentiethcentury literature. Genre-, region-, and author-specific titles are also useful, although a number of the author-specific periodicals fall into the category of newsletters. Some titles began as newsletters and evolved into more scholarly publications. Most of the periodicals discussed in this chapter offer peerreviewed or “refereed” articles that have been screened by the author’s colleagues in the field of literature. General American literature journals frequently publish articles on topics associated with the realism–naturalism period as well as articles that span more than one literary period. They are especially valuable for scholarship of the early twentieth century as fewer period- and genre-specific periodicals were available during these years. The lists of articles related to nineteenthand twentieth-century American literature in the bibliographies of Publications of the Modern Language Association (PMLA) for 1931 and 1933 establish American Literature as the key publisher of realism–naturalism articles, followed by Modern Language Notes, Sewanee Review, and Saturday Review of Literature.2 By the 1950s there were more specific journals noted, such as the Mark Twain Quarterly and Colby Library Quarterly. The September 1957 issue of PMLA printed the bibliography “American Journals in the Humanities: A Guide to Scope and Editorial Policy.”3 Many of the journals listed in the bibliography issued articles of interest to realism–naturalism researchers during the mid-1900s: American Literature, American Quarterly, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, Bucknell Review, College English, ELH, Huntington Library Quarterly, Journal of American Folklore, Modern Fiction Studies, Modern Language Notes, Modern Language Quarterly, Modern Philology, Nineteenth Century Fiction, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, PMLA, University of Kansas City Review, and University of Toronto Quarterly. As demonstrated in this chapter, many of the journals are still publishing articles on realism–naturalism literature today. The number of author-specific newsletters and journals associated with realism–naturalism writers increased steadily during the twentieth century. The earliest of these journals, Mark Twain Quarterly of the International Mark Twain Society, focused on the life and works of Mark Twain. Started in 1936 by Twain aficionado and author Cyril Clemens, the periodical (now titled Mark Twain Journal) is the oldest American magazine devoted to a
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single author.4 A few years later the Mark Twain Society of Chicago established its own journal The Twainian in 1939. Walt Whitman Newsletter (later Walt Whitman Quarterly Review) was issued in 1955, and Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter began publication in 1957, but other author-specific titles did not come on the scene until the early 1960s when an average of at least three titles per decade appeared. While browsing issues of these journals is a good way to keep informed of recent research, the most efficient way to identify specific journal articles by title, author, journal title, or subject is to use the two major online literary bibliographies: MLAIB and ABELL. Research methods for navigating these sources are detailed in chapter 4. Users should remember that journal titles change through the years, and that a new International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) is assigned to each version of the title. An alternative method for acquiring a list of articles from a journal is to visit the journal’s website, which frequently includes either an index or a table of contents (TOC). This can be useful for determining the type of articles published as well as the existence of book reviews. MLAIB does not index reviews, and some time may elapse before articles from the most recent issues are added to the database; coverage in indexes may be irregular. Because journals of interest to realism–naturalism researchers are diverse, there is no one Web portal that lists all of their websites. Instead, readers should use the Web addresses listed in this chapter.
PERIOD-SPECIFIC JOURNALS American Literary Realism (ALR). University of Illinois Press, 1999–. 3/yr. ISSN: 0002-9823/1540-3084. Former title: American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 (1967–99). www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/alr.html. ATQ: American Transcendental Quarterly. University of Rhode Island, 1987–. Quarterly. ISSN: 0178-3377. Former title: American Transcendental Quarterly (1969–86). www.uri.edu/artsci/eng/English/ATQ.htm. Available online via Literature Online (LION) (1997–). lion.chadwyck.com/. Nineteenth-Century Literature (NCL). University of California Press, 1986–. Quarterly. ISSN: 0891-9356. Former titles: Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1949–86) and The Trollopian (1945–49). ucpressjournals.com/journal .asp?jIssn=0891-9356. Available online via JSTOR (1945–) www.jstor .org/, Caliber (March 2001–) caliber.ucpress.net/, and LION (2002–) lion.chadwyck.com/. Nineteenth Century Studies (NCS). Nineteenth Century Studies Association. 1987–. Annual. ISSN: 0893-7931. www2.selu.edu/Academics/Depts/ English/NCS/frameset.html.
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Studies in American Naturalism (StAN). University of North Carolina at Wilmington, 2006–. Semiannual. ISSN: 1931-2555. Former titles: Dreiser Studies (1987–2006) and The Dreiser Newsletter (1970–86). uncw .edu/san/. Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal (TCL). Hofstra University, 1955–. Quarterly. ISSN: 0041-462X. www.hofstra.edu/ Academics/HCLAS/EAS/EAS_engspot_tcl.cfm. Available online via JSTOR (1955–) www.jstor.org/ and LION (1994–) lion.chadwyck.com/. American Literary Realism (ALR) is an important journal for realism– naturalism researchers as it focuses exclusively on the authors and works of the period. ALR was first published under the title American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 by the Department of English, University of Texas, Arlington, in 1967. The earliest issues contained author bibliographies for writers such as Joel Chandler Harris, Harold Frederic, Henry Blake Fuller, Theodore Dreiser, Mary Hunter Austin, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Hamlin Garland. Currently published three times a year by the University of Illinois Press, the journal has established a reputation for critical discussions of realism writings. Articles focus on American literature from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and range from historical inquiries into canonical writings. Many articles discuss the definition and evolving parameters of the genre. Issues of ALR usually contain between four and six articles, and include occasional bibliographies and checklists. The journal also features short, factual notes based on new biographical, textual, or bibliographical information that has surfaced. Book reviews are a regular feature of ALR, making the journal a valuable bibliographic resource for realism–naturalism scholars. ALR is indexed by MLAIB and ABELL. The website gives additional index coverage and provides tables of contents for issues from 1999 to the current issue. The biannual Dreiser Studies expanded its scope in the summer of 2006 and changed its title to Studies in American Naturalism (StAN), thereby increasing its value to realism–naturalism scholars and students of all specialties. While Dreiser Studies (1987–2006) and its predecessor Dreiser Newsletter (1970–1986) exclusively printed articles about Theodore Dreiser and his works, the new Studies in American Naturalism issues articles on naturalistic works published from the nineteenth century to the present and related topics. The inaugural issue for Summer/Winter 2006 offers critical essays on writers from the realism–naturalism era (e.g., Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Bret Harte, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, and Ellen Glasgow) along with book reviews, documents, notes, and bibliographies. StAN is produced twice a year in print and electronic format as a joint effort by the Department of English, the University of North Carolina at
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Wilmington, and the International Theodore Dreiser Society. The StAN website will be a future source for tables of contents and editorial information. Currently, website TOC coverage and indexing are only available for issues of Dreiser Studies and Dreiser Newsletter. The same situation applies to MLAIB and ABELL indexing. (For details about Dreiser Studies, see below under the section “Author-Specific Journals and Newsletters.”) Nineteenth-Century Literature (NCL), issued by the University of California Press, frequently publishes scholarship on the realism–naturalism period. The quarterly began in 1945 as The Trollopian, and then changed its name to Nineteenth-Century Fiction in 1949. When the current title was adopted in 1986, the journal broadened its scope to include poetry and nonfiction. Coverage of American literature began in 1952. In addition to publishing four to five articles, the issues of NCL feature book reviews and an annotated bibliography of new publications relating to nineteenth-century literature. Articles cover a variety of subject disciplines and themes, such as gender, history, psychology, and cultural studies. Abstracts follow each article. At the end of each issue a “Recent Books Received” section lists new publications. The MLAIB and ABELL databases provide indexing for this journal, and NCL is available online through JSTOR, LION, and Caliber, the online journals service from University of California Press. Caliber allows subscribers to search for relevant articles and print the full text; visitors to the website may utilize the indexes and tables of contents. Even though its title may suggest otherwise, the University of Rhode Island’s ATQ: American Transcendental Quarterly publishes articles relating to any aspect of nineteenth-century American literature as well as other components of American society. Topics have included exploration and adventure in the nineteenth-century American West, violence in the nineteenth century, and “the woman question.” ATQ is indexed by both MLAIB and ABELL, and indexing with full-text articles is provided by LION (September 1997–). The ATQ website does not list tables of contents. The editors of Nineteenth Century Studies (NCS), the journal of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association, look for articles with a multidisciplinary approach to topics that include literature, history, music, art history, and the history of the sciences and social sciences. Contributors write ten- to twentypage articles primarily, but not exclusively, about American and European society. Articles considered to be of broad interest are encouraged rather than those focused on a specific work. Instead of publishing individual book reviews, NCS provides review essays: compilations of reviews of works on a specific area of scholarly inquiry. Current review essays have explored recent scholarship on nineteenth-century theatre and women writers. NCS is published with the support of Southeastern Louisiana University (Hammond,
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Louisiana). The journal is indexed in both MLAIB and ABELL, and tables of contents on its website allow users to identify articles and review essays of interest. Period researchers should be aware of two other nineteenth-century studies journals although they are not listed among the citations above and their issues may not be worth browsing since they focus primarily on British literature. Nineteenth Century Literature in English (NCLiE) has been published twice a year in Korean and English by the Korean Society of Nineteenth Century Literature in English since 1997. NCLiE occasionally includes articles on realism–naturalism writers. So does the University of Southern Illinois’s Nineteenth-Century Prose (NCP), which publishes articles, review essays, reviews, notes, and bibliographical items on British, American, and Continental European nonfiction prose of the nineteenth century. NCP, formerly titled The Arnoldian: A Review of Mid-Victorian Culture (1975–1989/1990) and the Arnold Newsletter (1973–1975), addresses literary theory, history, and interpretation on an international level. NCLiE is indexed by MLAIB, but not by ABELL; NCP is indexed sporadically in MLAIB and back to 2001 in ABELL. Hofstra University’s illustrated Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal (TCL) is also difficult to browse for articles related to the American realism–naturalism period as the journal publishes essays on all aspects of literature from throughout the century, including essays in English concerning works in other languages. Period researchers may want to search the online bibliographies to identify articles on specific topics and writers. Unlike most literary journals, TCL does not publish book reviews. The journal is indexed in MLAIB and indexed back to 1959 in ABELL. Issues are available online through JSTOR (1955–) and LION (Spring 1994–). The TCL website provides editorial information, but does not list tables of contents for journal issues.
AMERICAN LITERATURE JOURNALS American Literary History (AmLH). Oxford University Press, 1989–. Quarterly. ISSN: 0896-7148. alh.oxfordjournals.org/. Available online via JSTOR (1989–) www.jstor.org/, Project MUSE (2000–) muse.jhu.edu/, LION (2002–) lion.chadwyck.com/, and Oxford Journals (1989–) www .oxfordjournals.org/. American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography (AL). Duke University Press, 1929–. Quarterly. ISSN: 0002-9831. dukeupress.edu/americanliterature/. Available online via JSTOR (1929–)
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www.jstor.org/, Project MUSE (1999–) muse.jhu.edu/, and the E-Duke Scholarly Collection, hosted by HardWire Press (2000–) www.dukeupress .edu/library/eDuke/. American Quarterly: The Journal of the American Studies Association (AQ). Johns Hopkins University Press for the American Studies Association, 1949–. Quarterly. ISSN: 0003-0678. americanquarterly.org. Available online via JSTOR (1949–) www.jstor.org/, Project MUSE (1996–) muse.jhu .edu/, and LION (2003–) lion.chadwyck.com/. Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory (ArQ). University of Arizona, Arizona Board of Regents, 1945–. Quarterly. ISSN: 0004-1610. www.u.arizona.edu/%7Eazq/. Available online via Project MUSE (2006–) muse.jhu.edu/ and LION (2004–) lion.chadwyck.com/. Resources for American Literary Study (RALS). AMS Press, 1971–. Annual. ISSN: 0048-7384. amspressinc.com/rals.html. Available online via Project Muse (1999–2001) muse.jhu.edu/. Scholarly journals that cover the whole of American literature devote a considerable amount of their content to the realism–naturalism period as it played a major role in the evolution of the nation’s writings. Journals more generally about American culture, such as American Studies and American Studies International, are less likely to do so, but may also be worth browsing for information on other aspects of society that influenced period writings. Oxford University Press describes its journal American Literary History (AmLH) as a “much-needed forum for the various, often competing voices of contemporary literary inquiry.” Articles discuss American literature and its relationship to political and social trends. Started in 1989, the journal is published quarterly, offering an annual summer issue on a specific topic. Recent articles related to the realism–naturalism period have compared anti-racism in the works of Charles W. Chesnutt and Philip Roth, and discussed regionalism in the writings of Sarah Orne Jewett, Frank Norris, and Booker T. Washington. Special issues have focused on “Hemispheric American Literary History” (Fall 2006) and “Race and Antebellum Literature” (Fall 2002). ALH is indexed by MLAIB; ABELL provides indexing back to 1991. The journal is available through JSTOR and Project MUSE as well as the online Oxford Journals service. The website provides article abstracts free of charge to nonsubscribers; full-text articles may be purchased individually. Publishing articles on all American literary time periods and genres, Duke University Press’s American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography (AL) is widely read by scholars and students, and is sponsored by the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association, a group comprised of scholars, teachers, and students of American
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literature and culture. Each issue consists of between six and eight articles, and over ten book reviews. Article length has increased over the years from between ten and fifteen pages to twenty-five to thirty pages. Until the early 1990s American Literature also included a “Notes” section (formerly called “Notes and Queries”), which consisted of previously unpublished poems, letters, and other writings by popular literary figures as well as sources of their writings. A “Brief Mentions” section is an annotated bibliography of new monographs and reprints, while an “Announcements” section lists competitions, events, and publishing opportunities. Occasional special issues are published that focus on one writer or topic. American Literature is indexed in both MLAIB and ABELL along with the many other indexes listed on its website. The journal is available online through JSTOR (1929–), Project MUSE (1999–), and the E-Duke Scholarly Collection hosted by HardWire Press (2000–) www.dukeupress.edu/library/eDuke/. Not exclusively a literary journal, American Quarterly (AQ), the journal of the American Studies Association, has been published since 1949. Issued in print and online by Johns Hopkins University, AQ collects articles that examine the United States from political, cultural, and sociological perspectives. The realism–naturalism researcher is most likely to find articles about the literary traditions of marginal groups of the period (e.g., Native American, Asian American, and female writers). Articles may also relate classic literature to current events. AQ regularly publishes special issues and series of essays on particular subjects. A recurring “Currents” section discusses events and cultural trends of the day. The journal encourages submissions of visual essays and essays that include hyperlinks and online supplements, such as video and audio clips, additional images, and links to online sources. Issues contain between six and eight articles, and include book reviews. AQ is indexed by both MLAIB and ABELL, but there are gaps in coverage in ABELL. Online issues are accessible through Project MUSE (1996–) and JSTOR (1949–). Active members of the American Studies Association receive access to AQ issues when they use Project MUSE. Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory (ArQ) produces scholarly articles averaging twenty pages in length on all periods and genres of American literature as well as film. Articles emphasize theoretical, historical, and cultural approaches to works of both well-known and minor authors. A periodical of five to six articles per issue, ArQ has been distributed as a quarterly since 1945. Both Project Muse (2006–) and LION (2004–) connect online users to the articles published in current issues of the periodical. Resources for American Literary Study (RALS), a journal published since 1971, is currently distributed as an annual clothbound volume by AMS Press.
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RALS offers annotated bibliographies of scholarship on American authors, their works, genres, and literary periods. Essays describe American literature resources, focusing on library collections and individual unpublished documents such as letters and manuscripts. The section “Prospects for American Literary Study” recommends avenues for future study of the works of individual writers, and book reviews are featured in each volume. The journal is indexed in ABELL and MLAIB, and included as an archive (1999–2001) in Project MUSE.
GENRE-SPECIFIC JOURNALS African American Review (AAR). Saint Louis University, 1992–. Quarterly. ISSN: 1062-4783. Former titles: Black American Literature Forum (1976–91) and Negro American Literature Forum (1967–76). aar.slu.edu/. Available online via JSTOR (1967–) www.jstor.org/ and LION (Spring 1994–) lion.chadwyck.com/. American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography (AmPer). Ohio State University Press, 1991–. Annual. ISSN: 1054-7479. Available online via Project MUSE (2003–) muse.jhu.edu/. Dime Novel Round-Up: A Magazine Devoted to the Collecting, Preservation and Literature of the Old-Time Dime and Nickel Novels, Popular Story Papers, Series Books, and Pulp Magazines (DNR). Published since 1931. J. Randolph Cox, 1994–. Bimonthly. ISSN: 0012-2874. Former title: Reckless Ralph’s Dime Novel Round-Up (1931). readseries.com/dnru.html. Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT). Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 1989–. 3/yr. ISSN: 1044-937X. web.gc.cuny.edu/Mestc/journals/ JADT/index.htm. Journal of American Folklore (JAF). American Folklore Society, 1888–. Quarterly. ISSN: 0021-8715. afsnet.org/publications/jaf.cfm. Available online via JSTOR (1888–) www.jstor.org/ and MUSE (2001–) lion.chad wyck.com/. Journal of Women’s History (JWH). Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989–. Quarterly. ISSN: 1042-7961. Available online via Project MUSE (1999–) muse.jhu.edu/. Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers (Legacy). Society for the Study of American Women Writers/University of Nebraska Press, 1984–. Biannual. ISSN: 0748-4321. Available online via Project MUSE (2000–) muse.jhu.edu/ and LION (1996–) lion.chadwyck.com/. MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS). The Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic
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Literature in the United States, 1974–. Quarterly. ISSN: 0163-755X. ship .edu/~kmlong/melus/. Available online via JSTOR (1974–) www.jstor.org/ and LION (1994–) lion.chadwyck.com/. Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film (NCTF). Manchester University Press, 2002–. Semiannual. ISSN: 1748-3727. Previous titles: Nineteenth Century Theatre (1987–2000), Nineteenth-Century Theatre Research (1973–86), and NCTR Newsletter (1976–79). Available online (2002–) through LION lion.chadwyck.com/ and Manchester University Press Ejournals service at journals.mup.man.ac.uk/cgi-bin/MUP?COMval=journal&key=NCTF. Studies in American Fiction (SAF). Northeastern University English Dept., 1973–. Semiannual. ISSN: 0091-8083. www.casdn.neu.edu/~english/pubs/. Available online via LION (1998–) lion.chadwyck.com/. Studies in American Humor (StAH). Texas State University for the American Humor Studies Association, 1974–. Annual. ISSN: 0095-280X. Absorbed: American Humor (1974–83). Semiannual. Official website: www.slu.edu/ academic/ahsa/journalhome.htm. Compedit site for first and second series: www.compedit.com/. Studies in American Indian Literatures: The Journal of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures (SAIL). Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures, 1980–. Quarterly. ISSN: 0730-3238. Former titles: Newsletter of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures and ASAIL Newsletter. oncampus.richmond.edu/faculty/ASAIL/ sail-hp.html. Available online via Project MUSE (2004–) muse.jhu.edu/ and LION (2004–) lion.chadwyck.com/. Studies in the Novel (SNNTS). University of North Texas, English Dept., 1969–. Quarterly. ISSN: 0039-3827. engl.unt.edu/sitn/. Available online via LION (1994–) lion.chadwyck.com/. Thalia: Studies in Literary Humor (Thalia). University of Ottawa, 1978– 2004. 3/yr. ISSN: 0706-5604. Available online via LION (1997–2004) lion.chadwyck.com/. A wide variety of genre-specific journals publish articles on the realism– naturalism period, from journals on specific ethnicities and women’s literature to journals on specific writing forms. Discussed in this section are those journals that are most likely to publish articles on the period, although a search in MLAIB or ABELL will uncover additional articles from other journals. In 1992 African American Review (AAR) expanded its scope beyond literature to a more general coverage of African American arts, humanities, and social sciences, although literary scholarship remains its primary focus. Each quarterly issue consists of between six and ten articles as well as creative works such as poetry, short stories or dramatic works, and interviews and
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book reviews. MLAIB and ABELL index issues of AAR and those published under previous titles: Negro American Literature Forum (1967–1976) and Black American Literature Forum (1976–1991). Full-text articles are available through JSTOR (1967–) and LION (1994–). The AAR website provides details on the contents of the journal and a series of indexes on its back issues. The last issue of each year includes a subject index. Not dealing exclusively with literature, but nonetheless of significance to the realism–naturalism researcher, American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography (AmPer) publishes and reviews scholarship dealing with the American newspaper and magazine industry. The journal solicits articles with a multidisciplinary approach to topics that focus on periodical readership, design, editorial policies, and the periodical’s impact on other areas of culture. American Periodicals is the official publication of the Research Society of American Periodicals, and is published by Ohio State University Press. Issues provide between four and seven articles. They are indexed by MLAIB and ABELL, and offered in electronic format through Project MUSE (2003–). Issues contain a “From the Periodical Archives” section, which reprints covers and other illustrations from historical periodicals. While Dime Novel Round-Up (DNR) cannot be considered a scholarly journal in the strictest sense, it is discussed here because of its unique coverage of the genre that reached the peak of its success during the realism– naturalism period. DNR’s subtitle defines it as “a magazine devoted to the collecting, preservation and literature of the old-time dime and nickel novels, popular story papers, series books, and pulp magazines.” The publication originated with a group of dime novel collectors who formed a national organization called the Happy Hours Brotherhood in 1924.5 The first president of the Brotherhood was Ralph Cummings, the editor of a number of newsletters of the early 1920s that advertised books for sale and printed observations about dime novels and story papers (Cummings & Clark’s Flyer, The Book Hunter, and The Novel Hunter’s Year Book). Cummings became the editor of the Brotherhood’s bimonthly newsletter Happy Hours Magazine: The Link Between the Collector and the Old Time Periodical (1925–1936), and Ralph Smith, another member of the organization, agreed to be its publisher.6 The content of Happy Hours Magazine became the basis for Dime Novel RoundUp, which began official publication in 1931. Entitled Reckless Ralph’s Dime Novel Round-Up in a few 1931 issues—“Reckless Ralph, the Dime Novel King” was a poem by Cummings—DNR was published monthly out of Massachusetts.7 Editorship of DNR was assumed by Edward T. (“Eddie”) LeBlanc in July 1952, another Massachusetts resident, and the magazine’s frequency changed to bimonthly in October 1975.8 The magazine has been edited and published
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since 1994 by J. Randolph Cox, librarian and professor emeritus at St. Olaf College (Northfield, Minnesota) as well as author of The Dime Novel Companion: A Source Book (Greenwood Press, 2000). Issues consist of two to three articles on the writing, publishing, collecting, and preservation of dime novels and other forms of historical juvenile fiction. Issues have spotlighted a particular novelist, such as Laura Jean Libbey, a Brooklyn writer of sensational romance stories for women. The magazine also publishes notes, letters to the editor, and advertisements. A browsable list of articles from 1971 to the present is available on its website as well as a list of the supplemental bibliographies initiated by LeBlanc in 1958. The bibliographies outline titles found in particular series, among them Beadle’s Frontier Series, the Nick Carter Library, New Buffalo Bill Weekly, Munro’s Ten Cent Novels, and Street & Smith’s Literary Album.9 DNR is indexed back to 1991 in ABELL, and back to 1985 in MLAIB. Michael L. Cook provides a discussion of the history of the Happy Hours Brotherhood and Dime Novel Round-Up in Dime Novel Roundup Annotated Index 1931–1981 (Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1983); a number of DNR issues feature articles about the magazine’s origins. Realism–naturalism researchers interested in folk literature may want to browse through early issues of the Journal of American Folklore (JAF), which began publication in 1888 as the official organ of the “American Folklore Society.” As set forth in the first issue, the journal’s function is to preserve vanishing folklore and promote its study. Articles, of which there are an average of five per issue, discuss Native American and African American culture, including oral traditions. In addition, the journal publishes transcriptions of oral indigenous and African American literature (e.g., creation myths, chants, and black spirituals) as well as reviews of books, sound recordings, films, and events. Recent issues of the journal focus more on contemporary studies and are less likely to include content of relevance to the realism–naturalism period; older issues contain titles such as “Folk Expression of Time and Place: 19th-Century Midwestern Rural Diaries” and “Lafcadio Hearn, American Folklorist.” Journal of American Folklore is indexed back to 1929 in ABELL, but only back to 1958 in MLAIB; issues from 1888 are available through JSTOR, while more recent ones are covered by Project MUSE (2001–). Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers is the official journal of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Legacy’s articles focus on American women’s literature from the colonial era to the mid-twentieth century. Articles may be close readings of single works or they may consist of a more general discussion of representations of race, ethnicity, gender, or class in women’s literature. In addition to four to six articles, each issue has book
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reviews and between one and five “profiles”—short biographies—of lesserknown and newly discovered American writers. Legacy’s “From the Archive” section offers reproductions of letters, manuscripts, and other primary texts. The journal also reprints ephemeral writing; a 2000 issue reprinted an 1889 article by Sarah Orne Jewett from the Boston Globe. Each issue ends with the “Legacy Bookshelf,” a listing of recently published articles and books on a selection of female literary figures. Author, subject, profile, and book-review indexes are available on the journal’s website. The full text of articles from Legacy may be accessed through Project MUSE (2000–) and LION (1996–); the journal is indexed by both MLAIB and ABELL. Journal of Women’s History (JWH) publishes about four articles per issue (ranging from two to thirty pages long) on female identity and representation in all aspects of society and culture, including the literary world. Articles on realism–naturalism writers and works are present, but are few due to the journal’s international scope and a heavier concentration on modern studies. Started in 1989, JWH went from being released three times each year to being a quarterly publication in 1994. The journal is accessible online through Project MUSE (1999–). A search for scholarship about African American, Native American, or immigrant literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will bring up many articles from MELUS, the journal of the Society for the study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. In its inaugural issue, MELUS was described as a potential forum for the society’s dissemination of information and “ventilation of divergent views.”10 Issues, which are released quarterly, focus on a specific subject (e.g., “Ethnic Sexualities,” “Popular Literature and Film,” and “Varieties of Ethnic Criticism”) or subgenre, including African American Literature, Asian American Literature, or Italian American Literature. Each issue has up to ten articles of twenty to thirty pages as well as roughly ten to fifteen book reviews. Since its appearance in 1974, MELUS has produced articles on Charles W. Chesnutt, Zitkala-Sˇa, Onoto Watanna, and other minority writers of the period. All of the issues of the journal are indexed in MLAIB, but ABELL only examines issues back to 1991. Studies in American Indian Literatures (SAIL) describes itself as the only scholarly journal to exclusively publish articles about Native American literature. The editors define the journal’s scope as “all written, spoken, and visual texts created by Native peoples.” The bulk of each issue is devoted to scholarly articles (between five and ten per issue), but the journal also contains short fiction, poetry, interviews, and book reviews. The journal began in 1977 as Newsletter of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures before shortening its name to ASAIL Newsletter the following year.
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SAIL adopted its current title in 1980. Conveniently, all back issues from 1977 to 2004 are reproduced in complete form on the website. The journal is indexed in MLAIB back to 1983 and in ABELL back to 1991. Published biannually out of Northeastern University since 1973, Studies in American Fiction (SAF) collects articles, notes, and reviews on American novels and short stories from all historical periods. To distinguish itself from contemporary literature journals, SAF tends to draw on scholarship on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most issues include at least one article with a primary focus on a realism–naturalism text or writer. Issues consist of between four and eight articles and occasionally a couple of book reviews. MLAIB covers SAF back to its initial issue. At the time of this writing, there is a problem with ABELL indexing for the journal title. If a user searches for journal title Studies in American Fiction, the latest articles appear to be from 2000. While the title is listed a second time in the database index as “Studies in American Fiction (Dept. of English, Northeastern University, Boston, MA),” this version of the title cannot be selected for searching. The more recent article citations can be retrieved by author, title, or subject keyword searches, and the full text of SAF articles is available from 1998 to the present through LION. The journal’s website offers tables of contents for current and back issues. Journals of American humor are likely to include content about realism–naturalism writers since humorists like Mark Twain, Finley Peter Dunne, Bill Nye, and Marietta Holley were popular during the second half of the nineteenth century. Studies in American Humor (StAH), a scholarly journal published annually by Texas State University (San Marcos, Texas) for the American Humor Studies Association, regularly includes content about realism–naturalism writers. The first series of StAH was issued from 1974 to 1977. After a five-year hiatus, the second series started in 1982 and ended in 1994; a third series began with the issue for 1994/1996. Articles in StAH discuss irony, satire, and other forms of humor in a particular author’s writings or work of literature. The journal provides book reviews on all aspects of American humor. Occasional issues are devoted to a specific subject; other issues contain a special section of articles on one subject. Once a year a “Year’s Work in American Humor Studies” article is printed that outlines recently published articles and books. The journal is indexed by MLAIB, but only sporadically in ABELL. There are two websites for StAH. The official site presents information about the journal and tables of contents from 1999 onward. The “Compedit” site, run by former editor Jack Rosenbalm, provides the tables of contents and text of selected articles from the first two series (1974–1994). There are a number of scanned images of covers of special issues of StAH at the Rosenbalm site.
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Thalia, a journal of American humor, which ceased in 2004, is included here because it was a regular publisher of articles on realism–naturalism writers. The journal used to print between five and ten articles (approximately ten to twenty pages long) per issue as well as artwork and poetry. Thalia is only indexed up to the year 2000 in MLAIB; LION offers indexing with full text of the articles from 1997–2004. Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film (NCTF) features articles about nineteenth-century drama from around the world. Before moving to Manchester University Press in the United Kingdom, the journal was published for more than two decades under the shorter name Nineteenth Century Theatre out of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. A previous title was Nineteenth-Century Theatre Research (1973–1986), which merged with NCTR Newsletter (1976–1979). The journal’s subject scope is broad. Theatre and film are defined as all types of performance including, according to the journal’s website, “‘pre-cinema’ optical and narrative forms, ‘silent’ motion pictures, and illusions.” The journal also covers dance, opera, circus, and other types of visual performance art. Issues sometimes offer primary texts or bibliographies in addition to the three to five scholarly articles, which average about ten to twelve pages in length. Book reviews are a regular feature. NCTF is available online through LION and Manchester University Press’s Ejournals service; articles on the website contain abstracts. Only articles published under the new name (since 2002) are available. The journal is indexed in both MLAIB and ABELL. Released out of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, a nonprofit performing arts center located in New York City and affiliated with the City University of New York, the Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT) publishes scholarship about theatre throughout American history. While there is a greater focus on the twentieth century, articles on theatre in the late nineteenth century appear occasionally. Issues published three times a year (Winter, Spring, and Fall) offer four to six articles. The journal has a modest website that features a full index of their titles. JADT is indexed in both MLAIB and ABELL. Since 1969 the University of North Texas’s Studies in the Novel (SNNTS) has published articles on this genre, which makes up the majority of literature of the realism–naturalism era. This quarterly journal concerns itself with novels from every culture, even though its primary focus is English and American literature. Each issue consists of five or six articles and eight to ten book reviews; special issues are published on a nearly annual basis. Articles published from 1969 to the present are indexed by the literary figure they discuss on the journal’s website. For instance, a researcher could find Theodore Dreiser in the index and obtain a list of seven articles, among them “Dreiserian Tragedy” and “Walking Away from the Impossible Thing: Identity and
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Denial in Sister Carrie.” Studies in the Novel is indexed by both MLAIB and ABELL. Indexing with full-text articles is available through LION (1994).
AUTHOR-SPECIFIC JOURNALS AND NEWSLETTERS The Call. The Jack London Society, 1991–. Biannual. ISSN: 1083-6799. london .sonoma.edu/Organizations/jl_society.html. Cather Studies (CathSt). University of Nebraska Press, 1990–. Biennial. ISSN: 1045-9871. Available online at cather.unl.edu/scholarship/cs/index .html. Dickinson Studies: Emily Dickinson (1830–86), US Poet (DicS). D-H Press/Higginson Press, 1978–93. Previous title: Emily Dickinson Bulletin. (1968–78). Alternate title: Higginson Journal. Dreiser Studies (DrSt). Indiana State University, 1987–2006. Semiannual. ISSN: 0896-6362. Former title: The Dreiser Newsletter (1970–87). Current title: Studies in American Naturalism (vol. 1, 2006–) www.uncw.edu/dreiser/ studies. Edith Wharton Review (EWR). The Edith Wharton Society, 1990–. Semiannual. [No ISSN] Former title: Edith Wharton Newsletter (1984–1990) www .wsu.edu/~campbelld/wharton/ewr.htm. Ellen Glasgow Newsletter (EGN). Ellen Glasgow Society, 1974–. Semiannual. ISSN: 0160-7545. stedwards.edu/hum/rainwater/glasgow.html. Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin (EDISB). Johns Hopkins University Press for the Emily Dickinson International Society, 1989–. Biannual. ISSN: 1055-3932. emilydickinson.org/edis/bulletin.html. The Emily Dickinson Journal (EDJ). Johns Hopkins University Press for the Emily Dickinson International Society, 1992–. Semiannual. ISSN: 10596879. emilydickinson.org/edis/journal.html. Available online via Project MUSE (1998–) muse.jhu.edu/ and LION (2002–) lion.chadwyck.com/. Frank Norris Studies (FNS). Frank Norris Society, 1986–2004. Annual. ISSN: 1527-2354. www.csub.edu/franknorriscenter/fns.htm. The Henry James Review (HJR). Johns Hopkins University Press for the Henry James Society, 1979–. 3/yr. ISSN: 0273-0340. mockingbird.creighton .edu/english/jsociety.htm. Available online via Project MUSE (1995–) muse.jhu.edu/ and LION (2002–) lion.chadwyck.com/. Jack London Journal (JLJ). Skysail. Resumed 1994–. Annual. ISSN: 10755837. Previous title: Jack London Newsletter (1967–88). london.sonoma .edu/Organizations/. The Mark Twain Annual (MTA). Mark Twain Circle of America, 2003–. Annual. ISSN: 1553- 0981. winthrop.edu/english/twainannual/.
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Mark Twain Circular: Newsletter of the Mark Twain Circle of America (MTC). Mark Twain Circle of America, 1987–. Biannual. ISSN: 1042-5357. Available online (1999–) at faculty.citadel.edu/leonard/mtcircular.htm. Mark Twain Journal (MTJ). The Citadel, 1954–. Biannual. ISSN: 0025-3499. Previous title: Mark Twain Quarterly (1936–53). Newsboy. Horatio Alger Society, 1962–. 6/yr. ISSN: 0028-9396. Alternate title: Horatio Alger Society Newsboy. ihot.com/~has/contents.htm. Stephen Crane Studies (SCSt). Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1992. Semiannual. ISSN: 1061-6136. www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/ crane/scs.htm. The Twainian. Mark Twain Research Foundation and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, 1939–. Quarterly. ISSN: 0041-4573. Walt Whitman Quarterly Review (WWQR). University of Iowa, 1983–. Quarterly. ISSN: 0737-0679. Previous titles: Walt Whitman Review (1959–82) and Walt Whitman Newsletter (1955–58). uiowa.edu/~wwqr/. The Willa Cather Newsletter and Review (WCNR). Alternate title: Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation Newsletter and Review. Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation (The Willa Cather Society), 2000–. 3/yr. ISSN: 0197-663X. Former titles: Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter and Educational Foundation Newsletter (1975–99); Newsletter: Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation (1965–75); Newsletter: Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial (1957–65); Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter (1957). www.willacather.org/newsletter.htm. Author societies often sponsor periodicals that deal exclusively with the life and writings of a particular author. A number of these publications have been established for realism–naturalism writers. Many are slim newsletters that publish only a few articles per issue and emphasize society news, agendas of past or upcoming events, book reviews, and, sometimes, newly published contemporary ephemera by or about the writer. Author-specific periodicals about the most celebrated writers (e.g., Mark Twain, Henry James, and Edith Wharton) tend to be more substantial with a greater focus on scholarship. The specificity of these newsletters and journals make many of them difficult to find, as only the most comprehensive library collections include them. The more obscure newsletters are also not indexed in MLAIB or ABELL. Researchers may need to rely on interlibrary loan to examine issues and take advantage of any indexes and/or tables of contents provided by author society websites. Dreiser Studies (DrSt) was started in 1970 as The Dreiser Newsletter and adopted its new title in 1987. While the periodical transformed into Studies in
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American Naturalism in 2006, extending its scope to include a broader coverage of naturalistic literature, the older issues should be referred to for research articles related to this important realism–naturalism writer. Each issue consists of between two and five articles about Theodore Dreiser and his works along with a bibliography or checklist of recent scholarship. Issues of Dreiser Studies also contain a news and notes section plus a section on book reviews. The reviews are not limited to publications on Dreiser. DrSt published indexes of its contents in its Spring 1995, Spring 2000, and Winter 2004 issues, and the indexes are conveniently reproduced on the journal’s website. Further indexing is provided by MLAIB and ABELL. Edith Wharton Review (EWR), formerly Edith Wharton Newsletter, is the official publication of the Edith Wharton Society. EWR releases two issues each year (Spring and Fall) with short (three- to fifteen-page) critical essays, close readings, author comparisons, bibliographies, and reviews of books about Wharton. An announcement section reports on upcoming Whartonrelated events. Most but not all issues published between 1987 and 2003 are indexed by MLAIB, and the publication is indexed back to 1991 in ABELL. Tables of contents of recent issues are provided on the Edith Wharton Society website. The Emily Dickinson Journal (EDJ), established by the Emily Dickinson International Society in 1992, is a key source of scholarship on the American poet. EDJ publishes between four and twelve articles about her life and works. Other articles discuss her influence among American poets and women writers. Most issues feature a book review section. The journal is issued semiannually by Johns Hopkins University Press. Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin (EDISB) is the society’s biannual newsletter, issued from 1989 to the present. The newsletter publishes news of the society and member activities together with book notices, short articles, and announcements of exhibits and performances of interest to the membership. Both EDJ and EDISB are indexed in MLAIB and ABELL, and full-text articles from EDJ are accessible online through Project MUSE (1998–) and LION (2002–). The society’s website describes the organization and its publications, but does not list tables of contents. An older journal, Emily Dickinson Bulletin, was started in 1968 by Frederick L. Morey. Changing its title to Dickinson Studies: Emily Dickinson (1830–86), US Poet (DicS) in 1978, the journal printed scholarly articles as well as notes and queries on Dickinson until it ceased in 1993. Frank Norris Studies (FNS) was an annual periodical of Norris scholarship that discontinued publication in 2004. Sponsored by the Frank Norris Society, the issues (1986–2004) consisted of between three and five short articles—many by the same circle of scholars—and occasional book reviews.
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Articles critically analyzed Norris’s popular works (e.g., “Victorian Contexts for Frank Norris’s Yvernelle”) or introduced a newly published piece of ephemeral writing by the writer (“The College Man in South Africa: A New Article by Frank Norris”). The publication is indexed in MLAIB and back to 1991 in ABELL. Tables of contents are provided for back issues on the society’s website. The Henry James Review (HJR), the official journal of the Henry James Society since 1979, appears every winter, spring and fall. The journal publishes between five and ten articles by both new and established James scholars along with book reviews. HJR’s articles, about ten to twenty-five pages long, discuss the famed writer from critical, theoretical, and historical perspectives. The journal is issued by Johns Hopkins University Press for the society, and is accessible through Project MUSE (1995–). LION also offers full-text articles from 2002 to the present, and HJR is indexed by MLAIB and ABELL. The Ellen Glasgow Society publishes Ellen Glasgow Newsletter (EGN). Established in 1974, the semiannual newsletter provides short essays on the Virginian novelist, her works, and the lives and works of other writers of her style and period. EGN contributes primary material, such as letters and diary entries; book reviews and notes are also printed. EGN is indexed in both MLAIB and ABELL. In its original incarnation between 1967 and 1988, the Jack London Newsletter was published by H. C. Woodbridge, out of Southern Illinois University. It was released three times per year, and each issue consisted of three or four articles. The newsletter continued publication in 1994 as the Jack London Journal (JLJ), publishing articles on London and other turn-of-thecentury cultural figures of the American West. JLJ is indexed by MLAIB, but there are gaps in coverage in ABELL. Tables of contents up to the year 2000 are listed on the journal’s website. Dealing exclusively with Jack London is The Call, the biannual publication of the Jack London Society. The Call publishes articles and research notes about the writer along with book reviews, announcements, and book collecting information. The periodical is not indexed in MLAIB or ABELL. The Stephen Crane Society formed in 1990 and began sponsoring Stephen Crane Studies (SCSt) through the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 1992. The slim journal which comes out in the spring and fall of each year contains mostly shorter articles (five to fifteen pages) on aspects of Crane’s life—both broad and very specific investigations of his writings and comparisons of his works with those of his contemporaries. Also featured once per year is an annotated bibliography of articles from other scholarly journals, book chapters, and dissertations. The journal is indexed in full in both MLAIB and ABELL.
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There are a number of periodicals that deal exclusively with the life and works of Mark Twain. Two of these, The Mark Twain Annual (MTA) and Mark Twain Circular (MTC), are produced by the Mark Twain Circle of America, an organization of literary scholars and Twain enthusiasts. The Mark Twain Annual, which started in 2003 out of Winthrop University in South Carolina, publishes critical and pedagogical scholarship on Twain’s works contributed by its members. The journal’s website states that it is a juried publication “practicing blind submission”; submissions are accepted from nonmembers of the Mark Twain Circle, but these contributors are then expected to join the association. Each issue contains eight to ten essays and a selection of book reviews. MTA is indexed in MLAIB, but not in ABELL. Only the table of contents of the first issue is available on the journal’s website. Mark Twain Circular, initiated in 1987, is the newsletter of the Mark Twain Circle, reporting on the happenings of the society. Issues consist of announcements of Twain-related events, calls for papers, death notices of Twain scholars, and a bibliography of recent publications about the writer. The Circular is not indexed in either MLAIB or ABELL, although issues back to 1999 are available in full as PDF files on the newsletter’s website. The Twainian, a joint publication of the Mark Twain Research Foundation and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, originated as an early project of the Mark Twain Society of Chicago. Started by the society in 1939, the periodical was continued in 1942 by the Mark Twain Association of America and then by the research foundation in 1947. The Twainian consists of scholarly articles, musings by Twain enthusiasts, and previously unpublished ephemera by Twain and his contemporaries. An irregularly issued title, The Twainian has been a monthly and a bimonthly publication, and is currently published quarterly. It is indexed in MLAIB for only the years 1942 to 1959, but back to 1994 and sporadically before then in ABELL. As previously mentioned, Mark Twain Journal (MTJ) is the oldest American magazine devoted to a single author. Started by Cyril Clemens, Mark Twain enthusiast and founder of the International Mark Twain Society, MTJ was published from 1936 until 1953 as Mark Twain Quarterly before adopting its current name and becoming a biannual publication. Cyril Clemens, a distant relative of Twain, was the author of several books on the American writer, among them Young Sam Clemens (Portland, Maine: Leon Tebbetts Editions, 1942). According to a May 18, 1999 St. Louis Post obituary described on a webpage posted at The Citadel, Cyril Clemens filled his home with Twain memorabilia and collected famous sponsors and donors for the masthead of his publication, a list which included at one point Benito Mussolini until “he fell in with bad company.”11 MTJ, currently published out of the Department of English, The Citadel, is a scholarly publication consisting
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mostly of articles by academics as well as reprints of newspaper articles and other accounts of Twain’s life and works. The journal is indexed in MLAIB, and back to 1957 in ABELL. Newsboy is the official journal of the Horatio Alger Society, an organization dedicated to promoting interest in the dime novelist and the philosophy he promulgated in his books. Publication began when the society was founded in 1962. A monthly periodical in the 1970s, the newsletter is now issued bimonthly. Issues contain book reviews and conversational articles about Alger, his works, and the collection of his works. Article titles include “Horatio Alger, Jr.: Juvenile Writer, Durable Metaphor and Collectible Author” and “How Much Money Did Horatio Alger Really Earn?” Example articles are provided on the society’s website. Walt Whitman Quarterly Review (WWQR) is the official journal of the Walt Whitman Studies Association, affiliated with the American Literature Association. Issued out of the Department of English of the University of Iowa, the journal replaces the earlier Walt Whitman Review (1959–1982) and Walt Whitman Newsletter, which began in 1955. In addition to articles about Whitman, his works, and his cultural contexts, the Review publishes book reviews, notes, poetry, and newly discovered manuscripts related to Whitman. Each issue also contains a “Current Bibliography” that lists recently published articles, books, and book chapters about the poet. These bibliographies are compiled on the journal’s website, and are searchable back to 1975. WWQR’s website also posts an announcements section and two indexes. The first indexes the journal’s articles and other publications; the second covers books reviewed by the journal. Each issue contains between two and three articles, and two and four book reviews. The WWQR and its two predecessors are indexed in both MLAIB and ABELL. The Willa Cather Newsletter and Review (WCNR), also known as Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation Newsletter and Review, is a publication of the Cather Foundation, an organization in Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, that restores and preserves historic sites relating to the writer and her works. WCNR publishes scholarly essays and book reviews of works about the Midwestern novelist. Also included in each tri-yearly issue (quarterly until 1996) are research notes, educational opportunities, and notices of publications. While the periodical is indexed in both MLAIB and ABELL (back to 1990), older issues are listed under a number of titles (e.g., Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter and Review, Willa Cather Newsletter and Review, Newsletter: Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation, and Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter). Each index uses different versions of the various titles, so users attempting a comprehensive search of the articles should consider typing “Willa
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Cather” into the search box and specifying “journal title.” The results obtain some unrelated citations, but most refer to the Newsletter and Review. Cather Studies (CathSt) is both a print and an online publication (1990–) that features articles and notes on Cather scholarship and criticism. Sponsored by the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in cooperation with the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation, CathSt is issued by the University of Nebraska Press. The biennial offers articles on various aspects of Cather’s life and writings. MLAIB offers indexing from 1996 and ABELL from 1990.
GENERAL LITERATURE JOURNALS ELH. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956–. Quarterly. ISSN: 0013-8304. Former title: ELH: A Journal of English Literary History (1934–55). press .jhu.edu/journals/english_literary_history/index.html. Available online via JSTOR (1934–) www.jstor.org/, Project MUSE (1993–) muse.jhu.edu/, and LION (2002–) lion.chadwyck.com/. The Journal of the Midwestern Modern Language Association (JMMLA). Iowa City, IA: Midwestern Modern Language Association, 1968–. Semiannual. ISSN: 0742-5562. Former title: Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association (1968–83). www.uiowa.edu/~mmla/. Available via JSTOR (1968–) www.jstor.org/. Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History (MLQ). University of Washington, 1940–. Quarterly. ISSN: 0026-7929. Variant title: MLQ. depts.washington.edu/mlq. Available online via Project MUSE (1999–) muse.jhu.edu/ and Duke University Press Journals ONLINE, hosted by HighWire Press (2000–) dukejournals.org/. Modern Language Studies (MLS). Northeast Modern Language Association, 1971–. Biannual. ISSN: 0047-7729. Former title: NEMLA Newsletter (1969–70). www.nemla.org/mls.html. Older issues available online via JSTOR (1971–) www.jstor.org/. PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (PMLA). Modern Language Association of America, 1888–. 6/yr. ISSN: 0030-8129. Former titles: merged with Modern Language Association of America: Proceedings to become Transactions and Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America (1886–87); Transactions of the Modern Language Association of America (1884/85). www.mla.org/pmla. Available online by library subscription to PMLA (2002–) and older issues through JSTOR (1884–) www.jstor.org/. Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature (RMR). Pullman, WA: Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, 1948–. Semiannual.
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ISSN: 0361-1299. Former titles: The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association (1963–74) and The News Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association (1948–62). Online sister publication: The Rocky Mountain E-Review of Language and Literature (1998–), at rmmla.wsu.edu/ereview/default.asp. Available via JSTOR (1948–) www.jstor.org/. The following journals offer articles on all areas of literary studies and regularly publish scholarship on writers of the realism–naturalism period. They are popular literary journals that can be found in the collections of most academic libraries. Since the journals do not specialize in period authors and works, researchers should use MLAIB and ABELL to identify articles of interest. All of the journals are indexed in the two online bibliographies. PMLA and Modern Language Studies are associated with the Modern Language Association (MLA), the largest American organization consisting of language and literature scholars and teachers that acts as an umbrella organization to numerous smaller literary groups. The regional chapters of the Modern Language Association each release a general literary journal that serves as a forum for discussion for its members on a full range of literary topics. Since 1971 the Northeast Modern Language Association (NEMLA) has published Modern Language Studies (MLS), a biannual journal that regularly publishes special issues centered on a particular topic. In 2006 Modern Language Studies was moved from the NEMLA headquarters in Kingston, Rhode Island, to Susquehanna University and was redesigned. New issues are divided into three sections: essays on language and literature from around the world; essays of the state of the English teaching profession and on pedagogy; and a section of reviews of primary texts featuring new fiction, creative nonfiction, and new editions of canonical literature. MLS is available online via JSTOR (1971–). The Journal of the Midwestern Modern Language Association, which replaced the Bulletin of the Midwestern Modern Language Association in 1984, is similar in coverage and is also released twice a year. One issue is devoted to a special theme discussed at the association’s annual convention, while the other invites article submissions on all literary topics. Articles discuss literary theory, pedagogy, and the state of the English profession. The journal’s website lists TOCs back to 2001. The Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association publishes two periodicals: Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature and The Rocky Mountain E-Review of Language and Literature, the latter being an expanded, electronic version of the former. They publish articles on literature, pedagogy, film, culture, and writing. Included are articles about the writings
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of the realism–naturalism period. While the print journal, which has appeared under various names since 1948, is released twice per year, the electronic version features new articles as they are accepted and edited. The print review consists of three articles as well as a usually generous selection of book reviews. The e-review includes all of the articles from the print publication as well as accepted articles in foreign languages and articles with graphical, video, or audio components. PMLA, the scholarly journal of the Modern Language Association, is the product of the 1886 consolidation of two separate publications—Transactions of the Modern Language Association of America and Modern Language Association of America: Proceedings. For two years it was published as Transactions and Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America before adopting its current title in 1888. Early issues address only linguistic studies and older European literature rather than contemporary literature of the time; articles about writings of the realism–naturalism period of American literature do not appear until the early 1920s. While PMLA published the article “Henry James’s Oblique Possession: Plottings of Desire and Mastery in The American Scene” in 2001, recent issues tend to focus on modern literature. Realism–naturalism scholars are most likely to find relevant articles in PMLA issues of the 1950s through the 1970s. Issues of articles are published four times a year, the first of which is usually on a special topic. Each issue has roughly five to eight articles of fifteen to twenty pages. In addition, a directory issue is released every September, and each November issue acts as a program for the MLA Convention. While PMLA does not publish book reviews, issues include notes in specialized sections such as “Theories and Methodologies” and “Talks from the Convention.” Recent issues of PMLA, beginning with the 2002 volume, are available online by library subscription. The historical archive of the journal, beginning with the year 1884, is maintained online by JSTOR. The reputable ELH: A Journal of English Literary History, published by Johns Hopkins University since 1934, provides “superior studies that interpret the conditions affecting major works in English and American literature . . . with an intelligent mix of historical, critical, and theoretical concerns.”12 While the publisher’s description of the journal reports that there are no specific aims involved with article selection, the journal’s contents tend to focus on the sociopolitical contexts of English and American literature. The early volumes for 1934–1955 were issued by the Tudor and Stuart Club of Johns Hopkins University, and ELH covered primarily English literature. Newer issues, however, publish pertinent articles on American literature. ELH can be accessed online through JSTOR (1934–), Project MUSE (1993–), and LION (2002–).
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Published since 1940, Modern Language Quarterly (MLQ) is an interdisciplinary journal from the University of Washington (Seattle) that is primarily concerned with literature and how it has affected and affects other areas of cultures worldwide and throughout modern history. The journal’s website provides an index of articles published since 1990 and abstracts of all articles since 2000. Project MUSE (1999–) and the E-Duke Scholarly Collection, hosted by HardWire Press (2000–), offer Web access to the articles in MLQ.
CONCLUSION As stated in the introduction, the journals described in this chapter are not the only titles that publish realism–naturalism scholarship. Occasional articles on the topic appear in other general literary journals as well as journals of American studies that are not exclusively dedicated to literary scholarship. Researchers may discover these articles when searching a bibliographic database or when following citations from another text. The field of literary scholarship is so large that a combination of approaches is required to find every article pertinent to an area of inquiry. The thorough researcher searches both bibliographies and indexes, and browses new issues of the major titles in his or her field. Periodical directories, such as the MLA Directory of Periodicals (see chapter 4), Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory, and Magazines for Libraries (see Appendix entries) can be consulted for descriptions of scope and details regarding subscriptions and submissions.
NOTES 1. Due to the fact that the time period between the last issue available in JSTOR and the most recently published issue of a journal is a “moving wall” from zero to ten years, only the starting date of JSTOR coverage is given. 2. George L. Hamilton, comp., “American Bibliography for 1931,” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 46 (Supp. 1931): 1329–1414; Archer Taylor, comp., “American Bibliography for 1933,” PMLA 48 (Supp. 1933): 1295–1394. 3. Annabelle Macmillan, comp., “American Journals in the Humanities: A Guide to Scope and Editorial Policy,” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 72, no. 4, pt. 2. Supplement (September 1957): 52–65. 4. “Mark Twain Journal,” Mark Twain Circular: The Newsletter of the Mark Twain Circle of America 16, no. 2 (April/June 2002): [6], http://faculty.citadel.edu/ leonard/a-j02.pdf (accessed 8 November 2006).
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5. Michael L. Cook, Dime Novel Roundup: Annotated Index 1931–1981 (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1983), 11. 6. Cook, Dime Novel Roundup: Annotated Index 1931–1981, 7, 11. 7. Cook, 13. 8. Cook, 15–16. 9. Dime Novel Round-Up, “Dime Novel Round-Up—Bibliographic Listings, 1958–1998,” readseries.com/dnrubib.html (accessed 8 November 2006). 10. Naval Uday, “MELUS—Raison d’Etre and Statement of Faith,” MELUS 1, no. 1 (September 1974): 2. 11. James S. Leonard, Cyril Clemens, at faculty.citadel.edu/leonard/Cyril.htm (accessed 14 November 2006). 12. “ELH [Project MUSE description],” at muse.jhu.edu/journals/elh/ (accessed 12 November 2006).
Chapter Six
Publishing History Resources
Sources of publishing history information are important to the study of American literature of the realism–naturalism period as the era witnessed the emergence of an industry that would shape the nation’s reading and authorship patterns in the years to come. The invention of the steam-powered printing press and typewriter, along with the expansion of the railroad, allowed for the mass production and dissemination of popular texts. Frank Doubleday and Henry Holt started publishing empires, while older firms such as D. Appleton, C. Scribner and Sons, and Harper and Bros. continued to build upon business reputations earned before the Civil War. International ties between publishing houses were established as both New York and London firms opened branches across the Atlantic. Newspapers and magazines flourished, and became intimately tied to the book-publishing industry. It was during this time period, too, that nineteenth-century bibliographic entrepreneurs Orville Roorbach, James Kelly, Frederick Leypoldt, Richard Bowker, and Halsey Wilson began to publish trade catalogs that advertised descriptions and prices of thousands of American books. By the start of the twentieth century, Leypoldt’s Publishers’Weekly had become an important source of industry news, reviews, and statistics, and the newly founded American Library Association was supplying library selectors with reviews of books for sale in the A.L.A. Booklist. In 1905 Wilson’s Book Review Digest began indexing reviews from Critic, Bookman, New York Times, Review of Reviews, Dial, Literary Digest, Forum, Atlantic Monthly, and other periodicals. The “Best Seller” lists in Bookman and Publishers’ Weekly advertised the reading trends of the public. The many trade catalogs and magazines, library journals, and review digests developed in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries serve as important sources of publishing history information. Chap134
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ter 6 describes their contents and explains how they can be used in combination with bibliographies and guides for book collectors to identify early editions and ascertain original prices as well as publisher information. Since the correspondence and records of publishing houses often reveal details about authorial intention, book design, publishing guidelines, and editing decisions, the chapter provides several basic finding aids for locating the histories and archives of these firms. Chapter 6 also identifies guides to contemporary literature that allow researchers to investigate the critical reception of a literary work and trace its rise or fall in popularity. For those unfamiliar with publishing history terminology, the chapter includes a list of dictionaries that define publishing terms and the various abbreviations for book sizes that are not usually found in standard dictionaries.
VOCABULARY AIDS Carter, John. ABC for Book Collectors. 8th ed. Revised by Nicholas Barker. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press / London: British Library, 2004. Feather, John, ed. A Dictionary of Book History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Glaister, Geoffrey Ashall. Encyclopedia of the Book. 2nd ed., rev. With a new introduction by Donald Farren. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press / London: British Library, 1996. Previous titles: Glossary of the Book: Terms Used in Paper-making, Printing, Bookbinding and Publishing, with Notes on Illuminated Manuscripts, Bibliophiles, Private Presses, and Printing Societies. Incl. illus. and translated extracts from Grafisk uppslagsbok, Esselte, Stockholm. 1st ed. London: Allen and Unwin, 1960. An Encyclopedia of the Book. 1st ed. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1960. Glaister’s Glossary of the Book. 2nd ed., completely rev. London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1979. Peters, Jean, ed. The Bookman’s Glossary. 7th ed. New York: Bowker, 1994. First appeared in serial form as “The Bookman’s Glossary: Material for a Dictionary of the Book-trade” in the July 12, 1924 issue of Publishers’ Weekly. Cont. serial form until Sept. 6, 1924 (vol. 106: pp. 118–20, 188–90, 390–93, 442–44, 498–99, 543–45, 601–2, 714–17). Roberts, Matt, and Don Etherington. Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books: A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology. Drawings by Margaret R. Brown. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1982. palimpsest.stanford .edu/don/don.html (accessed 20 July 2006). Stokes, Roy Bishop. A Bibliographical Companion. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1989.
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Walter, Frank Keller. Abbreviations and Technical Terms Used in Book Catalogs and in Bibliographies. Boston: F. W. Faxon, 1919. Before beginning a search for publishing history information, researchers may want to identify available dictionaries of terms related to bibliography, printing, and book publishing. Those who are not involved in the book trade may be unfamiliar with the vocabulary of the profession. While The Oxford English Dictionary and other English-language dictionaries may be consulted if a more specialized source is not available, many publishing terms are not listed in these standard dictionaries. In fact, although there is some overlap, each of the specialized dictionaries has its own scope, strengths, and idiosyncrasies. Someone may value one source over the others depending upon his knowledge and background as well as the particular information he requires. As dictionaries published by British authors often mention terms unfamiliar to Americans and vice versa, the origin of the reference work can be a consideration. If the title of a dictionary is not indicative of its content, the preface should be consulted for further clarification. One of the classic dictionaries is ABC for Book Collectors (2004), a valuable work by John Carter (b.1905–d.1975), a British book collector and author of a number of bibliographical works. Carter earned the respect of book collectors around the world when he and Graham Pollard exposed the famous rare book fraud committed by Thomas J. Wise in the 1930s. A wellknown collector and bibliographer of the day, Wise (b.1859–d.1937) amassed the Ashley Library of British rare books and manuscripts later acquired by the British Library. Unfortunately, he also printed copies of many nineteenth-century pamphlets of poems and letters, using false imprints that made them appear to be earlier editions than any previously discovered, and described them as authentic editions in his bibliographies and catalogs. The scandal ensued when many of the pamphlets were exposed by Carter and Pollard as forgeries in An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets (1934).1 Carter’s dictionary, designed to inform both beginning and experienced book collectors, is known for “combining the presentation of the maximum of information with much tart and lively comment.”2 He emphasizes vocabulary important to collectors of both antique and modern books, and offers detailed descriptions of terms ranging from “édition de luxe” and “gauffred edges” to “gutta-percha” and “frontispiece.” Another standard title in the field is Glossary of the Book: Terms Used in Paper-making, Printing, Bookbinding and Publishing, with Notes on Illuminated Manuscripts, Bibliophiles, Private Presses, and Printing Societies (1960) by Geoffrey Ashall Glaister. Glaister (b.1917–d.1985) served for many years as a British Council librarian. From 1947 to 1977 he was sta-
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tioned in fourteen different countries.3 Glaister’s professional interest in printing technology led him to create the Glossary for his own use as he traveled from country to country. The second edition, published under its U.S. title Encyclopedia of the Book by Oak Knoll Press and the British Library in 1996, offers an encyclopedic treatment of book production terms and other publishing topics, including biographical accounts of printers and bibliophiles. The volume contains appendixes with type specimens, Latin place names in the imprints of early printed books, proof correction symbols, and a short reading list. Donald Farren’s introduction in the second edition talks about Glaister’s life and describes the scope of this historic work. Naturally, both Carter and Glaister use British spellings in their entries (e.g., “Colours of Cloth” and “Favourite Edition”) and emphasize terms that originated in the United Kingdom. However, many of their explanations include mentions of similar American terms. For instance, Carter’s definition of the British “press-mark” not only explains that it is, in libraries, “a mark or number [often both] written or stamped in or on each book,” and also given in the library catalogue, specifying the room, book press (hence the name), book-case, or shelf where the book is kept, but also states that, in America, “they are usually known as call-numbers.”4 Carter does not, however, provide a separate entry for “call number” and assumes that his readers know what a press is. Glaister refers to the press as a “cupboard,” but even this term may not be familiar to some twenty-first-century students, who may need to consult Roy Stokes’s A Bibliographical Companion (1989) to learn that a British “press” can be a bookcase. To provide an example, Stokes describes the library of Sir Robert Cotton where manuscripts were stored in presses named after the busts of Roman emperors placed atop the cabinets. The manuscripts, now held by the British Library, are still known by their Cottonian “press marks.”5 Some students may, in fact, prefer the basic definitions and references presented by Stokes in A Bibliographical Companion (1989). Roy Stokes (b.1915–d.1995) established the first U.K. library school outside of London in 1946, and was its head until 1970. He went on to serve as professor and library school director of the University of British Columbia. Stokes felt the need for a student-level vocabulary guide that would fall somewhere between the dictionaries of Carter and Glaister and created one especially intended for university students.6 His Bibliographical Companion offers easy-to-understand explanations of bibliographical terms as well as references to sources of further information. Stokes’s dictionary may be compared to and used in conjunction with The Bookman’s Glossary (1994), a practical guide to frequently used book publishing terms. The Bookman’s Glossary first appeared anonymously as “The Bookman’s Glossary: Material for a Dictionary of the
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Book-trade” in the July 12, 1924 issue of The Publishers’ Weekly and continued in serial form until September 6, 1924. Each issue offered a list of terms related to a different aspect of the book trade (e.g., “Book Papers and their Finishes,” “Terms Used in the Printing Trade,” “Bookbinding Terms,” and “Book Planning and Production”). The glossary was subsequently issued in book form by R. R. Bowker as The Bookman’s Glossary: A Compendium of Information Relating to the Production and Distribution of Books (1925) by John A. Holden. The longevity of Bowker’s Glossary, currently in its seventh edition (1994) and edited by Jean Peters, may interest scholars who are studying the growth and development of publishing vocabulary during the twentieth century. A Dictionary of Book History (1986) by John Feather also offers definitions of terms and biographical entries related to bibliography, the book trade, and libraries. Feather (b.1947–), professor of Library and Information Studies at Loughborough University in Leicestershire, the United Kingdom, offers valuable explanations in his dictionary. Users will discover that he intentionally makes use of bibliographic terms in his definitions. Numerous cross-references lead readers to the entries for these terms if explanations are needed. Those unfamiliar with the vocabulary may find their simple search for a term becoming a learning experience that requires searches for three or four other terms. The definition for “gathering” (below in figure 6.1), for example, includes the terms “duodecimo,” “folio,” and “quiring.” Cross-references are supplied, although not for the abbreviation “6s,” which stands for six sheets of paper. Feather’s definition of “quiring” states that it is most commonly found in fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and early seventeenth-century foilios but was also used in quarto and octavo breaks. As there are no explanations of “folio,” “quarto,” or “octavo,” the reader must search for definitions. Both students and professionals may appreciate the easy access to cross-references provided by HTML links in the online dictionary Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books: A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology. The dictionary is the on-
Figure 6.1. p. 117.
Modified entry for “Gathering.” Source: A Dictionary of Book History,
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line version of a print document originally issued by the U.S. Government Printing Office in 1982. Authored by Matt Roberts and Don Etherington, the dictionary was scanned and converted to ASCII text in 1994 by Walter Henry, a member of the Preservation Department, Stanford University Libraries. Henry also developed an online index for searching any of the words in the text. As is evident from the title, the dictionary focuses on the terminology employed in bookbinding and conservation practices. Users can learn about “mineral tanning,” a method of converting hides and skins into leather with metals, as well as “metallic inks,” which are printing inks used to produce colored effects, such as gold, silver, copper, or bronze.8 Descriptions are short, usually no more than one to two sentences long. Students sometimes have trouble deciphering the abbreviations used in nineteenth-century trade catalogs. While John Carter and Roy Stokes offer explanations of terms such as “deckle edge” (i.e., the irregular edge of a sheet of handmade paper), they do not have an entry for “d.e.”9 This may call for the extra step of looking for a guide that explains abbreviations. The standard Acronyms, Initialisms, & Abbreviations Dictionary (Thomson Gale, 2006) can be helpful if the student is willing to locate the appropriate “d.e.” in a long list of abbreviations that contain the same letters. Some libraries hold a copy of Frank Keller Walter’s Abbreviations and Technical Terms Used in Book Catalogs and in Bibliographies (1919). Walter (b.1874–d.1945) was an active library educator, author, and librarian at the University of Minnesota.10 His guide, published in a number of editions, began as an expansion of Mary Medlicott’s Abbreviations in Book Catalogues, which was issued in 1906 by the Boston Book Company as pamphlet 15 of its Bulletin of Bibliography series. The volume covers English, French, German, Danish–Norwegian, Dutch, Italian, Latin, Spanish, and Swedish abbreviations and terms, and includes a partial list of the authoritative sources consulted.
TRADE CATALOGS The American Catalogue: Author and Title Entries of Books in Print and for Sale (Including Reprints and Importations), July 1, 1876–Dec. 31, 1910. 15 vols. New York: The Publishers’ Weekly, 1880–1911. Reprint New York: Peter Smith, 1941. Founded by Frederick Leypoldt (pseud. L. Pylodet); compiled under the editorial direction of Richard R. Bowker, Augusta I. Appleton, and Lynds E. Jones. Challen, Howard, comp. Publishers & Stationers Trade Directory, 1867–1869. Philadelphia: H. Challen, 1867–69. 3 vols. Microfiche version in The Sabin Collection: Selected Americana from Sabin’s Dictionary of
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Books Relating to America, From Its Discovery to the Present Time. Louisville, KY: Lost Cause Press, 1977; currently produced by Thomson Gale (Sabin no. 11755/group 67/fiche: A581795–A58816). Available online via American History and Culture Online: Sabin Americana (Thomson Gale). www.gale.com. Previous titles: Publishers’ Uniform Trade List Directory, 1868; The Uniform Trade List Circular, 1867. H. W. Wilson Co. The United States Catalog: Books in Print. 1st–3rd eds., 1899–1912, Minneapolis: H. W. Wilson, 1900–12. 4th ed., New York: H. W. Wilson, 1928. Eds.: 1899, George F. Danforth and Marion E. Potter; 1902–12, Marion E. Potter (1912 with Emma L. Teich, Louise Teich, and Bertha Tannehill); 1928, Mary Burnham and Carol Hurd. Annual cumulations of the monthly Cumulative Book Index (previous title: Monthly Cumulative Book Index) issued as supplements to The United States Catalog until July 1921. Huttner, Sidney F. Online Index to Publisher Names in PTLA. Sidney Huttner, August 9, 2002–. sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/lucile/ptla/index.htm (accessed 2 Aug. 2006). Kelly, James, comp. The American Catalogue of Books, (Original and Reprints,) Published in the United States from Jan., 1861, to Jan. 1871, With Date of Publication, Size, Price, and Publisher’s Name. With Supplement, Containing Pamphlets, Sermons and Addresses on the Civil War in the United States, 1861–1866; and Appendix, Containing Names of Learned Societies, and Other Literary Associations, with a List of Their Publications, 1861–1866. 2 vols. New York: J. Wiley and Son, 1866–71; London: N. Trübner, 1866–71. Reprint New York: Peter Smith, 1938. The Publishers’ Trade List Annual. New York: Office of The Publishers’ Weekly, 1874–. Previous titles: The Uniform Trade List Annual (1873); The Annual American Catalogue, 1871 (1872); The Trade Circular Annual for 1871, including The American Catalogue of Books Published in the United States during 1870 (1871); The American Catalogue of Books, 1869. R. R. Bowker Co. The American Book Publishing Record Cumulative, 1876–1949: An American National Bibliography. 15 vols. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1980. R. R. Bowker Co., Depts. of Bibliography and Publications Systems. Fiction, 1876–1983: A Bibliography of United States Editions. 2 vols. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1983. A group of dedicated nineteenth-century American entrepreneurs published a series of trade catalogs in the hope that the bibliographic lists of books in print would stimulate bookselling and trading in the United States. The catalogs offer an incomplete but extensive record of American publishing for the period.
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They state when, where, and by whom the books were published, and give original prices, explanations of pseudonyms, author dates, and basic physical details. Some of the catalogs are merely lists of books gathered from individual publishing firms, arranged in alphabetical order by firm name and bound for distribution; others compile the bibliographic details obtained from the publisher advertisements in alphabetical order by title and author in huge volumes that cover books published over a range of years. The compilers of the catalogs, workers in publishing firms, did not examine the actual books in libraries, so library locations for specific works are not identified. Since the citations were collected from advertising literature, they may not be as reliable as those in the descriptive bibliographies discussed in chapter 4. Users may find bibliographic “ghosts”—entries for editions that never existed or existed in another form—and should compare the citations with information from other sources.11 The men who produced the trade catalogs most valuable to those studying the literary works of the American realism–naturalism period were inspired by the early efforts of nineteenth-century bookseller and publisher Orville A. Roorbach (b.1803–d.1861). Roorbach, originally a farm boy, apprenticed with a bookseller in New York, and then opened his own shop in Charleston, South Carolina, in the mid-1820s. In 1845 he moved back to New York and established a reputation for his extensive knowledge of bibliography and the book trade. Roorbach compiled the first volume of Bibliotheca Americana and published it in 1849. The catalog listed twenty-five thousand American titles published between 1820 and 1849. He was able to issue a supplement with two thousand more titles (October 1852 to May 1855) before his death, and his work on the remaining volumes was continued by New York bookseller, library agent, and publisher Charles B. Norton (b.1825–d.1891), who completed the descriptions for titles published to 1861.12 Fortunately for period researchers, James Kelly (b.1829–d.1907), an Irish immigrant who worked in the order department of a New York publisher, felt that the Bibliotheca Americana should be continued as soon as the Civil War ended. Kelly titled his catalog The American Catalogue of Books.13 His initial volume, completed in 1867, listed over eleven thousand titles published from 1861 through 1866 along with over two thousand pamphlets, services, and addresses on the Civil War and the publications of seventy-three learned societies and other literary associations. A second volume contained descriptions of works issued from January 1866 to January 1871.14 Despite Kelly’s enthusiastic efforts to produce a comprehensive catalog—even to the point of including some pre-1861 titles omitted from Roorbach’s catalog—his records are far from complete. Postbellum publishers, especially those located in cities of the South, were reluctant to respond to his communications. Kelly
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devoted a separate section to Southern firms and the books they issued during the Civil War; the list comprises only a half of a page of titles from four firms: Evans and Cogswell (Columbia, South Carolina), S. H. Goetzel (Mobile, Alabama), Sterling and Albright (Greensboro, North Carolina), and West and Johnson (Richmond, Virginia). Most are not works of fiction; they are primers and collections of rebel songs, regulations, and recipes. Kelly’s difficult project, while appreciated by present-day scholars, was not profitable at the time. He discontinued his work, discouraged at the lack of support from fellow members of the book trade.15 The books described in Kelly’s American Catalogue of Books are organized alphabetically by author and title. They cover a wide range of subject areas from settlers’ guides to the West and homeopathic remedies to children’s books, law reports, and war diaries. Readers can browse through the titles to survey the topics of interest to nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury readers. A typical entry consists of the names of the author(s), editor(s), and/or translator(s); title; number of volumes; size; price; place of publication; publisher; and date. Some entries include physical description abbreviations, such as “gilt,” “oblong,” “sheep,” “cloth,” and “pap.” Since these terms and abbreviations are not explained in the catalogs, readers will have to look for definitions in one of the specialized dictionaries mentioned above. James Kelly was not the only person in the book trade to solicit bibliographic information from publishers during the 1860s. Howard Challen (fl. 1873–1878), a Philadelphia book publisher, also contacted firms for trade lists. Challen did not attempt to create an alphabetized bibliography, but chose, instead, to collate the trade lists received, bind them, and distribute them. The first annual compilation of his monthly publication was entitled The Uniform Trade List Circular (1867).16 The title was changed in 1868 to The Publishers’ Uniform Trade List Directory; The Publishers & Stationers Trade Directory, 1867–1869 completed the three-volume set. The content and style of the publisher trade lists sent to Challen’s firm varied. Most consisted only of titles and prices, although some offered author names, physical descriptions, and even abstracts and color advertisements. Each of the over two hundred firms is listed alphabetically in the table of contents. Print copies of The Publishers & Stationers Trade Directory, 1867–1869 can be found in a number of libraries. The directory may also be obtained through access to Thomson Gale’s full-text database American History and Culture Online: Sabin Americana, 1500–1926 and microfiche set The Sabin Collection: Selected Americana from Sabin’s Dictionary of Books Relating to America, From Its Discovery to the Present Time.
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The idea of producing a comprehensive American catalog of books was not reconsidered until publisher and bibliographer Frederick Leypoldt (b.1835–d.1884) came to the United States. Leypoldt, an enterprising German American who learned about the book trade in the bookstore of F. W. Christern in New York, opened his own store in Philadelphia and established a publishing firm with Henry Holt (Leypoldt and Holt) after the Civil War. Leypoldt was an indefatigable worker with original ideas that would change the book publishing and library science professions. Among his many accomplishments was the creation of Publishers’ Weekly, a weekly trade magazine, and an annual compilation of publisher catalogs called The Publishers’ Trade List Annual (PTLA). He helped to found the American Book Trade Association, American Library Association, and the profession’s Library Journal as well as Index Medicus, the key index to publications related to the field of medicine.17 Like Howard Challen, Leypoldt decided to collect and issue an annual collection of publisher trade lists. Leypoldt, however, took on this project with the intention of using the bibliographic information to produce a cumulative volume of American imprints. Beginning in 1870, he issued the forerunners of The Publishers’ Trade List Annual: The American Catalogue of Books, 1869 (1870), The Trade Circular Annual for 1871, including The American Catalogue of Books Published in the United States during 1870 (1871), The Annual American Catalogue, 1871 (1872), and The Uniform Trade List Annual (1873). Leypoldt’s name was given as “L. Pylodet,” an anagram for Leypoldt. He used the pseudonym on a number of his publications, including The American Catalogue.18 The annuals resembled Challen’s Uniform Trade List Circular except that they offered some additional aids. The Trade Circular Annual for 1871, for instance, included “a list of the principal books published in England; a publishers’, manufacturers’, and importers’ directory, and alphabetical list of nearly eight hundred articles suitable for sale at the book, stationery, music, and fancy goods stores; a summary of American and English novelties, and miscellaneous literary and trade information.” The trade lists collected by Leypoldt’s firm vary. Some present only the basic titles and prices, while others contain descriptions of dust jackets, series information, and biographical facts about authors. Leypoldt was not able to create indexes for all of the authors and titles advertised in the volumes of the PTLA. Indexes would have offered greater access to the descriptions, as the numbers of participating firms and advertisements increased exponentially over the years. The Trade Circular Annual for 1871 contains trade lists from twenty-four firms; by 1880, more than 175 firms were contributing trade lists and advertisements. Researchers looking for mentions of titles and authors in the PTLA should locate annual volumes
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that have the trade list of the appropriate publisher before browsing the lists for information. To make this process easier, Sidney Huttner, head of Special Collections, the University of Iowa Libraries, has made available his workin-progress Online Index to Publisher Names in PTLA on the Web. At this time, Huttner’s Online Index covers the years 1873–1880. By clicking on a specific year, users can obtain an alphabetical list of the firms that either contributed a trade list for that year or advertisements of books in lieu of a list. Huttner’s index is limited to publisher names; locations are only provided when it is necessary to distinguish between two publishers with the same name. The user can check WorldCat for library locations once the specific PTLA volumes have been identified. Although the Center for Research Libraries does not hold a full run, the center holds many volumes of the PTLA. Frederick Leypoldt’s ambition of continuing Kelly’s American Catalogue was fulfilled, although the project nearly sent him into bankruptcy and he died of overwork and worry at forty-eight.19 The American Catalogue offers descriptions of books in print and for sale from July 1, 1876, to December 31, 1910. Each volume is arranged in one alphabetical sequence by author, title, and subject. Entries are similar in structure to Kelly’s. Unfortunately, the costs of producing the catalog were so high that Leypoldt was forced to seek financial assistance from Andrew Armstrong, another New York publisher. Armstrong’s firm issued the first two volumes of The American Catalogue in 1880 and 1881.20 Publisher Richard Bowker (b.1848–d.1933)—friend and co-founder of the American Library Association and Library Journal—offered to purchase Publishers’Weekly on a temporary basis and issue the other volumes of The American Catalogue. Bowker’s ownership of both publications became permanent when Leypoldt died in 1884.21 Under his leadership, Leypoldt’s innovative but costly projects began earning profits, among them the monthly catalog of books in print The American Book Publishing Record, started in 1876.22 The American Book Publishing Record (ABPR) lists all books published or distributed in the United States. Entries give details on titles, authors, publisher, place of publication and date, copyright date, page arrangement and number, series, notes, Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress call numbers, ISBN, binding, and price. The information may be useful to realism–naturalism researchers, but they may want to find a copy of the fifteen-volume cumulative set of ABPR. Entitled The American Book Publishing Record Cumulative, 1876–1949: An American National Bibliography and published by the Bowker Company in 1980, the set eliminates the tedious process of looking through the monthly or annual issues. Entries in the first ten volumes of the cumulative set are arranged by subject according to the Dewey Decimal Classification system. Volume 11 is devoted to fiction, volume 12 to juvenile fic-
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tion, and volume 13 to non–Dewey Decimal classified titles. The last two volumes provide author and title indexes. In 1983 the Bowker Company used ABPR citations to compile Fiction, 1876–1983: A Bibliography of United States Editions, a two-volume set prepared by the company’s Department of Bibliography and Department of Publications Systems. Fiction, 1876–1983 lists citations for American editions of fiction, such as “novels, novellas, short stories, collections of short stories, and anthologies.” Both hardcover and paperback editions are included. Volume 1 offers a classified author and a main author index. In the classified author index, author birth and death dates are given when available, and the authors are grouped by nationality and/or the period in which they wrote. The main author index uses the fullest form of the names and cross-references to pseudonyms. Volume 2 of Fiction, 1876–1983 has a title index as well as a directory and a list of abbreviations for publishers and distributors. There is no index for time period except the classified author groupings (e.g., Authors, American—19th Century). An additional one thousand titles published from 1800 to 1876 were included in the set. Halsey W. Wilson (b.1868–d.1954), another nineteenth-century entrepreneur, was the chief rival of Richard Bowker. Originally the owner of a bookshop in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Wilson was interested in bibliographic projects. He founded a publishing firm, moved it to White Plains, New York, and then to the Bronx where it is still in operation today.23 The H. W. Wilson Company publishes Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature (1901–), Book Review Digest (1905–), Library Literature (1936–), and Wilson Library Journal; the company issued the first edition of The United States Catalog: Books in Print, 1899 in 1900.24 The catalog of books available in print was divided into two parts. Part one contained the author index, and part two, the title index. Entries in the second (1903) and third editions (1912) were arranged in one alphabetical sequence under author, subject, and title, and give information about bindings. The fourth edition (1928), arranged in a similar fashion, offered a “Directory of Publishers” on pages 3153–3164, compiled by Leonora R. Martin. By the early twentieth century, there were thousands of publishers and titles to record, and the unwieldy volumes contain numerous errors. Supplements were provided by annual compilations of the monthly Cumulative Book Index (CBI), previously entitled Monthly Cumulative Book Index until July 1921. Wilson started the monthly book indexes when Publishers’ Weekly discontinued its semiannual compilation of author/title records of books for sale.25 After 1928, Cumulative Book Index began reporting titles published in other English-speaking countries. Wilson’s products provided competition for Bowker’s, and a rivalry began that eventually culminated in a compromise in 1911. Bowker agreed to end
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the quarterly and annual lists of books for sale (but not the weekly lists) announced in Publishers’ Weekly, and to suspend his production of The American Catalogue. Wilson, in turn, agreed to increase the coverage of his Cumulative Book Index, focus on periodical indexes, and transfer his directories of librarians and booksellers to Bowker.26 Many of the bibliographic products of the two companies are still in existence, although the Bowker Company was sold to the Xerox Corporation in 1967 and, in 1985, to Reed International, which is currently part of the Reed Elsevier Group.27 Wilson’s Cumulative Book Index was discontinued in 2000 after more than one hundred years of existence, but The Publishers’ Weekly—now known as Publishers Weekly (PW)—still circulates trade news, advertisements, and descriptions of new publications.
THE PUBLISHERS’ WEEKLY AND ITS PREDECESSORS American Literary Gazette and Publishers’ Circular. Philadelphia, PA: G. W. Childs, 1863–72. American Publishers’ Circular and Literary Gazette. New York: Book Publishers’ Association, 1855–63. Full text available via APS Online for 1855 to Dec. 1862. www.proquest.com. The Criterion: Literary and Critical Journal. New York: C. R. Rode, 1855–56. Norton’s Literary Gazette and Publishers’ Circular. New York: C. B. Norton, 1852–55. Previous title: Norton’s Literary Advertiser (1851). Publishers Weekly. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1906–. Previous titles: The Publishers’Weekly (1873–1906); The Publishers’ and Stationers’Weekly Trade Circular (1872). The Trade Circular and Publishers’ Bulletin. New York: Leypoldt and Holt, 1870–71. Previous titles: The Trade Circular and Literary Bulletin: A Special Medium of Inter-Communication for Publishers, Booksellers, and Stationers (1869–70); The Literary Bulletin: A Monthly Record of Current Literature (July to August 1869); Leypoldt and Holt’s Literary Bulletin: A Monthly Record of Current Literature (Feb. to June 1869). Frederick Leypoldt started Publishers’ Weekly in 1872 as a weekly magazine that would bring trade news, advertisements, and descriptions of new books to booksellers, librarians, publishers, and others connected to the book trade. The magazine emerged as a blending of earlier trade publications—a tangled group of titles that can be difficult for literary researchers to unravel. In 1872, Leypoldt purchased American Literary Gazette and Publishers’ Circular
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from Philadelphia publisher George W. Childs (b.1829–d.1894) and merged Childs’s magazine with his own Publishers’ and Stationers’ Weekly Trade Circular, the trade version of the Literary Bulletin he had developed with Henry Holt in 1869. This union produced Publishers’ Weekly, as it was titled in 1873.28 George Childs’s Circular was itself the result of a blending of two publications: Norton’s Literary Gazette and Publishers’ Circular and The Criterion. Norton’s was started in 1851 by Charles B. Norton of Bibliotheca Americana fame and taken over by the Book Publishers’ Association when Norton retired.29 Norton’s declared itself to be “a monthly record of works published in America, England, Germany and France,” that offered “a review of the current literature of the day, contents of leading American and English periodicals, [and] advertisements of the trade.” The Criterion was edited and published by Charles R. Rode (b.1826–d.1865). Established in 1855, it was a weekly paper of literary communication and criticism.30 Under the management of Augusta Leypoldt, Frederick’s widow, and Richard Bowker, Publishers’ Weekly provided a “Weekly Record” and, until 1919, a “Monthly List” of American books. The “Annual Cumulation” of books was discontinued when Wilson’s CBI became popular.31 Over the years PW offered columns like “Literary and Trade Notes” and “Tips from the Publishers,” as well as literary gossip columns like “Personal Notes.”32 Readers could discover that Peter Parley was the pseudonym of Samuel G. Goodrich, learn that Frank Norris was working on The Octopus, and read about old booksellers of New York. They could obtain advance announcements of forthcoming books published in England, France, and Germany as well as literary news from abroad in “Foreign Correspondence.” A “Monthly Book Review” was offered from 1912 to 1932.33 PW also tried to educate members of the book trade with articles on book production, e.g., “How to Judge the Size of an Old Book,” printed in the June 13, 1896 issue. A “Hints to Salesmen” column began in 1891. The magazine advertised auction sales, published notices of books wanted, and posted the bestseller lists that recorded the public’s taste in reading.34 Publishing history researchers will find a wealth of information in PW, although it is difficult to find indexing for the earliest articles, columns, and notes of this important trade journal. From 1872 onward, PW was indexed for internal use. This internal indexing was never published, nor was it offered for general distribution, although the index was issued upon request to some academic and research libraries.35 Those online can take advantage of 19th Century Masterfile’s ability to locate hundreds of articles published between 1896 and 1898 if they choose the “Browse” option for periodical titles and search for the magazine title with the spelling Publisher’s Weekly. The citations in 19th Century Masterfile come from the Cumulative Index
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to a Selected List of Periodicals for 1896–1899. The original print version of this index was issued in eight print volumes by the Cleveland (Ohio) Public Library from 1896 to 1898, by the Helman-Taylor Company in 1899, and by the Cumulative Index Company from 1900 to 1903 before it was absorbed by Wilson’s Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature in November 1903. Unfortunately, Readers’ Guide did not index PW until 1929, and Library Literature began its indexing in 1921. Some books reproduce and analyze information from PW. Keith L. Justice’s Bestseller Index: All Books, by Author, on the Lists of “Publishers Weekly” and the “New York Times” through 1990 (McFarland, 1998) indexes the bestseller lists, and John Tebbel’s The Expansion of an Industry, 1865–1919 (1975) contains PW’s American book production figures, a service offered by PW beginning in 1881. Tebbel also records information from the 1888, 1900, and 1919 publisher directories issued by the periodical.
IDENTIFYING FIRST EDITIONS American Book Prices Current (ABPC). New York: Bancroft-Parkman, 1894/95–. Annual. ABPC on CD-ROM, 1975–. Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA), at www.abaa.org (accessed 12 October 2006). Blanck, Jacob. Peter Parley to Penrod: A Bibliographic Description of the Best-Loved American Juvenile Books. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1956. Boutell, Henry Sherman. First Editions of To-day and How to Tell Them. 1st ed. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1928. Later editions published in 1937, 1949, and 1965. Columbia University Libraries. L. Frank Baum, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”: An Exhibition of His Published Writings, in Commemoration of the Centenary of His Birth, May 15, 1856, Columbia University Libraries: January 16–March, 1956. Arr. and described by Joan Baum and Roland Baughman, Dept. of Special Collections, Columbia University Libraries. New York: Columbia University Libraries, 1956. Hanff, Peter E., and Douglas G. Greene. Bibliographia Oziana: A Concise Bibliographical Checklist of the Oz Books by L. Frank Baum and His Successors. Rev. and enl. ed. Kinderhook, IL: International Wizard of Oz Club, 1988. McBride, Bill, comp. A Pocket Guide to the Identification of First Editions. 6th rev. ed. Hartford, CT: McBride/Publisher, 2001. Zempel, Edward N., and Linda A. Verkler, eds. First Editions: A Guide to Identification: Statements of Selected North American, British Common-
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wealth, and Irish Publishers on Their Methods of Designating First Editions. 4th ed. Peoria, IL: Spoon River Press, 2001. One of the most important decisions researchers make involves their selection of the “best” scholarly edition of a literary work. An edition is all copies of a book printed from a single set of type.36 If substantial changes are made in the original type setting for one or more of the essential parts of the work (e.g., text, appendixes, or illustrations), the book is printed as a second edition.37 There may be a number of other editions following the first edition. Researchers examine the various editions and choose the one they believe is the closest to the author’s intentions. Some feel that the most authoritative edition is the last one approved by the author in his or her lifetime, even if it contains obvious misprints and errors, or represents a compromise between the author and the publisher. Others look for the first edition or, sometimes, even more specifically, for the first impression or printing of the first edition—especially if they are book collectors. The first impression of the first edition is the group of books produced from the first run of the printing press before any plates are removed to make changes.38 If minor changes are necessary, the press is stopped so the plates can be removed and changed; the next press run is considered to be a second impression or printing of the first edition. Some adjustments to a book are made simply to correct minor spelling or punctuation errors in the book, to add advertisements or dedications, or to rearrange or delete illustrations. Varying “states” of the book occur when the pages of some copies of a single printing are changed either during the printing process or after the printing is completed. Corrections can be made by removing the incorrect pages and inserting replacements called “tip-ins.”39 The term “state” covers all variants from the so-called ideal copy.40 A printing in which a change was planned and identified by the publisher, such as the intentional substitution of one publisher’s name for another on the title page or a new preface, is called an “issue.”41 The book is re-issued, and the title page may include such words as “With a New Preface.”42 “Points” are the features that help to distinguish between one issue and another, or one impression and another.43 The bibliographies discussed in chapter 4 describe the “points” that help researchers distinguish between the various editions and printings of American literary works. Bibliography of American Literature (BAL), compiled by Jacob Blanck, offers detailed physical descriptions and library locations of works published from the American Revolution to 1930. Matthew Bruccoli’s First Printings of American Authors (FPAA) can be used to identify the particular features of first printings, and Lyle Wright’s and Geoffrey Smith’s American Fiction volumes give valuable, if not detailed, descriptions of fiction titles published from 1851 to
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1925 along with library locations. Bibliography of American Fiction through 1865, edited by Kent P. Ljungquist, and Bibliography of American Fiction 1866–1918, edited by James and Gwen L. Nagel, feature author bibliographies of both major and minor American writers that include first editions of American books and their locations. A scholar who is examining a copy of the first printing of the first edition of Jack London’s John Barleycorn with the original dust jacket will be able to verify edition and printing details with the staff of the repository that holds it. However, editions not held in special collections and works by lesserknown authors may be more difficult to verify without additional information. The selection of an appropriate literature bibliography, author-specific bibliography, or other source that might confirm the details depends on the type of work in question. Was the book published in the nineteenth or the early twentieth century? Is the researcher only interested in the first printing of the first edition? Does he need an image of the title page, book cover, or dust jacket? Will he need to view the book in a library, or will an online image be adequate for the purposes of the study? Does the work fall into a category of literature that may not have been covered in most of the standard bibliographies (e.g., juvenile fiction)? A search for the first edition of William Dean Howells’s A Foregone Conclusion (Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1875) requires a different set of resources than a search for the first edition of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Chicago and New York: George M. Hill, 1900). While The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a classic title, its status as a work of twentiethcentury juvenile fiction eliminates it from consideration in many standard bibliographies, including BAL, FPAA, the Bibliography of American Fiction: 1866–1918, and Wright’s American Fiction. This makes the search for information on this title more challenging. In contrast, A Foregone Conclusion was published as a work of adult fiction in the late 1800s, and BAL provides a detailed description of the book (figure 6.2) as well as information about advertisements in Publishers’ Weekly (abbreviated as PW) and Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record (PC). The physical details of A Foregone Conclusion are described in BAL, but there is no reproduction of the title page. The researcher learns, however, that a copy of the first printing of the first edition is located at Harvard University (H) and the New York Public Library (NYPL). The first editions could be examined. Moving on to other bibliographies, she discovers the book is not treated in Bruccoli’s FPAA, and that Bibliography of American Fiction: 1866–1918 does not add any details to those already given in BAL. However, Wright’s American Fiction, 1851–1875, offered through Literature Online, proves to be valuable, as it provides the text and images of the pages in addi-
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Figure 6.2. Modified entry for A Foregone Conclusion. Source: Bibliography of American Literature, p. 392–393.
tion to the bibliographic citation and library locations. The copy is obviously a first printing of the first edition as the word “Europeans” is plural on page 9 and the “merchant” in Merchant of Venice is not capitalized on page 75 (as described in BAL). In the case of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, researchers are fortunate to have bibliographies published on the Wizard of Oz series because the standard bibliographies do not include this work of juvenile literature. They can also consult the trade guides compiled by booksellers and collectors designed to assist book buyers in identifying first printings of first editions. While trade guides in their various forms may not be as authoritative as the standard bibliographies of primary works, they can offer useful details to consider. Some give physical descriptions of first editions, while others outline the policies of individual publishers in regard to edition identification. Publishers do not always note the particular edition or printing in their books, and there is no one standard procedure for stating this information when they do. Some firms indicate edition or printing on the copyright page with the last number on the right of a string of numbers and others with the first number on the left; others add code letters to the copyright page. For example, “AM” may mean January 1912, and “LD,” November 1929. Obviously, the codes
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only make sense if they can be checked against a guide with a list of codes and their explanations. Even if there appears to be no means of denoting edition or printing, someone may find it reassuring to read that the publisher does not usually designate first editions in any special way. In their fourth edition of First Editions: A Guide to Identification (2001) Edward N. Zempel and Linda Verkler collect statements from over 1,500 North American, British Commonwealth, and Irish publishers regarding their methods of designating the first impression or printing of a first edition. Since these practices change through the years, the authors have chosen to assemble not only the statements of current methods but also those from previous years. They accomplish this by adding similar information obtained from Henry S. Boutell’s first (1928), second (1937), third (1949), and fourth edition (1965) of First Editions of To-day and How to Tell Them as well as the earlier versions of their own guide. Boutell’s guides are standard works now out of print. Despite the inclusion of older details from Boutell, however, Zempel and Verkler do not have an entry on George M. Hill, the publisher of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. While Bill McBride’s A Pocket Guide to the Identification of First Editions is a self-published booklet, the guide discusses some nineteenth-century publisher practices that were changed by the early twentieth century when the first edition of Boutell’s guide was issued. In addition to collecting publisher statements, McBride has examined nineteenth-century books and noted some earlier methods of indicating first editions that were used in books published from 1850 to the early twentieth century. Currently in its sixth edition (2001), McBride’s booklet is designed to be a compact guide for collectors, dealers, librarians, and auctioneers to bring to sales. A downloadable version entitled An Electronic Guide to the Identification of First Editions is for sale on McBride’s website. There is also a CD-ROM version based on the sixth edition of the Pocket Guide. American Book Prices Current (ABPC) is another trade guide that may be useful to researchers. ABPC has been issued annually in print format since the late 1800s (1894/95–) and on CD-ROM from the mid-1970s (1975–). Currently issued by Bancroft-Parkman, the guide is a valuable source of information on printed and manuscript material sold at public auction in a number of countries, including North America, England, Germany, Monaco, the Netherlands, Italy, and Australia. The CD-ROM version’s ABPC-Books focuses on books, maps, broadsides, and other printed material, while ABPC-A & Ms (Autographs and Manuscripts) covers autographs, manuscripts, documents, signed photographs, and other material that is entirely or partly handwritten. The print version assigns these different categories to “Part I” and “Part II.” As “hammer prices” are listed (i.e., the prices actually called out in the sale room before taxes and
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auction house premiums are added), users can study the current values of literary works. They can compare them to the original selling prices and examine the differences between the market values of the various editions. In each entry, the bibliographic information on the books is followed by a physical description, the name of the auction house in code, the date of the sale, the lot number, and the price. Other details (e.g., the name of the buyer) are sometimes given. There are explanations for abbreviations and codes. Web surfers may want to browse the descriptions of books for sale on the website of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA). Since 1949, the ABAA has worked to promote ethical standards and professionalism in the antiquarian book trade in the United States as well as internationally through its affiliation with the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB). The ILAB encompasses national associations that represent antiquarian booksellers in twenty-eight countries. In addition to a description of the organization and its history, the website has an online catalog of books offered by ABAA members that can be searched by author or title. Visitors can also browse books by subject in the catalog or list their search criteria in the “Wants” section so that they may be contacted when the book becomes available on the market. Figure 6.3 is a sample entry for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Along with details about specific editions for sale (in this case, a first edition, second state), the visitor obtains information about several important bibliographies that he should have encountered in his library research: “Hanff/Greene” and Peter Parley to Penrod. Author or series bibliographies, such as the guides for the Wizard of Oz series, are valuable resources for the publishing history of literary works. Both
Figure 6.3. Modified entry for L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Source: ABAA website www.abaa.org (accessed 12 October 2006).
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the revised and enlarged edition of Peter E. Hanff and Douglas G. Greene’s Bibliographia Oziana: A Concise Bibliographical Checklist of the Oz Books by L. Frank Baum and His Successors, issued by the International Wizard of Oz Club in 1988, and the commemorative exhibition bibliography created by Columbia University Libraries in 1956 (full title given above) outline the complex history of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Those interested should also consult the authoritative and detailed descriptions of the various editions and printings recorded by Jacob Blanck in Peter Parley to Penrod: A Bibliographic Description of the Best-Loved American Juvenile Books (1956). In Peter Parley to Penrod, Blanck covers many of the juvenile titles he deliberately omitted in BAL. This volume is interesting to American realism–naturalism researchers because nearly all of the works examined by Blanck were published between 1861 and 1914. Among the titles described in Peter Parley to Penrod are the novels Elsie Dinsmore, Two Little Confederates, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, The Hoosier School-Boy, Frank on the Lower Mississippi, A Boy’s Town, Tattered Tom, White Fang, Little Men, and The Prince and the Pauper.
GUIDES TO CONTEMPORARY LITERARY REVIEWS Bamberg, Robert D., ed. The Portrait of a Lady: An Authoritative Text, Henry James and the Novel, Reviews and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. Clarke, Graham, ed. Walt Whitman: Critical Assessments. 4 vols. Helm Information Critical Assessments of Writers in English. Mountfield, E. Sussex: Helm Information, 1996. Eichelberger, Clayton L., comp. A Guide to Critical Reviews of United States Fiction, 1870–1910. Assisted by Karen L. Bickley and others. 2 vols. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1971–74. Farber, Evan Ira, exec. ed. Combined Retrospective Index to Book Reviews in Humanities Journals, 1802–1974. Stanley Schindler, senior ed. 10 vols. Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications, 1982–84. Hayes, Kevin J., ed. Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews. American Critical Archives 7. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. H. W. Wilson Co. Book Review Digest. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1906–. Previous title: The Cumulative Book Review Digest. Minneapolis: The H. W. Wilson Company, vol. 1, 1905. James, Henry. Literary Reviews and Essays, on American, English, and French Literature. Edited by Albert Mordell. New Haven, CT: College and University Press, 1957.
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Literary Writings in America: A Bibliography. 8 vols. Millwood, NY: KTO Press, 1977. Marks, Patricia. American Literary and Drama Reviews: An Index to Late Nineteenth Century Periodicals. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. Weatherford, Richard M., ed. and comp. Stephen Crane, The Critical Heritage. Critical Heritage Series. London, Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. The identification of critical reviews is an integral step in the study of the publishing history of a literary work. Through reviews, scholars can trace the fluctuations in individual reputations and follow intellectual debates among the reviewers.44 Reviews serve to announce a new title by a well-known author or, sometimes, the first work of a writer’s career. They not only provide an assessment of content and writing style but also present the work within the critical context of the period. It is important for students and scholars to examine the reactions of the reviewers of the time and compare their opinions to those of general readers. They may need to discover what types of literary works were the most popular, and why. The reviews of the earliest years of the American realism–naturalism period are not known for their unbiased opinions of literary works. Mott indicates in volume 2 of A History of American Magazines that many book reviews from the mid-1850s to the 1860s were little more than advertisements by friends of the authors or publishers, although “some good reviewing” was done by Putnam’s, Atlantic Monthly, and Literary World.45 The prejudices and biases of the reviewers tend to color the evaluations, sometimes making it difficult for readers to determine the quality of the literary work examined. Women and minority authors, writers from other regions of the country, realists, and romantics: all were under attack. Regional bias is noticeable in some nineteenth-century reviews. Due to the destructive effects of the Civil War on Southern periodicals, a high percentage of the book reviews of the postbellum period were published in magazines based in Northeastern cities. Naturally, not all Northern reviewers were willing to praise works that sentimentalized the antebellum culture of the South and defended Confederate ideals. In the example of the review of Mary E. Bryan’s Wild Work given below, the writer dismisses the usual Southern historical romances even as he begrudgingly acknowledges this particular author’s attempt to be fair to “both sides.” “WILD WORK,” written by Mary E. Bryan and published by D. Appleton & Co., challenges attention as a political novel from the Southern side, and is a possible hint to Judge Tourgee and his school that they are not to have the field
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entirely to themselves. The author disavows political intention, claiming to have chosen her material solely for its dramatic qualities. Still, it remains true that the motive of the story is an attempt to furnish a rationale of the social and political troubles of the South during the reign of “carpet-baggery.” . . . There is little that seems like special pleading, and no strained attempt to make out a case for the South, such as renders worthless a large part of the literature of that section. Both sides are presented fairly enough, and both come in for liberal shares of condemnation.46
On the other hand, an announcement of “a new novel, dealing with Southern life and character, by Miss M. A. Collins, of Tennessee” was panned in Independent even before the writer of the “literary notice” read the book. Miss Collins is “S. M. A. C.” or “S. M. A. Collins,” the author of The Homestretch, A Novel (New York: George W. Harlan, 1882). The novel is described in Wright’s American Fiction, 1876–1900 as a work on “southern life” (vol. 3, no. 1151). We know not this author nor her book as yet; but we must frankly confess to a feeling of discouragement or, rather, of the most languid interest as to that somewhat recent class of fiction which may be styled the “Southern novel.” In spite of Mr. Cable, in spite of such a book as Mrs. Bryan’s “Wild Work” (where we have the kind at [sic] in many respects its best), the mental mercury descends alarmingly at the thought of such books as Miss [Ellen] Martin’s “Feet of Clay.” If another Northern publisher has found a Southern novel writer who uses correct English, who can sketch character incisively, and who understands the practical work of making a readable book, he has made a literary discovery that will be bruited abroad, to his profit and to the credit of territory south of lat. 38º.47
Of course, Southern reviewers, in turn, found opportunities to criticize Northern values. Western culture and values were also disparaged by reviewers, who compared them unfavorably to those of the East. In the following excerpt of a review of Bret Harte’s East and West, Poems, published in the New York magazine Independent (Nov. 16, 1871), the critic finds the rough life of the West to be insufficient inspiration for a poet. Mr. Harte has done work, here and elsewhere, that has a distinctive flavor of its own—that of the rough life and character of our Pacific Coast. Whether that life and character has in it enough of range, of variety, of novelty, to furnish sufficient material for a new poet or romancer to build a reputation on may be fairly considered doubtful.48
The battle for and against realism is noticeable in reviews of the period. Realists such as Henry James were criticized for being too unemotional—“too
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subtle, too psychological, too analytical, for the purposes of fiction.”49 In fact, James frequently came under fire for his focus on psychological analysis, and was bitter about its effect on sales of his novels.50 Reviewers said that he treated his characters as if he were performing a “difficult vivisection,” and that “the piercing of live flesh in cold blood” was bad art.51 Literary World claimed that his novel The Portrait of a Lady “might almost be called a cruel book in its dissection of character and exposure of the nerves and sinews of human actions.”52 Realists, in turn, criticized the shallowness of the “middlebrow” sentimental and moralistic romantic fiction that had become popular in the antebellum era (e.g., Susan Warner’s novel The Wide, Wide World).53 Even when realism in literature found more favor later in the century, literary reviews of the works of muckrakers were used as a sounding board for commentary on social issues, such as urban poverty and crime, Reconstruction corruption, and unsanitary food and housing.54 Reviews were not only a vehicle in which to discuss social issues but also a place to take a stand on societal norms. The literary landscape of the realism– naturalism period saw reviewers taking sides on the moral issue of whether modern novels had become too passionate and risqué, and thereby endangering society. Conservatives such as Amelia E. Barr and Joshua W. Caldwell sharply criticized French-influenced expressions of lust (particularly by female characters) and crude behavior, while liberal reviewers such as Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Albert Ross celebrated unrestrained expression and came to the defense of the criticized novelists. Implicit in this debate was the discussion of what was “literature” versus lowbrow entertainment for the masses.55 The critical forum improved in the latter part of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. By this time literary journals that heavily featured reviews had begun to appear in major cities, particularly Boston’s Literary World, an important journal that later merged with Critic in 1904. Other important review sources during the 1870s were New York’s Arcadian and Library Table, and Chicago’s Owl, edited by the bibliographer and librarian William Frederick Poole.56 Mainstream magazines, such as Atlantic Monthly and Nation, continued to publish reviews, and Dial, Critic, Book Notes for the Week, and Literary Life were established in the 1880s.57 The New York Times began its Saturday Review of Books in 1896.58 Journals released by book publishers and booksellers, such as Literary News, Book News Monthly, and Book Notes, were intended not just for members of the book trade but also for the general public.59 There is no one exclusive finding aid for identifying and locating contemporary critical reviews because no one index offers exhaustive coverage of all of the newspapers, magazines, and journals published during the period. In
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fact, the sources described below should be considered only as starting points. Their sole purpose is to identify reviews, but they should be used in combination with the indexes to contemporary periodicals described in chapter 7. If the author of the work in question is a canonical writer, the researcher may want to begin with an author-specific bibliography or even a title-specific source if one is available, such as The Portrait of a Lady, edited by Robert Bamberg (1995). Bamberg’s volume is just one of the many titles in the Norton Critical Editions series from W. W. Norton. The series is valued by scholars and students for combining annotated authoritative texts with critical material, chronologies, and bibliographies. Bamberg offers 1882 reviews from W. C. Brownell (Nation), Horace E. Scudder (Atlantic Monthly), an anonymous critic (Harper’s), and Margaret Oliphant (Blackwood’s) to give readers a sense of the initial critical reception of the novel. There are also guides to critical reviews written by well-known authors, for example, Literary Reviews and Essays, on American, English, and French Literature (1957), edited by Albert Mordell, which offers information on reviews by Henry James. The American Critical Archives series, edited by M. Thomas Inge, Robert Emory Blackwell Professor of English and the Humanities at RandolphMacon College, is useful because its volumes gather together representative contemporary reviews of major works of American authors. Currently, there are fifteen titles in the Cambridge University Press series; six of them focus on authors of the period: Henry James, Edith Wharton, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, and Louisa May Alcott. Historical overviews discuss the major themes of the reviews and their particular influence on the authors. Henry James was an expatriate writer, so the volume Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews (1996), edited by Kevin J. Hayes, offers sample reviews from British publications. The reviews selected for Wharton, Cather, and Alcott serve to point out nineteenth-century attitudes toward women writers. Critical articles not reprinted in full in the guides are cited in bibliographies. Since many of the reviews have been published in difficult-to-locate periodicals, the reference volumes are convenient sources of this information. The volumes in the Critical Heritage Series, published by Routledge and Kegan Paul, also collect critical reviews of major authors. Represented in the series are Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Stephen Crane. The sources selected range from newspaper articles and essays to critical opinions contained in letters and diaries. Stephen Crane, The Critical Heritage (1973), compiled and edited by Richard M. Weatherford, is an example of a title in the series. The volume offers an introduction to Crane’s published writings, a selective bibliography, and an index of works, authors, and subjects.
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Walt Whitman: Critical Assessments (1996), edited by Graham Clarke, is one of the multivolume sets in the Helm Information Critical Assessments of Writers in English series. The sets reproduce samples of contemporary reviews of key works from major authors as well as critical assessments through the years to the present time. Readers will appreciate these collections of critical debates and biographical information. Walt Whitman is covered in four volumes: (1) The Man and the Myth: Biographical Studies, (2) The Response to the Writing, (3) Writers on Whitman’s Writing, and (4) Walt Whitman in the Twentieth Century: A Chronological Overview. Willa Cather, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, and Henry James are some of the American writers represented by the series. A Guide to Critical Reviews of United States Fiction, 1870–1910, compiled in two volumes by Clayton L. Eichelberger and others, specifically targets the reviews of fictional works published by both major and minor writers of the American realism and naturalism period. The periodicals selected for examination represent both American and British review sources. Reviews are only examined in the guide if they offer an evaluation of the “substantive or artistic achievement of the author,” so short critical comments, such as “Notes” in Nation, are not examined. Travel sketches and biographies are also not considered within the scope of the guide, and works of juvenile fiction are only covered if they were not labeled as such by reviewers.60 The reviews listed in the guide focus on works by American authors and include expatriate authors. To verify the nationality of lesser-known authors, Eichelberger’s team of compilers consulted Lyle Wright’s American Fiction volumes and a selection of biographical dictionaries, such as W. Stewart Wallace’s Dictionary of North American Authors Deceased Before 1950 (1968) and the fifth edition of Oscar Fay Adam’s Dictionary of American Authors (1969). Patricia Marks, formerly professor of English at Valdosta State University (Valdosta, Georgia), published American Literary and Drama Reviews: An Index to Late Nineteenth Century Periodicals in 1984. As the title of her guide indicates, Marks indexed both literary and drama reviews appearing from 1880 to 1900 in selected periodicals, such as Life, Once a Week, Puck, Spirit of the Times, New York Illustrated Times, Illustrated American, Impressionist, Judge, Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, Collier’s Weekly, Chic, Tid-Bits/Time, and Truth. Part one covers reviews of American dramatic productions, and part two examines literary works. The periodical titles are abbreviated as codes in the entries, so users need to refer to the list of codes and their explanations on pages xvii–xviii. For instance, figure 6.4 shows an entry for William Waldolf Astor’s novel Valentino: A
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Figure 6.4. Modified entry for Droch’s review of Valentino by William Waldolf Astor. Source: American Literary and Drama Reviews, p. 179.
Historical Romance of the Sixteenth Century in Italy (1885). Viscount Astor (b.1848–d.1919), a wealthy financier and publisher born to a prominent American family, wrote several historical romances.61 Marks indicates that reviews of Valentino are contained in the December 24, 1885 issue of “L” (Life) and the March 24, 1886 issue of “P” (Puck). Robert Bridges, the reviewer for Life, was an American journalist, poet, and editor for Scribner’s Magazine who wrote under the pen name “Droch.”62 The Combined Retrospective Index to Book Reviews in Humanities Journals, 1802–1974, edited by Evan Farber and Stanley Schindler, examines a group of 157 scholarly periodicals from around the world. Librarian at Earlham College (Richmond, Indiana) from 1962 to 1994, Evan Farber is well known in the field of library science for his model program of student instruction in the basics of library research in addition to his many publications.63 Farber created Combined Retrospective Index after observing the difficulties his students had in finding reviews in older issues of journals. Entries for approximately five hundred thousand reviews contain the usual author, title, review citations, and—whenever possible—the names of the reviewers. Journal titles are usually abbreviated in the index, so users need to consult the list of abbreviations contained on pages xi through xxxii. The list provides the full title of the journal, its initial date of publication, the name and address of the publisher, and the ISSN. Among the titles indexed are Bookman, Dial, Drama, and North American Review. Researchers may want to consider Farber’s other index, the Combined Retrospective Index to Book Reviews in Scholarly Journals, 1886–1974 (Carrollton Press, 1979–1981) as an additional source of review information. The ten volumes offer author and title access to reviews published in social sciences journals. The merits of Literary Writings in America: A Bibliography (LWA) for bibliographic research are discussed in detail in chapter 4, but this source should also be considered as an index of critical review citations. Produced during a five-year period by fifty workers in a Works Progress Administration group during the New Deal era of Franklin Roosevelt, LWA attempts to offer a comprehensive list of creative works published by Americans from 1850 to
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1940 as well as the critical reviews they received. Students studying lesserknown nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century writers may find the bibliography to be a valuable source despite the to-be-expected errors. Entries are listed both under the name of the author of the literary work and the reviewer, and give the author’s full name together with his or her birth and death dates, the name of the work reviewed, the title of the periodical, and the periodical’s volume number, date, and pages. The long list of periodicals consulted is given at the front of the first volume of the set. The print Book Review Digest (BRD), beginning in 1905, and its online version Book Review Digest Plus (BRDP), may be valuable sources of reviews from the early twentieth century as long as their users remember that the long-standing monthly Book Review Digest changed in scope over the years. While current versions of the index cover familiar review sources (e.g., Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist), the older BRD volumes examine a different set of publications. Many titles focus on specific areas of study, such as the Astrophysical Journal, Journal of Geology, Engineering News, and American Journal of Sociology. The first volume for 1905 lists review citations from Bookman, New York Times, Dial, Forum, Critic, and other titles that assess works of literature. Often a synopsis of the plot and an excerpt from the review are provided along with a citation. The inclusion of a plus or minus sign indicates the degree of favor or disfavor expressed in the review. Some researchers may wonder why print guides to literary reviews are still useful when they can obtain the full text of reviews in online databases like American Periodicals Series Online and Periodicals Index Online. Reviews can be difficult to locate with a basic keyword search of title, author, or reviewer name unless the database is set to look for words in the full text of the reviews. The heading for the review may not include the title of the work examined, and the reviewer may be using his pen name instead of his real name. For instance, someone searching APS Online for the keywords valentino and bridges would not find the review citation (above) for William Waldolf Astor’s novel Valentino in Life because Robert Bridges used the name “Droch.” The review appears as one entry in a list of fifty-three citations when the searcher types valentino and astor; he may not recognize the appropriate citation when he sees it because the review is grouped with a short humorous note entitled “Where There’s a Will There’s a Weigh” by H. Van Santvoord, and is labeled as such in the database. Even if the review was listed separately, “Gilt-Edged Novel” by Droch may not sound like the expected “Review of Valentino: A Historical Romance of the Sixteenth Century in Italy” by Robert Bridges.
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Another consideration is the possibility that a database may not, at that time, cover all of the issues of a particular periodical. For example, APS Online appears (as of October 18, 2006) to offer indexing and full text for issues of Puck from 1877 to 1918 for volumes 1–83 (March 1877 to September 1918), yet there is a gap in coverage between September 4, 1878 and February 13, 1901. The review that Patricia Marks cites for Astor’s Valentino is contained in the March 24, 1886 issue of Puck, which happens to fall within this time period. Of course, it should be noted that Marks cites the title as “a historical novel” rather than “an historical novel” and does not offer the full text of the two reviews, so researchers are best served by the use of a combination of guide and database if they want to obtain the most accurate and complete results. Further sources for index coverage of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century periodicals are covered in chapter 7.
PUBLISHER HISTORIES, DIRECTORIES, AND ARCHIVES Albinski, Nan Bowman. “Guide to the Archives of Publishers, Journals, and Literary Agents in North American Libraries.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1993 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1994), 202–25. Available online as A Guide to Publishers’ Archives in the United States. The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, created May 1993. sharpweb.org/albinski.html (accessed 22 Oct. 2006). ArchiveGrid. Dublin, OH: OCLC, 2006–. archivegrid.org. The Archives of Harper and Brothers, 1817–1914. 58 microfilm reels. Cambridge, England: Chadwyck-Healey, 1980. Index: Index to the Archives of Harper & Bros., 1817–1914. Compiled by Christopher Feeney (Cambridge, England: Chadwyck-Healey, 1982). ArchivesUSA: Integrated Collection and Repository Information. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 1997–. archives.chadwyck.com. Brodersen, Martha, et al. A Guide to Book Publishers’ Archives. New York: Book Industry Study Group, 1996. Clark, Robert A., and Patrick J. Brunet. The Arthur H. Clark Company: An Americana Century, 1902–2002. Spokane, WA: Arthur H. Clark, 2002. Dzwonkoski, Peter, ed. American Literary Publishing Houses, 1638–1899. 2 vols. Dictionary of Literary Biography 49. Detroit: Gale Research, 1986. Dzwonkoski, Peter, ed. American Literary Publishing Houses, 1900–1980: Trade and Paperback. Dictionary of Literary Biography 46. Detroit: Gale Research, 1986. Greenspan, Ezra. George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000.
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Greenspan, Ezra, ed. The House of Putnam, 1837–1872: A Documentary Volume. Dictionary of Literary Biography 254. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. Stern, Madeline B., ed. Publishers for Mass Entertainment in Nineteenth Century America. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. Tebbel, John. A History of Book Publishing in the United States. 4 vols. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1972–81. Someone investigating the publishing history of a work is usually interested in its publisher. Why did the author choose this particular firm? What were its policies? Where was the firm located? Was it a large or small company? How much did it cost to print the work, how many copies were printed, and what income did the author derive from its sales? There are a number of sources for these details. Works on the history of book publishing and individual publishing houses, such as The House of Putnam, 1837–1872: A Documentary Volume (2001) and The Arthur H. Clark Company: An Americana Century, 1902–2002 (2002), can be identified by searching a library catalog or WorldCat. American Literary Publishing Houses, 1638–1899 (1986) and American Literary Publishing Houses, 1900–1980: Trade and Paperback (1986), edited by Peter Dzwonkoski, are volumes in Gale’s Dictionary of Literary Biography series and offer basic information on many firms of the period. Another source to consider is Publishers for Mass Entertainment in Nineteenth Century America (1980), edited by Madeleine B. Stern. There are also biographies of well-known heads of publishing houses, such as George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher (2000). Trade catalogs, like those described above, may contain directories of publishing companies; business directories often list these firms. John Tebbel’s classic four-volume study A History of Book Publishing in the United States (1972–1981) provides a fascinating discussion of the history of American book publishing from 1630 to 1980. Volume 2, The Expansion of an Industry, 1865–1919 (1975) focuses on the book publishers that flourished during the American realism and naturalism period. In the volume, Tebbel relates the histories of Henry Holt, Charles Scribner, Richard Bowker, and other famous names in the book trade, as well as those of smaller businesses and firms that did not last through the twentieth century. Several appendixes offer statistics taken from Publishers’ Weekly, in particular, details about American book title output, 1880–1918, along with a graph and directories of publishers for 1888 and 1900. The list of publishers for 1919 includes authors and printers who issued books during 1918. Scholars requiring author–editor correspondence, costs for production, and details concerning the business practices and history of a publisher may need
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to locate the company’s archives. Finding these documents may be difficult as many are lost, damaged, or dispersed; others are privately held with restricted access.64 Despite the fact that the documents of a number of British publishing companies have been preserved on microfilm by ChadwyckHealey, we are aware of only one product related to an American firm: The Archives of Harper and Brothers, 1817–1914 (1980). Since archival collections are not necessarily located at the company’s headquarters or in one specific center or library, finding aids may be needed to locate them in national, academic, and private repositories. Often libraries publish print catalogs of their special collections holdings (e.g., the Catalogue of Manuscripts in the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Chadwyck-Healey, 1986–1987) or offer finding aids on the Web. There are other, more general, guides to consider. Nan Bowman Albinski’s “Guide to the Archives of Publishers, Journals, and Literary Agents in North American Libraries” is available in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook for 1993 (1994) and on the website of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP). This useful guide is divided into three sections of alphabetized entries: publishers’ archives, journal archives, and literary agents’ archives. Surprisingly, a number of British archives are held in American repositories. However, the majority of the entries concern American publishing firms and journals. Each entry gives the name and location of the publisher, journal, or literary agent; the location of the collection; dates; size; and content of the collection. The source of information is given in square brackets. In some of the entries, Albinski notes the existence of a published guide to the specific library or an index to the archive. All guides and indexes are listed in the concluding bibliography. A Guide to Book Publishers’ Archives (1996) by Martha Brodersen, Beth Luey, Audrey Brichetto Morris, and Rosanne Trujillo provides brief descriptions of nine hundred collections related to approximately six hundred publishers. The authors compiled the information through library surveys for The Book Industry Study Group, Inc. (BISG), the industry’s trade association for policy, standards, and research. The directory lists the archives of U.S. book publishers still active in the twentieth century as well as print and Web sources. For each publisher, the authors have attempted to describe the size of the collection, years covered, type of materials, finding aids, and any restrictions placed on its accessibility or use. Entries are arranged in alphabetical order. Although the directory contains more recent publishers and their founders, editors, and designers, the predecessors of these companies are also listed along with magazines that were either sponsored by book publishers (e.g., Collier’s and Harper’s) or related to the book industry (Publishers’
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Weekly). Cross-references link older and newer names of firms, making it easy for period researchers to utilize this directory. There are several subscription databases that index information on archival collections. ArchiveGrid, initiated by the Research Libraries Group (RLG) in 2006 as an expanded version of an earlier product called RLG Archival Services, is now offered by OCLC. The database indexes descriptions of archival collections housed in thousands of libraries, museums, and historical societies. The records give the collection and repository titles, contact information, restrictions of use, a description of the collection, and subject terms. Searchers can use Boolean and proximity searching, along with wildcard and truncation symbols, to locate records of interest. Another database, ArchivesUSA (ProQuest), provides details about primary source material
Figure 6.5.
Modified entry for Houghton Mifflin Company. Source: ArchivesUSA.
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found in thousands of U.S. manuscript repositories by combining records from the National Union Catalogue of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) and the National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States (NIDS). Library of Congress NUCMC records are freely available on the Web (http:// www.loc.gov/coll/nucmc/), while the National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States (NIDS) is a ProQuest publication that reproduces the finding aids of archives and manuscript collections. Each record in ArchivesUSA integrates information from both NUCMC and NIDS, as shown in figure 6.5 for the Houghton Mifflin Company. (For more details on the two databases, see chapter 9.)
CONCLUSION The realism–naturalism period was one of prolific writing, and bibliographies and trade catalogs identify the many texts yet to be studied. Luckily (and logically), the rise of the publishing industry coincided with the efforts of a number of eminent American bibliographers, and researchers can take advantage of the array of bibliographic resources described in this chapter. The details of a text’s first publication contribute to a greater understanding of a particular writer, an industry, and a culture. Similarly, critical reviews document a work’s reception and locate a writer’s place in society. The difficulties in understanding archaic and obscure publishing terms and abbreviations are made easier with the help of book trade dictionaries and glossaries. These varied reference tools should be used in combination to enhance critical studies of realism–naturalism texts.
NOTES 1. Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew Kimmens, eds., World Authors 1900–1950 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1996), s.v. “Thomas James Wise.” 2. “Mr John Carter Bibliographer and man of taste (Obituary),” The Times, March 19, 1975, www.gale.com/Times/. 3. Geoffrey Ashall Glaister, Encyclopedia of the Book, 2nd ed., rev. (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press; London: British Library, 1996), back cover. 4. John Carter, ABC for Book Collectors, 8th ed., rev. by Nicholas Barker (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press; London: British Library, 2004), s.v. “Press-Mark.” 5. Roy Stokes, A Bibliographical Companion (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1989), s.v. “Press Mark.” 6. Stokes, A Bibliographical Companion, v.
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7. John Feather, ed., A Dictionary of Book History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), s.v. “Quire.” 8. Matt Roberts and Don Etherington, Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books: A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1982), s.v. “Mineral Tanning” and “Metallic Inks,” palimpsest.stanford.edu/ don/don.html (accessed 20 July 2006). 9. Stokes, A Bibliographical Companion, s.v. “Deckle Edge.” 10. Bohdan S. Wynar, ed., Dictionary of American Library Biography (Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1978), s.v. “Frank Keller Walter.” 11. Stokes, A Bibliographical Companion, s.v. “Ghosts.” 12. Wynar, Dictionary of American Library Biography, s.v. “Charles Benjamin Norton.” 13. John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1975), 2: 457. 14. Adolph Growoll, Book-Trade Bibliography in the United States in the Ninteeenth Century to Which is Added a Catalogue of All the Books Printed in the United States with the Prices, and Places Where Published, Annexed. Published by the Booksellers in Boston January, 1804 (1898; repr., New York: Burt Franklin, 1960), lxii. 15. The American Catalogue: Author and Title Entries of Books in Print and for Sale (Including Reprints and Importations), July 1, 1876[–Dec. 31, 1910] (1880–1911; repr., New York: Peter Smith, 1941), [iii]. 16. Growoll, Book-Trade Bibliography in the United States, xviii. 17. Dictionary of American Biography, s.v. “Frederick Leypoldt,” available via Biography Resource Center (Gale), www.galegroup.com/BiographyRC/. 18. Dictionary of American Biography, s.v. “Frederick Leypoldt,” available via Biography Resource Center (Gale), www.galegroup.com/BiographyRC/. 19. Tebbel. A History of Book Publishing in the United States, 2: 591. 20. Tebbel, 2: 590. 21. Tebbel, 2: 594. 22. Kathleen L. Endres, ed. Trade, Industrial, and Professional Periodicals of the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 350. 23. Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, 2: 459. 24. Tebbel, 2: 458. 25. Tebbel, 2: 457. 26. Tebbel, 2: 459. 27. Klaus G. Saur, “Publishing for the Library Community,” Libri: International Journal of Libraries and Information Services 50, no. 2 (2000): 95, librijournal.org/ pdf/2000-2pp95-97.pdf. 28. Endres, ed., Trade, Industrial, and Professional Periodicals of the United States, 348. 29. Growoll, Book-Trade Bibliography in the United States, xlii–xlv. 30. Growoll, xxviii, xliv–xlv. 31. Stern, Books and Book People in 19th-Century America (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1978), 308.
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32. Stern, 309. 33. Stern, 310–11. 34. Stern, 312–13. 35. Gary Ink (Research Librarian, Reed Business Information), e-mail message to author Linda Stein, October 12, 2006. 36. Karl Beckson and Arthur Ganz, A Reader’s Guide to Literary Terms (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1960), s.v. “Edition.” 37. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 10. 38. Carter, ABC for Book Collectors, s.v. “Edition and Impression.” 39. Matthew J. Bruccoli, “Editorial,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1996 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1997), 285. 40. Stokes, A Bibliographical Companion, s.v. “State.” 41. Stokes, s.v. “Issue.” 42. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago Manual of Style, 10. 43. Stokes, A Bibliographical Companion, s.v. “Points.” 44. Evan Ira Farber, exec. ed., Combined Retrospective Index to Book Reviews in Humanities Journals, 1802–1974 (Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications, 1982–84), vii. 45. Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930–68), 2: 158. 46. “Review 1—No Title [Wild Work],” The Dial 2, no. 18 (Oct. 1881), 122. APS Online at www.proquest.com. 47. “Literary News [The Homestretch, A Novel],” The Independent 34, no. 1737 (March 16, 1882), 12. APS Online at www.proquest.com. 48. “Review 2—No Title [East and West, Poems],” The Independent 23, no. 1198 (November 16, 1871): 6. APS Online at www.proquest.com. 49. Outlook, 66, no. 7 (October 13, 1900), 423. 50. Henry Nash Smith, Democracy and the Novel: Popular Resistance to Classic American Writers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 144. 51. “Review 2—No Title [Washington Square],” Californian 3, no. 16 (April 1881), 376–77. APS Online at www.proquest.com. 52. “Mr. James’s Portrait of a Lady,” Literary World 12 (December 17, 1881), 473–74. APS Online at www.proquest.com. 53. Smith, Democracy and the Novel, 146–47. 54. Aaron Urbanczyk, “Literary Criticism,” in American History through Literature 1870–1920, eds. Tom Quirk and Gary Scharnhorst (Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons/Thomson Gale, 2006), 598. 55. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1885–1905, 4: 121–2. 56. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 3: 232–4. 57. Mott, 4: 124–5. 58. Mott, 4: 126. 59. Mott, 3: 235. 60. Clayton L. Eichelberger, comp., A Guide to Critical Reviews of United States Fiction, 1870–1910 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1971), 1: vi.
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61. American National Biography, s.v. “William Waldolf Astor,” www.anb.org/. 62. “Robert Bridges (Obituary),” in Current Biography Yearbook (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1941), www.hwwilson.com/Databases/biobank.htm. 63. “Interview with Evan Farber,” Georgia Library Quarterly 39, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 5–10. 64. Alexis Weedon, Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market 1836–1916 (Aldershot, England; Burlingon, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 8.
Chapter Seven
Magazines and Newspapers of the Period
One of the key challenges to researchers of the American realism and naturalism period involves the search for works of literature published in magazines and newspapers. The invention of the steam-powered printing press, linotype, telegraph, and typewriter, as well as the expansion of the railroad and improvements in the postal system helped to create an unprecedented boom in the mass production and distribution of periodicals. An emergent middle class with leisure time took advantage of this expansion and adopted periodical reading as a national pastime. Novels and stories were read aloud in family gatherings, and each installment of a serial novel was eagerly anticipated. Press syndicates sprang up to handle the popular demand for this form of entertainment. They sold the rights to serial fiction and stories to newspapers in each territory, causing them to be published in papers across the country. Thus, the names of Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and other period writers became familiar to readers in cities and towns throughout the United States. A second research challenge concerns the need to identify and locate articles on current affairs, essays, and editorials published in contemporary magazines and newspapers in order to study the significant social, technological, and philosophical changes that occurred during the Civil War and the decades that followed. News stories are essential for understanding political, financial, and technological trends; magazines contain discussions of political and social issues, their articles debating the reconstruction of the South, workers’ rights, the economy, and other national issues that influenced writers during these years. A number of publications were created to promote the causes of special interest groups or to represent particular segments of the population. Abolitionists, for example, established newspapers to publicize and gain sup170
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port for the antislavery movement.1 Secessionists issued publications defending slavery and states’ rights, while others attempted to treat the Civil War from a nonpolitical point of view. While some women’s magazines offered household hints, fashion illustrations, and entertaining stories, there were others that espoused the more radical causes of dress reform, suffrage, abortion, and birth control. African American periodicals proliferated during the late 1800s and became a force against segregation. Those of Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, and other minority groups served their respective communities by campaigning for recognition in American society. Chapter 7 discusses the various types of periodicals issued during these years, from the “highbrow” literary journals and innovative “little magazines” to the general-interest magazines and newspapers or cheaply produced “story papers.” The chapter describes online as well as print indexes and bibliographies that examine contemporary periodicals. Researchers are instructed on how to utilize these resources and take advantage of the many links to full-text articles and works of literature. Well-known magazines and newspapers are usually easy to locate, but articles and stories printed in local newspapers or more specialized publications can sometimes be more difficult to find. The chapter suggests reference guides and directories that classify these periodicals by specific subjects or geographic areas and sources for identifying collections in library and archival collections. PERIODICALS AND LITERATURE The American realism and naturalism period experienced a boom in the publication of periodicals—defined here as publications that are issued at fairly regular intervals, such as daily newspapers, weeklies, and monthlies.2 Frank Luther Mott, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning A History of American Magazines, estimated that the number of magazines rose from some seven hundred to more than five thousand titles in the years following the Civil War to 1900.3 Despite the fact that many of the publications were short-lived, the less expensive “cheap” magazines of the 1870s gained a collective circulation of 10.5 million at a time when the population was only thirty million in 1870.4 Dozens of these magazines were read each week by American families, including the Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, which broke all circulation records by printing over a million issues weekly—the Post reaching two million by 1912.5 The number of daily newspapers also increased, peaking at about 2,600 between 1910 and 1914.6 The periodical became the medium of choice, causing dramatic changes in the editing and publishing of American literature. Most of the prominent
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authors of this era wrote for a magazine or newspaper at least some time during their careers.7 Mark Twain, Hamlin Garland, Jack London, Stephen Crane, Bret Harte, Henry James, George Washington Cable, Mary Noailles Murfree, Edward Eggleston, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and William Dean Howells—all published their work in a variety of periodicals.8 The major book publishers were tied to prominent literary magazines of the day (e.g., Atlantic Monthly, Scribner’s Monthly, Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine).9 These elite “house journals”—what Frank Luther Mott calls the “quality” monthlies—featured the fiction of authors associated with the firm along with contributions from other authors and, in some cases, reprinted works from British writers, the latter being an inexpensive source of pirated novels before the enactment of the International Copyright Act on March 3, 1891. The act, nicknamed the “Chace Act” for Senator Jonathan Chace of Rhode Island who introduced it, provided protection to foreign copyright holders as long as their own countries offered reciprocal rights to American authors.10 Many mid- to late-nineteenth-century novels appeared first as serial novels in periodicals before being published as books, such as Henry James’s The Bostonians and The Portrait of a Lady and William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham. Each issue of a magazine or newspaper carried an installment of the novel. The serial novels attracted a large and enthusiastic clientele of readers who enjoyed this type of “parlor literature” and faithfully looked for the next episode in the series. Magazine editors were delighted with the trend, believing that serial novels boosted their circulation figures.11 Book publishers thought that the approach attracted more book buyers than it satisfied, and viewed the serialized versions as advertisements for the upcoming monographs. Serialization helped authors to earn a reasonable living from their writing, but their novels were designed to be chopped into segments. “Cliff-hangers” left readers in suspense until the next installment or deliberately kept them poised between expectation and completion.12 Writers also had to adapt to difficult editorial policies. Although the popular magazines paid well, they often had certain requirements concerning censorship and style. Words that could not be read aloud to families were eliminated, and pressure was exerted on novelists to avoid material that was intellectually challenging for “middlebrow” audiences.13 The “quality” monthlies had high standards for acceptance, but they were produced by huge publishing houses for which sales and circulation were the bottom line. Some writers, such as Edith Wharton and Henry James, found it more amenable to their careers to live and publish overseas. Others chose to publish their stories under pseudonyms in the popular “cheap” magazines and use their own,
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or another pen name, for their more serious works in the house monthlies, establishing multiple literary identities. Rebecca Harding Davis (b.1831–d.1910), for example, did not sign her name to her early writings in Atlantic Monthly. In need of money for her family, she sent stories under a pseudonym to Peterson’s Magazine, a less genteel but better-paying periodical. Her practice of writing under different identities was eventually challenged when readers noticed the similarities between her story “Ellen” in Peterson’s Magazine and “Ellen” in Atlantic Monthly. They reported the supposed “plagiarism,” not realizing that the two authors were the same person.14 Louisa May Alcott (b.1832–d.1888) took advantage of pseudonyms in order to create multiple author identities. While Alcott may be famous for her moralistic novels for children (e.g., Little Women, Jo’s Boys, Eight Cousins), she also authored A Marble Woman:—Or,—The Mysterious Model: A Novel of Absorbing Interest (1865); The Abbot’s Ghost:—Or,—Maurice Treherne’s Temptation: A Christmas Story (1867); and other gothic thrillers under the pen name of A. M. Barnard in popular magazines like Ballou’s Monthly Magazine and Flag of Our Union.15 Both the nature of and the demand for serial novels changed over time. Michael Lund, author of America’s Continuing Story, describes the installments of the novels of the mid-1800s as easily identifiable segments of a continuous story. He compares them to the more loosely connected set of episodes of the 1880s and 1890s. The later works were often difficult to distinguish from the new short-story serials that were being published under a common title. The short-story serials shared the same setting and characters, but could be read as separate entities (e.g., Grace King’s Balcony Stories, Whilomville Stories by Stephen Crane, and The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett).16 What are now called “novellas”—prose works that are shorter than novels and longer than short stories—also appeared during this era. Lippincott’s Magazine featured Julian Hawthorne’s Sinfire: A Novel in the January 1887 issue when the periodical began its new practice of publishing a novel in each issue.17 Life in the Iron Mills, Rebecca Harding Davis’s novella, is an important work of American realism that points out the desperate poverty of immigrant mill workers. The novella was published anonymously in the April 1861 edition of Atlantic Monthly. Henry James wrote longer stories that he called “nouvelles”—those better suited to two and three periodical installments.18 Pirated editions of Henry James’s “nouvelle” Daisy Miller: A Study (first published in the British Cornhill Magazine in the June and July issues for 1878) were printed by two American magazines: Littell’s Living Age in July 1878 and Home Journal in July and August (using the subtitle “Americans Abroad”).19
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Short stories achieved greater recognition and appreciation as a genre of American periodical literature after the Civil War, especially during the years from 1872 to 1897.20 Henry James, Mark Twain, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and William Dean Howells agitated to change the form to fit the aesthetics of realism.21 Later, the short-story form would adjust to the shift toward modernism at the start of the twentieth century with stories like Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case” (1905) and Gertrude Stein’s “Three Lives” (1909). 22 A form of the short story called the “storiette”—the short, short story—was developed at this time and published in magazines such as Everybody’s, Collier’s, and Munsey’s.23 Local-color authors of the period found that short stories showcased their talents, and the public enjoyed Mark Twain’s humorous “snappers”—the final “punch lines” of his comic tales. Stories with a “trick” or surprise ending were also appreciated.24 A well-known example of the latter, Frank Stockton’s “The Lady, or the Tiger?” (Century, November 1882), tells the tale of a barbaric princess who must choose the fate of her lover: his marriage to another beautiful woman or death by a savage tiger. The reader is left to wonder what her choice will be. Stockton’s story was so popular that it was performed as an operetta.25 Along with the proliferation of magazines came an increase in “periodical” or “magazine” poets. The quality monthlies published poetry as did the “little” magazines; the general-interest magazines are thought to have depended on poems to fill extra space.26 An average of sixty to seventy poems were appearing each week in major American newspapers and magazines by the 1890s.27 Most of the magazine poets have fallen into obscurity over the years. Students of American literature usually study Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson rather than Clinton Scollard or Ella Wheeler Wilcox.28 Denigrated by modern critics for their dense language and “complex rhetorical structures,” the work of the magazine poets has only recently been reevaluated in the context of the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century periodical.29 Sarah Piatt (b.1836–d.1919), a popular writer who published nearly three hundred poems in a wide range of magazines from the 1860s to the 1910s, is now being compared to Emily Dickinson.30 The famous and often studied Emily Dickinson (b.1830–d.1886) was unknown by her contemporaries because only a few of her poems were printed in periodicals, and probably not by her initiation.31 Walt Whitman (b.1819–d.1892) wrote for magazines before he acquired fame with the publication of Leaves of Grass. He published about 150 first printings of poems in about forty-five periodicals from 1838 to 1892, not counting those that were issued multiple times or without his knowledge and/or consent. The poems have been collected in the online Walt Whitman Archive, http://www.whitmanarchive.org.32
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Periodicals also published plays. In Plays in American Periodicals, 1890–1918, Susan Harris Smith states that more than 125 dramatic works were issued in fourteen representative American magazines between 1890 and 1918. The magazines selected for study range from the quality titles Atlantic Monthly and Scribner’s to the popular McClure’s and Everybody’s Magazine to progressive magazines such as Arena and Forum. Not all of the plays are written by Americans, but Smith contends that their publication in U.S. magazines served to contribute to the cultural development of the country.33 Among the plays listed in the book are John Kendrick Bangs’s “A Proposal under Difficulties” (Harper’s Monthly, June 1895), Hamlin Garland’s “Under the Wheel” (Arena, July 1890), and Henry James’s “An Animated Conversation” (Scribner’s Magazine, March 1889).
TYPES OF PERIODICALS Periodicals took a number of forms during the realism–naturalism period. Each type was targeted to a different audience, although the distinctions between them sometimes blurred. Even the most prestigious titles mixed popular content with elitist works of literature. They changed with the times, adopting new trends in order to stay competitive and adjusting prices and formats as the economy dictated. Some of the more sensational weeklies became illustrated monthlies, and a number of quality monthlies increased their readership by adding advertisements, illustrations, and current affairs articles to compete with the popular general-interest magazines. Starting in the 1890s, major newspapers began to issue weekend “magazine” supplements to compete with the “cheap” weeklies and monthlies that were encroaching on their news-reporting territory.34 Changes in editors, owners, or sponsoring organizations and companies often called for modifications in content and style, and the loss of a talented editor or influential owner could bring changes. For example, the most successful years of Overland Monthly belong to its first series of issues when Bret Harte was an editor and contributor. The magazine struggled after Harte resigned to go east, having lost the main source of its creative fiction.35 S. S. (Samuel Sidney) McClure’s sharp instincts and energy in crafting McClure’s Magazine attracted Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Willa Cather, and other exceptional writers to his staff. 36 There was also Frank Leslie, who developed a technique to produce woodcuts quickly, allowing Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper to illustrate and print news stories within a couple of weeks of their occurrences.37
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The quality monthlies were some of the most influential publications, defining the literary trends of the time. Targeted at a higher class clientele, Atlantic Monthly (Boston, 1857–), Harper’s Monthly Magazine (New York, 1850–), Putnam’s Monthly Magazine (New York, 1853–1910), and Scribner’s Monthly/Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine (New York, 1870–1881) dominated the magazine industry in the late 1800s and promoted many of the canonical writers. The Atlantic Monthly was Ticknor and Fields’s preeminent magazine of literature, art, and politics. The Boston magazine primarily featured New England writers during its early decades and was designed to contrast with the monthlies from New York.38 The Harper and Brother’s firm published Harper’s Monthly Magazine, later known as Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (and now titled Harper’s). Harper’s earliest issues consisted largely of pirated British works by well-known authors, such as Dickens and Trollope—a practice which allowed Harper and Brothers to obtain a financial advantage over its competitors.39 Scribner’s Monthly, founded by the elder Charles Scribner, gained more of a literary reputation after it was sold, becoming the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine of the Century publishing firm.40 A new Scribner’s title, Scribner’s Magazine was created by the younger Charles Scribner to compete with the other house journals. The magazine was distinguished both by its engravings and its literary works, and attracted educated readers.41 Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art, founded by G. P. Putnam’s firm, issued the works of well-known literary figures, but its various forms did not run for long periods of time. The first, begun in 1853, merged with Emerson’s United States Magazine in 1857; the second (1868–1870) merged with Scribner’s Monthly in 1870; and the third (started in 1906) joined with Atlantic Monthly in 1910.42 An economic recession in the 1890s led to the success of the cheaper tencent monthlies (e.g., McClure’s, Munsey’s, and Cosmopolitan) at the expense of the quality monthlies that sold for twenty-five cents or more. The development of halftone photoengraving allowed the magazines to be illustrated at a cheaper price, which increased their selling power. They managed to drop their prices below the cost of production by attracting a large clientele and obtaining their profit from advertisements.43 Because of their growing circulation figures and ability to offer higher pay, the cheap monthlies could attract well-known contributors. McClure’s Magazine, for example, featured the fiction of William Dean Howells and Edward Everett Hale during the 1890s, and Cosmopolitan the writings of Ambrose Bierce, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, and Edith Wharton. While it was the nonfiction news articles that became the major draw for these magazines, they continued to print fiction and poetry into the early twentieth century and remained a medium for the devel-
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opment of literary culture. Staff writers were hired to research articles for serialization, and syndicates were developed to sell the rights to serial fiction and stories to publishers across the country.44 Little magazines sprang up at the end of the nineteenth century as a response from the literary community to commercialism and syndication. They differed from the large, commercial magazines by their emphasis on the experimental writings of relatively unknown, avant-garde authors as well as their unprofitable finances. They attracted a comparatively small, elite audience of literary enthusiasts.45 Many of the little magazines were started by new writers who were unable to find outlets for their writings. With their own periodicals they could publish literary texts seen as unprofitable to mainstream publications, often written by a small coterie of their friends.46 One of the earliest titles of the 1890s was Chap-Book, frequently credited with inspiring the other titles of the movement. Chap-Book, published by Herbert Stuart Stone and Hannibal Ingalls Kimball, was originally intended to showcase their company’s books. Its attractive illustrations and the quality of its literary works caused it to be valued as a literary publication in its own right. Chap-Book issued the serialized version of Henry James’s What Maisie Knew in addition to works by Ellen Glasgow, Stephen Crane, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich. The magazine was merged into Dial, a political organ that evolved into one of the most influential little magazines of the modernist era. The success of Chap-Book was followed by Thomas Bird Mosher’s Bibelot; Lark, known for its editors’ original poetry; Elbert Hubbard’s Philistine; Vance Thompson’s M’lle New York; and Bradley, His Book, edited by Will H. Bradley.47 Another type of periodical was the inexpensive weekly or monthly “story paper.” Golden Days (1880–1907), Elverson’s Saturday Night (1865–1902), Beadle’s Banner Weekly (1882–1897), and George Munro’s Fireside Companion (1866–1907) are some of the papers that printed “lowbrow” fiction in newspaper format on cheap stock.48 Some were known as mail-order magazines because of their extensive advertisements for mail-order products (e.g., People’s Literary Companion). Included in this category are the weekly humor titles such as Life, Puck, and Judge, which were aimed at the middle class and known for their satires, humorous stories, and witty poetry.49 Dime novels with picaresque plots were also published weekly in magazines for young readers. Some, like the Horatio Alger stories, promoted a capitalistic moral, promising that hard work and honesty would bring success. A number of weeklies called “libraries” printed a novelette in each number, e.g., Beadle’s Dime Library (1878–1905), the Nick Carter Library (1891–1896), the Wide Awake Library (1878–1891), and the Frank Reade Library (1892–1898), with its novels that featured Frank Reade Jr., a young inventor of scientific machines.50
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As discussed earlier in chapter 6, there were a number of journals that focused on criticism of literary works, ranging from Boston’s Literary Review (1897–1901), which began as a five-cent monthly, to New York’s Bookman (1895–1933) and Chicago’s Dial (1880–1929). Literary World (1870–1884) was based in Boston until it merged with New York’s Critic (1884–1906). Philadelphia offered the Literary Era (later titled the Era, 1892–1905), while Literary Life (1884–1903) began publication as a general magazine in Cleveland, moved to Chicago, then revived as a Saturday paper in New York after a brief suspension.51 Important scholarly journals were founded during the era that still continue today: PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association, 1884–), Journal of American Folk-Lore (1888–), American Journal of Philology (1880–), and Journal of English and Germanic Philology (originally titled Journal of Germanic Philology, 1897–).52 The University of the South’s Sewanee Review (1892–), the oldest continuously published American literary quarterly, currently prints American and British fiction, poetry, and reviews as well as critical essays. Created to be a Southern competitor for the venerable North American Review, its early issues, edited by William Peterfield Trent and published from 1893 to1900, offered studies of history, philosophy, religion, politics, and Reconstruction economics.53 Periodicals with competing political agendas—both magazines and newspapers—circulated the writings and influenced the opinions of authors of the time. Although news reports were supposed to be neutral, editorials generally represented the opinions of the publisher. For example, editor William Tappan Thompson (b.1812–d.1882) of Savannah’s Daily Morning News was an active champion of the Southern cause. Key editorials by Thompson include an eyewitness account of the bombardment of Fort Sumter “Our Flag Victorious!” as seen from the Battery in Charleston, South Carolina and his series of reports on the formation of the provisional Confederate government. Forced to give up the paper when General Sherman took over the city, Thompson later resumed his editorial work in 1868 and again acted as a spokesman for the South during the Reconstruction years until his death in 1882.54 Northern periodicals were equally vocal. Abolitionists established the Liberator, National Era, and other newspapers to publicize the antislavery movement. National Era’s serial issues of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin in forty installments (1851–1852) had a dramatic impact on the North’s view of slavery.55 Alternative viewpoints were represented during the period in socialistic journals (e.g., American Fabian, Nationalist, Masses, and Commonwealth) from a variety of groups: the Christian Socialists, Fabian Socialists, Bellamy Nationalists, Marxian Socialists, and the Populists.56 William Dean Howells, Jack London, and other literary writers supported the movement as they were interested in seeing improve-
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ment in the social and economic problems produced by industrial capitalism. The socialist journal Appeal to Reason hired Upton Sinclair to investigate the meatpacking industry, and was the first to publish his famous exposé The Jungle in serialized form. Minority groups, including Native and Hispanic Americans, started periodicals to serve their respective communities and campaign for recognition in American society. A number of African American periodicals were founded after the Civil War and solicited contributions from leading spokesmen, such as Frederick Douglass, Frances Harper, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Mary Church Terrell. Colored American, Voice of the Negro, Southland, and other magazines took advantage of a national media environment that was slowly becoming more hospitable to blacks. These periodicals provided an arena for the debate over whether newly freed slaves should protest and resist a society still rampant with racism, or work within the system to better their social standing—a stance promulgated by Booker T. Washington.57
GENERAL HISTORIES OF PERIODICALS Gabler-Hover, Janet, and Robert Sattelmeyer, eds. American History through Literature, 1820–1870. 3 vols. Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons/Thomson Gale, 2006. Available online via www.gale.com/gvrl/. Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines. 5 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930–68. North, S.N.D. (Simon Newton Dexter). History and Present Condition of the Newspaper and Periodical Press of the United States. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office for the Census Office, Dept. of Interior, 1884. Issued as vol. 8 of the Final Report of the 10th Census. Microfiche: Library of American Civilization (LAC 16016). Chicago: Library Resources, 1970. Available online at lcweb2.loc.gov/service/gdc/scd0001/ 2003/20030922001hi/20030922001hi.pdf (accessed 29 July 2007). Quirk, Tom, and Gary Scharnhorst, eds. American History through Literature, 1870–1920. 3 vols. Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons/Thomson Gale, 2006. Available online via www.gale.com/gvrl/. American History through Literature, 1820–1870, edited by Janet GablerHover and Robert Sattelmeyer, and American History through Literature, 1870–1920 (Tom Quirk and Gary Scharnhorst, editors) are described in detail in chapter 2 of this book. Each set offers an essay on “Periodicals” that, combined, provides a useful overview of the history of magazine publishing during the period. The essay in 1820–1870 talks about the publishing histories of
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major New York, Philadelphia, and Boston magazines. The 1870–1920 essay breaks down the industry into genres (e.g., quality monthlies, story papers, and little magazines) and then describes the lives of editors and magazine writers. Other entries related to magazine and newspaper publishing are “Newspaper Syndicates,” “Journalism,” “Muckrakers and Yellow Journalism,” and “Little Magazines.” Periodicals important to the period are covered: Appeal to Reason, Atlantic Monthly, Century Magazine, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, McClure’s Magazine, Nation, Overland Monthly, Scribner’s Magazine, Voice of the People, and Woman’s Journal. Frank Luther Mott’s five-volume work A History of American Magazines is well known for its authoritative discussion of the important events and topics in the history of American magazines. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1939, Mott’s description of the periodicals from 1741 to 1930 is enlivened by tales of some of the colorful personalities of the time. Four of the volumes are particularly relevant to the realism–naturalism period: volume 2 (1850–1865), volume 3 (1865–1885), volume 4 (1885–1905), and volume 5 (1905–1930). Among the chapters that may interest literary researchers are “Literary Types and Judgments,” “Literary Phases of Postbellum Magazines,” “General Monthly Magazines,” “General Weekly Magazines,” “Local and Regional Magazines,” and “Women’s Activities.” Each volume in the set contains a chronological list of magazines and a general index. Volume 5, although published unfinished due to Mott’s death, includes an extensive index to the set. North’s History and Present Condition of the Newspaper and Periodical Press of the United States gives an overview of the periodical industry of the early realism–naturalism period. Originally published as volume 8 of the Final Report of the 10th Census by the U.S. Government Printing Office for the Census Office, this informative document has been digitized and is now available on the website of the Library of Congress. The main part of the report chronicles the history of the American periodical industry until 1880, dividing time periods into three segments: 1639–1783, 1783–1835, and 1835–1880. Following the report are four appendixes that provide statistics about the industry in tables. The first appendix supplies statistics related to periodical type and subject, circulation rates, geographic distribution, profits, and employment. The second appendix is a comprehensive listing of periodicals published in 1880 in every state and territory. The third consists of chronologies of events relating to periodical publication for each state and territory, and the fourth lists the contents of newspaper collections. North added an index and a map of the United States to the report. The map shows the number and classes of newspapers and periodicals published in each county in the census year 1880.
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GUIDES TO SPECIFIC TYPES OF MAGAZINES Realism–naturalism researchers are fortunate in that there are numerous guides that describe the magazines and newspapers of the period. Guides are like miniature encyclopedias. They consist of entries that introduce people, places, subjects, or—in the case of literary studies—publications. The guides listed below survey the periodicals of a specific type, genre, or region, and can be used to determine which ones warrant direct examination. Like other reference works, they also often include bibliographies that lead to more indepth scholarship. Some suggest library collections, assisting in the location as well as the identification of titles of interest, although students and scholars should use the information only as a start to their own search for library holdings as collections change over time and a digitized collection may become available. Many of the guides are titles in the Greenwood Press series Historical Guides to the World’s Periodicals and Newspapers (e.g., American Mass-Market Magazines, Women’s Periodicals in the United States: Social and Political Issues, and American Humor Magazines and Comic Periodicals). Guides in this series usually begin with an introduction that details the social and historical context for the profiles of periodicals that follow.
LITERARY MAGAZINES/LITTLE MAGAZINES Chielens, Edward E., ed. American Literary Magazines: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Historical Guides to the World’s Periodicals and Newspapers. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986. Chielens, Edward E., ed. American Literary Magazines: The Twentieth Century. Historical Guides to the World’s Periodicals and Newspapers. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. Chielens, Edward E. The Literary Journal in America to 1900: A Guide to Information Sources. Detroit: Gale Research, 1975. Chielens, Edward E. The Literary Journal in America, 1900–1950: A Guide to Information Sources. Detroit: Gale Research, 1977. Hoffman, Frederick J., Charles Allen, and Carolyn Ulrich. The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947. Both Edward E. Chielens’s American Literary Magazines: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (1986) and American Literary Magazines: The Twentieth Century (1992) offer profiles of literary magazines. The profiles consist of a history of each magazine from the intentions of its founders to its
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last year of publication. Chielens focuses on the literary aspects of each magazine and its role in the development of literary movements, ending each profile with a bibliography and publication information (i.e., collections in libraries, applicable indexes, circulation rate, and editor names). American Literary Magazines: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries covers magazines issued before 1900. Because few exclusively literary magazines were published before the turn of the century, Chielens also discusses general-interest magazines with some literary content. Two appendixes offer a listing of minor publications and a chronology. The companion volume American Literary Magazines: The Twentieth Century describes many literary magazines, including some that were started in the nineteenth century but did not become popular until the twentieth. The Twentieth Century contains three useful appendixes. The first gives brief descriptions of minor regional and little magazines (independent, low-budget, and often radical publications). The second appendix is a chronology of events that connects literary magazines to social and literary events. The third describes little magazine collections in the United States and Canada. Chielens also authored two useful annotated bibliographies: The Literary Journal in America to 1900 (1975) and The Literary Journal in America, 1900–1950 (1977). Chielens’s bibliographies were published in the 1970s, but they are still valued for their examination of writings on the subject from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Brief (one- to twosentence) descriptions of books and articles discuss the various aspects of the literary journal in American history. Chielens defines “literary journals” as “periodicals in which literature—fiction, poetry, and philosophical, critical, or familiar essays—was a primary element as well as those that played parts in the development of American literary history.”58 Entries in The Literary Journal in America to 1900 are organized into chapters by the regional focus of the periodical being discussed. The other volume for 1900–1950 is organized by journal type (e.g., little magazines, regional literary magazines, politically radical publications, and academic quarterlies). Appendixes supply added information on bibliographies, checklists, background studies, and other works of interest. Readers will find information about little magazines in the American Literary Magazines and Literary Journal in America guides by Edward E. Chielens as well as Frank Luther Mott’s A History of American Magazines (described above). They may also want to consult The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography by Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn Ulrich. The Little Magazine is an older source (1947) that covers the history and development of little magazines in general, both overseas and in the United States. Especially useful are the first three chapters that discuss little
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magazines in the 1910s and the annotated bibliography at the end of the book. In the bibliography, descriptions of the magazines are given in order of their date of publication, making it easy to identify and learn about their history. Each entry contains symbols that stand for libraries holding issues of the magazine. Among the titles of interest to American realism and naturalism researchers are Mirror (1891–1920, St. Louis, Missouri, weekly); Chap-Book: Being a Miscellany of Curious and Interesting Songs, Ballads, Tales, Histories, etc. (1894–1898, Chicago, semimonthly); and Papyrus: A Magazine of Individuality (1903–1912, Mount Vernon, New York, monthly).
GUIDES TO GENERAL-INTEREST AND SPECIALIZED PERIODICALS Bullock, Penelope L. The Afro-American Periodical Press, 1838–1909. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. Endres, Kathleen L., and Therese L. Lueck, eds. Women’s Periodicals in the United States: Consumer Magazines. Historical Guides to the World’s Periodicals and Newspapers. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995. Endres, Kathleen L., and Therese L. Lueck, eds. Women’s Periodicals in the United States: Social and Political Issues. Historical Guides to the World’s Periodicals and Newspapers. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Kanellos, Nicolás, with Helvetia Martell. Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography. Houston, TX: Arte Público Press, 2000. Littlefield, Daniel F., Jr., and James W. Parins. American Indian and Alaska Native Newspapers and Periodicals. 3 vols. Historical Guides to the World’s Periodicals and Newspapers. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984–86. Lora, Ronald, and William Henry Longton, eds. The Conservative Press in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century America. Historical Guides to the World’s Periodicals and Newspapers. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Lora, Ronald, and William Henry Longton, eds. The Conservative Press in Twentieth-Century America. Historical Guides to the World’s Periodicals and Newspapers. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Nourie, Alan, and Barbara Nourie, eds. American Mass-Market Magazines. Historical Guides to the World’s Periodicals and Newspapers. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990. Riley, Sam G. Index to Southern Periodicals. Historical Guides to the World’s Periodicals and Newspapers. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986.
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Riley, Sam G. Magazines of the American South. Historical Guides to the World’s Periodicals and Newspapers. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986. Sloane, David E. E., ed. American Humor Magazines and Comic Periodicals. Advisory ed., Stanley Trachtenberg. Historical Guides to the World’s Periodicals and Newspapers. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. Zuckerman, Mary Ellen, comp. Sources on the History of Women’s Magazines, 1792–1960: An Annotated Bibliography. Bibliographies and Indexes in Women’s Studies. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. One of the titles in the series of Historical Guides to the World’s Periodicals and Newspapers from Greenwood Press, Alan and Barbara Nourie’s American Mass-Market Magazines (1990) profiles general-interest magazines published throughout American history. The approximately thirty magazines covered in the volume were issued during the realism–naturalism period, among them the familiar titles of Atlantic Monthly, Scribner’s Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, and Smart Set. Articles discuss the ownership and editorship of each journal, its content and reception over the years, and the journal’s changing place in the magazine industry. The articles are more than just lists of facts; they vividly tell the story of each publication with quotes and concluding statements. Each article is followed by a brief bibliography and a publication history with details about titles, frequency, publishers, editors, and circulation rates. A chronology, selected bibliography, and index end the book. Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography (2000), by Nicolás Kanellos and Helvetia Martell, examines Hispanic newspapers and magazines issued in the United States before 1960 in Spanish, English, or in both languages. They begin their book with “A Brief History” that provides the social and historical context for the bibliography that follows. The bibliographic list contains the details regarding periodical titles, place(s) of publication, publishers, and dates. Indexes allow access by geographic location and publication date, so readers can identify titles from certain cities in addition to those dating from a particular century. A subject index helps them to find discussions of key topics, firms, and people. Another specialized periodical guide American Indian and Alaska Native Newspapers and Periodicals is composed of three volumes: volume 1 for the years 1826 to 1924, volume 2 for 1925 to 1970, and volume 3 for 1971 to 1985. Daniel F. Littlefield Jr. and James W. Parins begin the first volume (1826–1924) with an introduction to the Native American press of that time period. Like the other titles in the Greenwood Press Historical Guides series, the Littlefield and Parins guide offers an alphabetical list of titles and details
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on their history, editors, content, and organizational affiliations, including tribal affiliations. Each title entry gives the library locations. Appendixes sort titles by chronology, tribe, and place of publication, and readers are led from variant titles to main title entries by cross-referencing. The Afro-American Periodical Press, 1838–1909 (1981), by Penelope L. Bullock, examines African American periodicals of the antebellum and realism–naturalism eras. Bullock focuses on magazines rather than newspapers, describing each publication, its editors, and key contributors along with its intended purpose. Two essays—“Perspective” and “In Retrospect”— bookend the magazine profiles and further contextualize them in history. An appendix gives publishing details, circulation rates, and library holdings for each title, although the details vary depending on the issues available for examination and the magazine’s span of existence. Since the guide was published in 1981, the availability information should be used only as a supplement to a current search for library holdings and/or digitized collections. The magazines of the realism–naturalism period are well represented in Sam G. Riley’s Magazines of the American South (1986), a Greenwood Press guide that covers magazines from throughout American history. The volume is designed to be used in conjunction with its companion title Index to Southern Periodicals (below). Riley writes multipage profiles of periodicals, each followed by a listing of publication and distribution facts. The first appendix is a chronology, and the second lists magazines by state of publication. Riley’s companion guide Index to Southern Periodicals (1986) contains a chronological list of the Southern magazines and their locations in libraries throughout the United States. The chronology is based on the date of founding, and the location symbols used are those of The Union List of Serials in Libraries of the United States and Canada, third edition, edited by Edna Brown Titus (H. W. Wilson, 1965). A good starting point for researching the “cheap” magazines of the period is David E. E. Sloane’s American Humor Magazines and Comic Periodicals (1987). Sloane’s guide is another title in the Greenwood Press Historical Guides series that covers hundreds of titles from the realism–naturalism period. The book is divided into four parts. Part I consists of over one hundred multipage articles on popular humor magazines, such as Rolling Stone, Bee, and Smart Set. Part II describes approximately four hundred less popular magazines, and Part III offers lists of magazine titles accompanied by no more than a sentence of bibliographic information. Part IV features three essays that overview the appearance of humorous texts in specific types of periodicals. The end matter of the book includes a useful chronology of the starting dates of every magazine listed in the book, a selected bibliography, and an index.
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General-interest magazines designed by and for women were started in the nineteenth century. They contained a variety of material, from fashion illustrations, travel articles, and etiquette tips to poems and stories. Godey’s Lady’s Book, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, and Woman’s Home Companion are just some of the titles issued during these years. There are two volumes in the Greenwood Press Historical Guides series that discuss women’s magazines. Kathleen L. Endres and Therese L. Lueck’s Women’s Periodicals in the United States: Consumer Magazines (1995) provides brief, two- to six-page essays on women’s consumer magazines from throughout American history. The volume examines general women’s magazines, magazines about specific hobbies and interests, and those aimed at specific ethnic or racial groups. Each essay is followed by a bibliography, lists of index and location sources, title changes, and names of publishers and editors. A publication chronology allows readers to identify realism–naturalism titles of interest. Endres and Lueck are also the editors of a companion guide on specialized women’s periodicals that focuses on social and political issues. Women’s Periodicals in the United States: Social and Political Issues (1996) profiles a number of nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury magazines ranging from Far and Near (1890–1894), the journal of “a loose-knit national coalition” of “working girls’ clubs,” to the Remonstrance (1890–1920), a voice for the anti-suffrage movement. Like Consumer Magazines, each essay on an individual magazine is followed by a bibliography and publishing history details (i.e., editor names, title changes, and circulation rates). The chronology of starting dates is also provided along with an index to names, topics, and titles. As a title in the Greenwood Press series Bibliographies and Indexes in Women’s Studies, Mary Ellen Zuckerman’s Sources on the History of Women’s Magazines, 1792–1960 (1991) is meant to lead its readers to works about various aspects of women’s magazine publication. These topics include business, advertising, representations of women, criticisms, and publishing history, as well as general surveys. After two general chapters on magazines from before 1865 and after 1865, the bibliography is divided into subject chapters, including “Portrayal of Women in the Media,” “Advertising and Ad Agencies,” and “Critiques of Women’s Magazines.” The last chapter lists articles on individual titles. Entries supply full bibliographic information and annotations. The book ends with an author index and a subject index. Both The Conservative Press in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century America (1999) and its companion volume The Conservative Press in TwentiethCentury America (1999) are edited by Ronald Lora and William Henry Longton and issued as titles in the Greenwood Press Historical Guides series. The guides offer informative sketches (eight to ten pages long) of U.S. conserva-
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tive periodicals. Lora and Longton have selected a “representative sampling” of periodicals from these centuries that range from the well known to the esoteric. Most of the selected titles are monthly or quarterly journals rather than weeklies or dailies, so “Conservative Press” should not be mistaken as a reference to the newspaper press. Indexes list names and titles.
ONLINE PERIODICAL INDEXES American Periodicals Series (APS) Online, 1740–1900. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 2000–. www.proquest.com. The Gerritsen Collection: Women’s History Online, 1543–1945. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 2000–. www.proquest.com. Illustrated Civil War Newspapers and Magazines: Important and Rare Periodicals from Confederate, Union, Abolitionist, and British Presses. Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press, 2007–. alexanderstreetpress.com. JSTOR: The Scholarly Journal Archive. New York: JSTOR, 1995–. www .jstor.org. 19th Century Masterfile. Reston, VA: Paratext, 1999–. Previous title: Poole’s Plus: The Digital Index of the Nineteenth Century. www.paratext.com. Making of America. Ann Arbor, MI/Ithaca, NY: University of Michigan/Cornell University, 1995–. Michigan site: www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp/. Cornell site: cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/. Periodicals Archive Online. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 2005–. www.proquest .com. Available alone and linked to C19: Nineteenth-Century Index. Ann Arbor, MI: Proquest, 2005–. C19index.chadwyck.com Periodicals Index Online. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 2002–. www.proquest .com/. Available alone and linked to C19: The Nineteenth Century Index. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 2005–. c19index.chadwyck.com. Previous titles: Periodicals Contents Index (PCI), 1993–2001; Cumulative Contents Index, 1992–93. Poole, William Frederick. Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature. 6 vols. Boston: Houghton, 1888–1908. Rev. ed. Boston: Houghton, 1891. Reprint: Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1963. Available online via 19th Century Masterfile at www.paratext.com and linked to C19: The Nineteenth Century Index. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 2005–. c19index.chadwyck.com. Chapter 6 described specialized indexes for review articles in contemporary periodicals. The print and online indexes in this section may be used to identify review articles as part of a wide range of articles. Some retrieve references to articles in newspapers in addition to those in magazines and journals;
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other indexes specific to newspapers are addressed later in this chapter, such as Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers. Researchers looking for periodical indexes in related subject fields, such as art and music, should consult the resources in the Appendix. James L. Harner’s Literary Research Guide, described in chapter 2, and Robert Balay’s Early Periodical Indexes: Bibliographies and Indexes of Literature Published in Periodicals before 1900 may also be consulted for index recommendations. Balay does not focus on the sources specific to the era, but he discusses sources published prior to 1900 that are restricted to periodicals and groups them into six categories: general, humanities, history and area studies, social and behavioral sciences, science and technology, and library and information science. There are a number of factors to consider before beginning a search of the available resources. Writers of this era often used multiple pseudonyms and submitted anonymous contributions, especially women writers of the nineteenth century, so the biographical and pseudonym guides described in chapter 2 may be needed as a preliminary step in the research process. Those studying serialized literature will want to make sure that all periodical issues involved in the series have been identified, especially the segments not labeled “to be continued.” Some magazines may have been indexed annually by their publishers. Detailed library catalog or WorldCat records may note the particular issues that contain the indexes. It is also important to consider the increasing number of online databases that provide not only indexing for periodicals of the era but also the full text and, sometimes, the photographs or other graphic art contained in the articles. The content of early print indexes may have been “repackaged” as a database, and smaller databases subsumed by larger ones. The many ties between databases as well as databases with websites should not be ignored even if overlapping coverage and connections are not advertised. An important source for contemporary periodicals is ProQuest’s American Periodicals Series Online, 1740–1900, a database of digitized page images from magazines, journals, and newspapers. The database offers indexing for American periodicals that began publication between 1740 and 1900, with coverage extending to 1940 for titles that started before 1900 and continued into the twentieth century. APS Online was originally published as a microfilm set divided into three series: American Periodical Series, Eighteenth Century (APS I); American Periodical Series, 1800–1850 (APS II); and American Periodical Series, 1850–1900 (APS III). All types of periodicals are represented, from general-interest journals and women’s magazines to society and humor magazines. The database includes over one hundred titles issued during the Civil War and Reconstruction, magazines of political and social commentary from the end of the nineteenth century, and early professional
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journals. The entirety of each periodical has been digitized and indexed, which means that even minor articles and advertisements can be identified, as well as comics, editorial cartoons, illustrations, letters, obituaries, photographs, poems, recipes, reviews, and statistics. ProQuest’s “Advanced Search” interface looks for keywords in citations, abstracts, full text, and periodical titles; searchers can opt to limit by date and type. The APS Online interface requires its users to choose between “Search for Articles” and “Search for Periodicals.” The “Search for Articles” option allows them to look for material published by periodicals; the “Search for Periodicals” option leads to individual periodical records with bibliographic and historical information. Clicking on “Tools: Search Tips” on the articles interface brings up help screens that offer advice on the best way to construct searches. For instance, someone looking for “Beyond the Bayou,” a short story by Kate Chopin, may appreciate knowing that quotation marks can group words together and that three-word queries locate proximities. Boolean operators can also be used to connect keywords. “beyond the bayou” chopin beyond bayou chopin beyond and bayou and chopin Any of the three search strategies retrieves the results shown in figure 7.1. The first citation is the desired story by Chopin in the June 15, 1893 issue of Youth’s Companion. The second entry locates the title of the short story in the table of contents of the magazine because the database searches the issue cover to cover for the keywords. The third finds a reference to the author’s story in a review of her book Bayou Folk. Although the three references can be viewed quickly, the user could have targeted the single appropriate citation by selecting the “Advanced Search” tab at the top of the interface and dis-
Figure 7.1.
Modified search results for “Beyond the Bayou.” Source: APS Online.
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playing the options for multiple search terms, searching for “beyond the bayou” as “document title” and for chopin as “author.” When “Article image—PDF” is chosen from the appropriate citation, Chopin’s story is displayed as a portable document format (PDF) file using Adobe Reader software. “Page map” brings up the original typography and layout, while “Abstract” produces the descriptive summary in figure 7.2. A search for the periodical Youth’s Companion using the option “Search for Periodical” produces details about the magazine’s publisher, editors, and future title American Boy. Further information can be found in volume 2 of Mott’s A History of American Magazines. It is important that APS Online users do not assume that all issues of the magazine are being searched in their entirety, as the publisher may not have had access to particular issues or pages of issues. The descriptions and lists of individual issues covered allow users to check indexing coverage. The 19th Century Masterfile (NCM), formerly known as Poole’s Plus, is a useful tool for exploring nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century periodicals. The database, published by Paratext, is a compilation of over sixty historical subject indexes to materials published before 1930, all of which are searchable through a single interface. At the present time, NCM’s indexes are divided into five series: Series I covers multi-title periodical indexes, such as Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature (1802 to January 1, 1907), the Index to Periodicals (Ed.
Figure 7.2.
Modified entry for “Abstract” of “Beyond the Bayou.” Source: APS Online.
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William T. Stead, 1890–1902), An Alphabetical Subject Index and Index Encyclopedia to Periodical Articles on Religion, 1890–1899 (Ed. E. C. Richardson), Cumulative Index to a Selected List of Periodicals (1896–1899), Catalog of Scientific Papers—Mechanics, Physics, Mathematics (1800–1900), Jones and Chipman’s Index to Legal Periodical Literature (1786–1922), The Psychological Index (1894–1905), America: History and Life, and Swem’s Virginia Index, 1619–1930. Series II indexes examine the MARC records of nineteenth-century books and periodicals. Series III provides newspaper indexes (e.g., selective runs of the New York Times Index (1863–1905), the New York Herald Tribune Index (1875–1906), and the Index to the Oregon Spectator (1846–1854). Series IV contains indexes to individual periodicals: Harper’s Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, North American Review, and Library Journal. Series V offers indexes to United States and United Kingdom government publications and patents, including the Congressional Record File, Descriptive Catalogue of the Government Publications of the U.S. (1774–1881), and the Subject Matter of Patents Issued by the U.S. (1790–1873). Although some U.K. resources are offered in the database, the majority are related to U.S. periodicals and documents. Each of the series may be purchased separately. New index titles have been added over the years, so users should verify the contents of their particular library’s version of 19th Century Masterfile before they search the database. The centerpiece of the NCM database is Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature, published in print form by Houghton, 1888–1908 (rev. ed., 1891). William Frederick Poole (b.1821–d.1894) is considered one of the forefathers of American librarianship. He served both as the head librarian of the Chicago Public Library and as an early founder and president of the American Library Association. The 1891 index is an expanded version of an earlier one that he completed during his college years at Yale University: An Alphabetical Index to Subjects Treated in the Reviews and Other Periodicals, to Which No Indexes Have Been Published (Society of Brothers in Unity, Yale College, 1848) and later published as An Index to Periodical Literature (Norton, 1853). Poole felt strongly that subject access to periodical literature was needed, and organized a group of librarians in 1876 to achieve this goal.59 Users of Poole’s can retrieve citations from magazines important to the period, such as Sewanee Review; Review of Reviews; Putnam’s Magazine; Overland Monthly; McClure’s Magazine; Scribner’s Magazine; Harper’s Weekly and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine; Godey’s Magazine; Folk-lore; Atlantic Monthly; and Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art. The edition of the index available through NCM is an enhanced version
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that offers almost five hundred thousand citations, with date and title information not contained in the original print volumes. Users of the 19th Century Masterfile database can search by title, author, or keyword. The database utilizes a relevancy-ranking search engine that evaluates the degree of relevance on the number of times keywords occur in each record, their proximity to each other, and the significance of the fields in which the keywords are found (e.g., title or subject). Search queries may take the form of a single search term, a short phrase (identified as such by selecting the option for “exact phrase”), or multiple search terms placed side by side. The database does not recognize Boolean operators, but automatically searches for both singular and plural forms of nouns. Users can truncate search terms and limit their queries to a certain date range. The results screen shows twenty records at a time in brief display. Titles can be selected for more bibliographic information. Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature may be searched in combination with Periodicals Index Online and Periodicals Archive Online (discussed below) through C19: The Nineteenth Century Index, ProQuest’s bibliographic “spine.” C19 links the offerings of a number of databases related to the nineteenth century for cross-searching: the NSTC and The Nineteenth Century for books; The Wellesley Index, American Periodicals Series (APS) Online, British Periodicals, and Periodicals Index Online/Periodicals Archive Online for periodicals; the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers for official publications; and the Palmer’s Index to “The Times” for newspapers. ProQuest’s Periodicals Index Online (PIO), formerly known as Periodicals Contents Index, examines thousands of humanities and social science publications spanning from 1665 to 1995. While the greatest number originate from the middle and late twentieth century, the database indexes some American literary journals that were active during the realism–naturalism period: American, Bookman, Century, Dial, Literary Digest, Literary World, Living Age, Modern Language Notes, North American Review, PMLA, Sewanee Review, and Writer. The international scope of the database brings coverage of journals from around the world, many in foreign languages. PIO consists of both article records and journal records. Article records contain the title, author, journal title, journal issue, page number, and journal subjects. There are quick links from each article record to the journal record and to a list of other articles from that issue. Journal records provide the title, previous titles, publisher, description, publishing dates, index coverage dates, language, subject terms, Library of Congress Control Number, ISSN, and Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal call numbers. Below the record are links to each issue, which are browsable. If a library also subscribes to the companion database Periodicals Archive Online (PAO), a collection of over
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four hundred journals in full-text digital format, PIO links to PAO’s articles. PIO records may also link to JSTOR when full text is available through that database. In PIO and PAO, users can either search for articles or browse journals by title or subject. Results of a search can be filtered by journal, language, journal subject, date, or a combination of filters. In PIO, through a feature called “MyArchive,” article or journal records can be marked and saved to be accessed at a later time or date. PAO provides durable URLs that can be inserted into documents to give quick access to articles. Alexander Street Press’s Illustrated Civil War Newspapers and Magazines covers publications from 1860 to 1865. The database is made up of twentythree pro-Union titles, eleven pro-Confederation titles, fifteen presidential campaign newspapers, and six hundred letters from Alexander Street’s The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries. Included are military papers, abolitionist papers, political satire papers, and British papers published during the war. Images of the scanned pages are supplied as well as the reprinted text of each article. The search interface allows for standard searches and proximity searches, limiting by publication, and limiting by date and publication feature (e.g., advertisement, article, editorial, map, or poetry). Begun in 1995 and available without subscription on the Internet, Making of America (MOA) is a collaborative digitization project between Cornell University and the University of Michigan with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The collection consists of more than 1.5 million images of monographs and journal articles published from the antebellum era to the Reconstruction era on a wide variety of subjects, but focusing on education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. The collection is divided into two parts: one based out of Cornell and the other based out of Michigan. Cornell University offers access to the full text of lengthy runs of twenty-two journals, among them Atlantic Monthly (1857–1901), Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (1850–1899), North American Review (1815–1900), and Scribner’s Magazine (1887–1896). Michigan provides access to thirteen journals, e.g., Overland Monthly (1868–1900), Princeton Review (1831–1882), and Southern Literary Messenger (1835–1864). Journals can be browsed, searched collectively, or searched individually. Advanced search features allow for Boolean, proximity, frequency, and index searching. A subject index is available in addition to title and author indexes. The Gerritsen Collection: Women’s History Online, 1543–1945 is the online version of The Gerritsen Collection, a compilation of women’s writings from around the world on microform, now digitized and made available through Chadwyck-Healey (a division of ProQuest). Among its vast archives are American periodicals of the realism–naturalism period. The collection
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was begun in the late nineteenth century by Aletta H. Jacobs (1984–1929), a Dutch physician, and her husband; it was finished in 1945. The complete collection consists of over two million pages in fifteen languages spanning four centuries. The digitized version consists of a periodical series and a monograph series, the former of which makes up one quarter of the collection. Most of the periodicals come from the years 1860 to 1900, among them the American publications Woman’s Exponent, Woman’s Tribune, and Chicago Sunday Press. The collection concentrates on feminist and suffragist writings, but also includes anti-feminist writings and other contrasting views. Users can search the Gerritsen Collection by keyword, author, book or article-title keyword, publisher, place of publication, language and/or year of publication in one or a combination of search boxes. There are options for utilizing Boolean and proximity operators in addition to phrase searching. The “Select from a list” link to the right of each search box displays a list of appropriate terms from the applicable index. More advanced options, available on the lower portion of the search interface, permit users to look for specific subjects or articles from a particular periodical. The “Gerritsen Index” box, located under the subject search box, offers broader subject search categories and subcategories (e.g., “Women and the arts – Dutch,” “Women and the arts – English,” and “Women and the arts – French”). Searches can be limited to books or periodical articles, and search results sorted alphabetically, chronologically, or by relevance.
PRINT PERIODICAL INDEXES Goode, Stephen H. Index to American Little Magazines, 1900–1919; To Which Is Added a Selected List of British and Continental Titles for the Years, 1900–1950, together with Addenda and Corrigenda to Previous Indexes. 3 vols. Troy, NY: The Whitston Publishing Company, 1974. Literary Writings in America: A Bibliography. Millwood, NY: KTO Press, 1977. Poole, William Frederick. Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature. 6 vols. Boston: Houghton, 1888–1908. Rev. ed. Boston: Houghton, 1891. Reprint: Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1963. Available online through 19th Century Masterfile at www.paratext.com and linked to C19: The Nineteenth Century Index. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 2005–. c19index.chadwyck.com. Sader, Marion, ed. Comprehensive Index to English-Language Little Magazines, 1890–1970. Series One. Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson Organization, 1976.
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Wells, Daniel A., comp. The Literary Index to American Magazines, 1850–1900. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Introduced in chapter 4, Literary Writings in America (1977), produced as a Works Progress Administration project, is useful for periodical research in that it comprehensively lists creative works published primarily in magazines (but also in books) between 1850 and 1940. Over six hundred magazine titles were reviewed; they are listed in the front matter of the first volume. Reviews and criticism from periodicals are included as well. Library users can browse Literary Writings to find all of the works published by a particular writer in magazines. LWA lists many lesser-known authors whose work appeared only in periodicals. Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature is described above as a key component of the 19th Century Masterfile database and ProQuest’s C19: The Nineteenth Century Index. Those who do not have access to the online database will want to take advantage of the print form of this index. Many libraries have the six print volumes in their reference collections. The index is arranged by subject, but there is an author index in the last volume of the set that offers easier access to article citations. In The Literary Index to American Magazines, 1850–1900 (1996), Daniel A. Wells offers an index to the “mentions” and writings of over a thousand literary figures in eleven of the most popular literary magazines published between 1850 and 1900. Entries begin with a short description of the literary figure followed by a list of the volumes and page numbers of mentions of the writer in the magazines. Some citations contain a brief description of the passage or article. Mentions and reviews of the writer’s works are listed next, followed by poems, stories, and articles by the writer that appear in the magazines. Writers may be contemporary or classic (for example, there is a four-page entry on Shakespeare). There are occasional entries for popular periodicals, like the eleven that are indexed, and topics (i.e., copyright, criticism, Russian literature, and transcendentalism). The title of Stephen H. Goode’s Index to American Little Magazines, 1900–1919 (1974) is misleading as most of the entries in the three-volume set date from after 1919. Goode explains in his preface that the set, in addition to being a primary index of little magazines from the first two decades of the century, is designed to continue and supplement previous indexes that cover up to 1947 (i.e., The Index to American Little Magazines, 1920–1939; Index to Little Magazines: 1940–1942; and Index to Little Magazines 1943–1947). The eight-volume Comprehensive Index to English-Language Little Magazines, 1890–1970 (1976), edited by Marion Sader, examines only five
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American little magazines from the realism–naturalism period: Camera Work, Chap-Book, Glebe, Poetry, and Sewanee Review. Chap-Book is indexed with full text through APS Online, and Poetry and Sewanee Review are covered by Periodicals Index Online; those who do not have access to the two databases may want to consult Sader’s volumes for indexing of these publications. Entries are for authors of creative works and articles as well as editors, translators, illustrators, photographers, composers, and other creators. Reviews are listed under both the writer and the creator of the work being reviewed.
INDEXES TO INDIVIDUAL PERIODICALS HarpWeek: The Civil War Era (1857–1865). Norfolk, VA: HarpWeek, 1997. www.harpweek.com. The Nation Digital Archive: Since 1865. New York: Nation Publishing Company, 2001–. www.archive.thenation.com. The Nation, the oldest weekly magazine in the United States, was founded in 1865 by abolitionists. A liberal-leaning publication, it circulated articles critical of nationalism, imperialism, and socialism. The magazine is valuable today as a source for more than 130 years of news articles, editorials, and creative works. The Nation Digital Archive, a subscription database, makes the entire text of the magazine searchable back to its first issue. Pages have been digitized as PDF files. OCR text allows users to search the full text by keywords as well as by title, author, or subject. They can limit searches by date range, document type, or number of pages. Articles can also be browsed by date, author, or subject category. Most article records include abstracts. HarpWeek makes available in digitized image format the entirety of the print run of Harper’s Weekly, the influential political magazine published by Harper and Brothers between 1857 and 1912. The magazine is especially important to literary researchers as it published serialized fiction throughout its lifespan. Libraries may subscribe to some or all of the nine period segments that make up the print run. Users can either browse issues or search for queries in HarpWeek. The browse feature allows users to view the table of contents for each issue or link directly to page images. Users can choose to search the full text of the articles, human-made indexes, or synopses of fictional works found in Harper’s Weekly. Words or phrases can be located in the full text by either a standard search or a proximity search (where they can be up to fifty words apart). Database indexes can be searched collectively or individually. They consist of a subject index, an illustration index, an adver-
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tisement index, and a literature and publishing term index. There are also paragraph-long synopses of each fictional work or installment of fictional work that can be searched or browsed. The plots of over 3,500 fictional works are summarized, delineating how certain subjects were treated in period fiction.
NEWSPAPERS Newspapers were the main source of information for the average American citizen before the 1890s and the advent of national magazines. The printed publications, considered a type of magazine, were usually issued daily or weekly on folded, unstapled sheets of inexpensive paper. In addition to news stories, they offered advertisements, photographs, articles, and correspondence.60 At the beginning of the realism–naturalism period there were approximately four hundred daily and three thousand weekly newspapers in the United States. By the period’s end the amount peaked at two thousand daily and fourteen thousand weekly papers.61 Those willing to utilize contemporary newspapers may find answers to many of their research questions. What news headlines and articles accompanied Kate Chopin’s short stories in the Saint Louis Dispatch? Did events in the news affect Walt Whitman’s writings while he lived in Washington, DC during the Civil War? Since local-color and regionalist authors like Jack London and Frank Norris based their plots on local news stories, collections of local newspapers can be valuable sources of information. The local newspapers still retained their popularity despite competition from urban papers that were growing in size and circulation rate. A significant change to the newspaper industry stemmed from the development of powerful newspaper syndicates at the end of the nineteenth century. These agencies produced articles and other content to be distributed for printing in more than one newspaper. The first newspaper syndicate was started by Ansel Nash Kellogg in July 1861 when he made arrangements with David Atwood and Horace Rublee of the Wisconsin State Journal to place their war news on pages folded—“ready prints”—inside his Baraboo Republic.62 By the 1880s syndicates were distributing the literary works of writers such as Jack London, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Kate Chopin, who became known nationwide through newspaper syndication. The ability to sell their work for syndication gave these and other writers more autonomy and made the writing profession more popular. Newspaper syndication has also been declared responsible for the increased popularity in short stories. Even after syndicates declined after 1905, they continued to distribute short stories to newspapers.63
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Literature and journalism were more closely connected during the realism– naturalism period, and the application of fictional devices to real-life stories to provide emotional or dramatic impact (i.e., literary journalism) was a common practice.64 Fiction writers, especially local-color and regionalist authors, often based their plots on local news stories, while newspapers published poetry, fiction, and literary essays in addition to news articles. “Yellow journalism” introduced an element of fiction to the news with the use of sensationalism to attract a large audience of readers, peaking in 1898 when the exaggerated stories of the 1898 sinking of the American battleship Maine helped to bring about a war with Spain. Numerous novels and stories of the Progressive era (1890s to the 1920s) were published in newspapers by “muckrakers”—writers who attempted to expose corrupt practices (e.g., racketeering and child labor) or unhealthy conditions in slums, prisons, or food processing plants. Given the derogatory nickname by Theodore Roosevelt, the muckrakers were later recognized as the instigators of much social reform. This complex publishing environment influenced and contributed to the popularity of the literary realism and naturalism movements. Histories Caswell, Lucy Shelton, ed. Guide to Sources in American Journalism History. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. Mott, Frank Luther. American Journalism: A History, 1690–1960. 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1962. North, S.N.D. (Simon Newton Dexter). History and Present Condition of the Newspaper and Periodical Press of the United States. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office for the Census Office, Dept. of Interior, 1884. Issued as vol. 8 of the Final Report of the 10th Census. Microfiche: Library of American Civilization (LAC 16016). Chicago: Library Resources, 1970. Available online at lcweb2.loc.gov/service/gdc/scd0001/ 2003/20030922001hi/20030922001hi.pdf (accessed 27 July 2007). Lucy Shelton Caswell’s three-part Guide to Sources in American Journalism History (1989) offers a variety of guides and reference tools that can assist in newspaper research. The first part of the book consists of three articles on researching journalism. The second has both essays and reference tools, including a guide and bibliography to reference sources, a guide to databases (largely outdated), a discussion of the United States Newspaper Program (a newspaper preservation program started by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress), and an essay on researching oral histories. The third part, making up the majority of the book, is a guide to
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archival and manuscript sources relating to journalism. Archival collections are arranged by repository and state. An index at the back of the book allows users to look up the collections by newspaper title or journalist. Frank Luther Mott’s American Journalism: A History, 1690–1960 (1962) covers newspapers with the same thoroughness as his A History of American Magazines addresses its subject. Chapters 20 through 35 discuss the realism– naturalism period in three sections: “Journalism in War and Reconstruction 1860–1872,” “The Rise of the Independent Press 1872–1892,” and “The Rise and Fall of Yellow Journalism 1892–1914.” Each meticulously detailed section provides the histories of various presses and generous amounts of statistics, and ends with a two-page bibliography. The index of this book makes it a good reference tool for quickly learning about journalists and publishers. North’s History and Present Condition of the Newspaper and Periodical Press of the United States (1970) offers a window into the newspaper industry of the early realism–naturalism period. Originally published as volume 8 of the census reports of the Tenth Census by the U.S. Government Printing Office for the Census Office, this informative document has been digitized and is now available on the website of the Library of Congress. The report gives a chronological history of the newspaper press of the United States, a list of newspapers issued at the time, and a map showing the number and classes of newspapers issued in each county in the census year, 1880. The list is organized by place of publication (with population figures), frequency, type, date of establishment, and price. Directories and Bibliographies Kenny, Daniel J. The American Newspaper Directory and Record of the Press. Containing an Accurate List of All the Newspapers, Magazines, Reviews, Periodicals, etc. in the United States & British Provinces of North America. Also, a Concise General View of the Origin, Rise and Progress of Newspapers. New York: Watson, 1861. Microfilm: American Culture Series (Microfilm 01291; reel 67, no. 5 E; Z6951). Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International. Web PDF from Harvard University, Google Books Search collection. books.google.com. Lord & Thomas’ Pocket Directory of the American Press: A Complete List of Newspapers, Magazines, and Periodicals Published in the United States, Canada, Porto [sic] Rico, Hawaiian and Philippine Islands. Chicago: Lord and Thomas, 1900–26. N. W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual and Directory. Philadelphia: N. W. Ayer and Son, 1910–29. Previous title: N. W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual (1880–1909). Current title (2006): Gale
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Directory of Publications and Broadcast Media. Absorbed (1910): Rowell’s American Newspaper Directory. George P. Rowell and Co., 1905–8 (previously American Newspaper Directory, 1886–1904). Contemporary newspaper directories are less likely to be found in libraries that do not hold an extensive publishing history collection, but they are worth locating for their ability to identify publications that existed at the time. Some of the best-known American directories are described in this section. Each one offers different details about newspapers from across the country. To investigate other directories, researchers can do an advanced search for subject in WorldCat using the keywords newspapers united states directory or american newspapers directories to find items assigned the subject headings of “Newspapers—United States—Directory” and “American newspapers— Directories.” Lord & Thomas’ Pocket Directory of the American Press was issued from 1900 to 1926. The directory not only lists the newspapers for U.S. cities, it also provides the city population, the circulation figure for the paper, its frequency (daily, weekly, quarterly, or monthly abbreviated as D, W, Q, and M), and notes regarding its affiliation or orientation, such as Democratic or Republican, socialist, family, agricultural, medical, literary, educational, or religious. A list of codes serves to differentiate the daily morning papers from the evening papers and the particular days they were delivered. Researchers may find it interesting to compare the newspapers favored by the population of each city: Boston, Massachusetts to Columbia, South Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, etc. If studying particular papers— for example, the nationally distributed, socialist Appeal to Reason—they may want to examine the publications of Girard/Crawford, Kansas. The Philadelphia (PA) company N. W. Ayer and Son published the American Newspaper Annual (often called the Ayer’s Directory) from 1880 to 1986. Ayer’s is a list of newspapers and other periodicals issued in the United States and Canada, categorized by geographical location and subject content. A predecessor, then competitor of Ayer’s, Rowell’s American Newspaper Directory was issued out of New York City by George P. Rowell and Company from 1886 until it was absorbed by Ayer’s in 1910. The directory of newspapers and periodicals is also categorized by geographic locations covering the United States and its territories. Both directories provide advertising rates and circulation data. Information about radio and television stations was added when Ayer’s American Newspaper Annual was continued as the Gale Directory of Publications and Broadcast Media (New York: Gale, 1987–). The information given in Ayer’s and Lord & Thomas may be compared to that of Daniel J. Kenny’s The American Newspaper Directory and Record of
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the Press, published in 1861 as the American Civil War commenced.65 The directory records the titles, prices, and locations of antebellum newspapers— an industry that would experience dramatic changes in the four years of civil war that would follow. The directory begins with a simple alphabetical list of states with cities and their newspapers, which is followed by an alphabetical list of newspapers with prices and addresses. There are essays “Origin and Progress on the Art of Printing,” “Introduction and Progress of Newspapers in America,” and “General Remarks,” together with statistical tables comparing the number of newspapers to the population of 1860. Kenny’s directory is available on microfilm as part of the American Culture Series by UMI (ProQuest) and on the Web as a Harvard University title in the Google Book Search collection. News Article Reprints Burt, Elizabeth V. The Progressive Era: Primary Documents on Events from 1890 to 1914. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004. Dickerson, Donna L. The Reconstruction Era: Primary Documents on Events from 1865 to 1877. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003. Pickett, Calder M. Voices of the Past: Key Documents in the History of American Journalism. Columbus, OH: Grid, 1977. Risley, Ford. The Civil War: Primary Documents on Events from 1860 to 1865. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004. Each of the volumes in the Greenwood Press series Debating Historical Issues in the Media of the Time, edited by David Copeland, examines a different era in American history by presenting important events covered in the media. Currently, there are three volumes applicable to the American realism and naturalism period: The Civil War (2004), by Ford Risley; The Reconstruction Era (2003), by Donna L. Dickerson; and The Progressive Era (2004), by Elizabeth V. Burt. There is no volume for 1877 to 1890. The excerpts from sources such as newspapers, magazines, broadsides, and pamphlets represent a wide variety of viewpoints and news stories, from the “Death of Sitting Bull and the Battle of Wounded Knee” to “Boss Tweed and the New York Ring,” “Attack on Fort Sumter,” “Alaska Purchase,” and the “McClellan Controversy.” Those who wish to locate the original news articles can use the bibliographic references at the back of the volumes. Calder M. Pickett’s Voices of the Past: Key Documents in the History of American Journalism (1977) is a fascinating collection of important newspaper articles (typed rather than scanned) that began as a reading list for a college course on the history of American journalism. Pickett has gathered
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together articles—or, in some cases, key parts of articles—from the first newspapers printed in Europe and colonial America to Watergate. The collections related to “The Press and the Slavery Crisis,” “Newsmen in the Wild, Wild West,” “The Age of the Great Barbeque” “Culmination of the Mass Press,” and “Reform and Conflict in a New Century” will interest those investigating the American realism–naturalism period. The volume ends with an index and a “Bibliographic Essay” that lists titles for further reading. Specialized Guides Bullock, Penelope. The Afro-American Periodical Press, 1838–1909. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. Danky, James P., ed. African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography. Maureen E. Hady, assoc. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Henritze, Barbara K. Bibliographic Checklist of African American Newspapers. Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing, 1995. Kanellos, Nicolás, and Helvetia Martell. Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography. Houston, TX: Arte Público Press, 2000. Potter, Vilma Raskin. A Reference Guide to Afro-American Publications and Editors, 1827–1946. Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1993. Suggs, Henry Lewis, ed. The Black Press in the Middle West, 1865–1985. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Suggs, Henry Lewis, ed. The Black Press in the South, 1865–1979. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983. Specialized bibliographies for period newspapers may be available depending on the research topic of interest. Search WorldCat or a library’s catalog for the applicable subject headings to identify and locate these guides. For instance, a search for “American Newspapers—California—Bibliography” may identify guides such as Helen Giffen’s California Mining Town Newspapers, 1850–1880 (Van Nuys, CA: J. E. Reynolds, 1954) or Muir Dawson’s History and Bibliography of Southern California Newspapers, 1851–1876 (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1950). A similar search for “American Newspapers—Wisconsin—Bibliography” might retrieve an entry for A Guide to Wisconsin Newspapers, 1833–1957, compiled by Donald E. Oehlerts (Madison: State Society of Wisconsin, 1958). The first African American newspaper to be published in the South was L’Union, started in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1862. Its financier Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez and editor Paul Trévigne were civil rights movement lead-
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ers, and the newspaper had an audience of established blacks as well as recently freed slaves.66 Edited by Henry Lewis Suggs, The Black Press in the South, 1865–1979 (1983) gives the history of L’Union and other African American newspapers from Texas to Virginia and Florida. Each chapter is written by a different scholar and talks about one of twelve Southern states. The introduction by Suggs acts as a good overview of the genre with the histories of the press in each state summarized in less than a page. Newspapers of the Midwest (e.g., Gary American, Indianapolis Leader, Kansas Black Journal, and the Chicago Defender) are treated in Suggs’s The Black Press in the Middle West, 1865–1985 (1996) as he covers the black press in Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Ohio, and Wisconsin. African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography (1998), edited by James P. Danky and Maureen E. Hady, presents a comprehensive list of the newspapers and periodicals published and edited by African Americans between 1827 and the 1990s. The guide is useful for verifying details about periodicals as well as locating them in libraries. Entries are extensive and give publication, circulation, and subject information along with whether the title is illustrated or includes advertisements, if and where it is indexed, and a listing of libraries that hold issues. Barbara K. Henritze’s Bibliographic Checklist of African American Newspapers (1995) lists by city and state 5,539 newspapers from the history of African American journalism. She provides the location, frequency, dates, and source of information for each title along with a bibliography for further research and a title index. A Reference Guide to Afro-American Publications and Editors, 1827–1946 (1993), by Vilma Raskin Potter, enhances Warren Henry Brown’s alphabetical Check List of Negro Newspapers in the United States (School of Journalism, Lincoln Univ., 1946) with additional indexes so that readers can identify titles by place of publication, publication year, and editor name as well as collection locations and founding dates. The book concludes with a bibliography of reference sources, but does not offer a general index. Print and Online Indexes to Newspapers Accessible Archives. Malvern, PA: Accessible Archives, 1998–. www .accessible.com. Early American Newspapers, Series I (1690–1876), Series II (1758–1900), Series III (1829–1922), Series IV (1756–1922), and Series V (1777–1922). America’s Historical Newspapers. Chester, VT: Readex, 2004–. www .newsbank.com/readex.
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Falk, Byron A., and Valerie R. Falk. Personal Name Index to “The New York Times Index,” 1851–1974. Succasunna, NJ: Roxbury Data Interface, 1976–85. New York Times Index. New York: New York Times Company, 1913–. Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers. New York: Thomson Gale, 2006–. www.gale.com/usnewspapers/process.htm. ProQuest Civil War Era. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 2007–. www .proquest.com. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 1999–. www .proquest.com. Accessible Archives offers some important full-text newspaper databases that will be subscribed to by a number of major academic libraries. The company, located in Malvern, Pennsylvania, started in 1990 with the mission to make available electronic archives of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury periodicals. Under the umbrella of Accessible Archives are the eight digital collections: The Liberator; Godey’s Lady’s Book, 1830–1885; The Civil War: A Newspaper Perspective; African American Newspapers: The 19th Century; The Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728–1800; American County Histories to 1900; The Pennsylvania Genealogical Catalogue: Chester County, 1809–1870; The Pennsylvania Newspaper Record: Delaware County, 1819–1870; and The Industrial Revolution in Delaware County with Vital Statistics. The databases are equipped with a simple, one-field interface for searching the full text of newspapers with the Boolean operators and, or, and not. Although keyword searches cannot be restricted to specific fields like title, author, or abstract, users can search more than one periodical database at a time. Consisting of millions of complete issues of historical newspapers, Readex’s America’s Historical Newspapers series is a valuable resource for American literature scholars. Currently, there are five series (i.e., Early American Newspapers, Series I, 1690–1876; Series II, 1758–1900; Series III, 1829–1922; Series IV, 1756–1922; and Series V, 1777–1922). The Readex website states that future series will expand America’s Historical Newspapers beyond 1922 to offer coverage from 1690 to 1980. Libraries may subscribe to one or all of the five series; each one offers titles from the realism– naturalism period. While the core of the digital collection is formed by Isaiah Thomas’s colonial and early national period newspapers at the American Antiquarian Society, other institutions and historical societies have contributed to the database: the Boston Athenaeum, Connecticut Historical Society, Library Company of Philadelphia, Library of Congress, Brown University, Harvard University, and private collections.
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The search interface allows users to search the full text or headline of an article. Results can be limited to a specified presidential era or an era in American history, article type, place of publication, or newspaper title. This helps to narrow a particularly broad search, such as the phrase “fort sumter,” which should be placed in quotation marks to indicate proximity. A general search for “fort sumter” in Series I can be limited to the U.S. Civil War era and the specific date of 4/1861. When choosing the option to limit by article type, the database can look for “walt whitman” in poetry—useful for literary researchers—or in news/opinion items, letters, advertisements, and birth, marriage, and death notices. From the results list searchers can choose to view only the article that contained the search word or phrase, or the image of the newspaper page that contained the article. The page image enables users to see the article in the context of the other news items of the day. A list of the page’s contents appears in a column on the left side of the screen. Search results are displayed as digitized images with the search word or phrase highlighted. Citations can be stored in a list called “My Collection” to be viewed later. Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers is an online collection from Thomson Gale that contains indexing of the full text and images of many nineteenth-century American newspapers. Among the titles examined are Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (New York, 1855–1892), Nashville Union (Tennessee, 1845–1868), Los Angeles Times (California, 1881–1890), and the Daily Mining Record (Colorado, 1893–1899). Database users choose between a basic keyword search, an advanced search, and a journal search for specific newspapers. Keyword searches can be limited to up to ten newspapers or cities, as well as by date and/or articles containing illustrations. Users look for words or phrases in the title, citation, and abstract, or in the full text of articles. Full-text searching is accomplished by optical character recognition (OCR), and search terms are highlighted in purple in the text. Full-text searching did not appear to be completely functional for all articles (on March 18, 2007) as a search for beauregard in the Daily News and Herald (Savannah, Georgia) for April 15, 1861 did not retrieve the word in the text of “Our Flag Victorious!” even though a title search easily located the article. However, the phrase fort sumter was found in “Patriotic Demonstration of the Springfield Boys” in the April 20, 1861 issue of the same newspaper. The “Research Guide,” accessible from the navigation bar on the left, presents essays on major themes related to nineteenth-century history (e.g., “Newspapers and the Press,” “Confederate States of America,” and “Spanish American War”). The themes are designed to give a basic overview of the topics; they do not link to related news articles. The complete runs of major American newspapers can be found in the ProQuest Historical Newspapers database. At the present time, these include the
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New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Atlanta Constitution, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times. Access to the individual newspapers is sold separately so different libraries may not subscribe to all available titles. Multiple or individual newspapers may be searched at once. The Advanced Search option allows users to identify articles by characteristics unique to newspapers, such as location and image caption. Searches can also be limited to specific document type, such as an editorial, an interview, or an obituary. Articles appear as PDF files. The text or citations can be marked and saved in a folder to be e-mailed at a later time. ProQuest Civil War Era is a new collection initiated in 2007 that offers full coverage of eight newspapers and thousands of pamphlets from between 1840 and 1865. Searchers can use advanced search options to retrieve articles and pamphlets as PDF files. The newspapers present views from across the country: Northern newspapers Boston Herald, New York Herald, and Columbus Gazette (Ohio); the Southern Daily Picayune (New Orleans, Louisiana), Charleston Mercury (South Carolina), and Daily Dispatch (Richmond, Virginia); and Border State/Mississippi Valley Louisville Daily Journal (Kentucky) and Memphis Daily Appeal. The pamphlets are organized by subject, including a “Literature and Fiction” section with poems, plays, song lyrics, and stories. Some libraries may not subscribe to online databases that provide the full text of newspaper articles. Visitors to those libraries may need to check the catalog for the subject heading “Newspapers—Indexes” to find the available print indexes. The print New York Times Index was published in numerous volumes starting in 1913. Users should study the example entry given at the front of each volume and consider nineteenth-century terminology when looking for subject terms. Citations in the index do not list the name of the person who wrote the news article or the year, as all citations are from the year printed on the spine of the individual volume. The letters and numbers refer to the month, day, page, and column, so “O 15, 2: 3” means October 15, page 2, column 3. A particular section of the newspaper may also be specified. Users of the New York Times microfilm sometimes see a code for a particular edition, such as “L” for late edition. If available, the Personal Name Index to “The New York Times Index,” 1851–1974, authored by Byron A. Falk and Valerie R. Falk, may offer quick access to citations for personal names. Chapter 8 provides tips for using microfilm collections.
JOURNALISM BIBLIOGRAPHIES Price, Warren C. Literature of Journalism: An Annotated Bibliography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1959.
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Price, Warren C., and Calder M. Pickett. An Annotated Journalism Bibliography, 1958–1968. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970. Sloan, William David. American Journalism History: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. Literature of Journalism: An Annotated Bibliography, by Warren C. Price, is a standard bibliography on journalism for which Price (University of Oregon) received the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi award, as well as the Kappa Tau Alpha honor society’s award for distinguished achievement in journalistic research. Although the bibliography was published in 1959, it is still useful for realism–naturalism researchers because it describes late nineteenthand early twentieth-century works on newspapers, newspaper checklists, magazines, journalists, journalism bibliographies and directories, ethical and legal concerns of the press, public opinion, propaganda, and other topics of interest. Price was compiling a continuation of his bibliography at the time of his death. His work was completed by Calder M. Pickett (University of Kansas) and titled An Annotated Journalism Bibliography, 1958–1968. Pickett also authored Voices of the Past: Key Documents in the History of American Journalism, an interesting collection of famous editorials, including many from the realism–naturalism period. (See description above under “News Article Reprints.”) William David Sloan’s American Journalism History (1989) is an annotated bibliography of twentieth-century scholarship on American news media. Sloan explains in the introduction that his bibliography is designed to facilitate scholarly historical research. Numerous chapters in the book will be helpful to those researching the realism–naturalism period, especially “The Antebellum and Civil War Press, 1820–1865”; “The Press of the Industrial Age, 1865–1883”; “The Age of New Journalism, 1883–1900”; “Frontier and Regional Journalism, 1800–1900”; “The Emergence of Modern Journalism, 1900–1945”; and “The Press and the Age of Reform, 1900–1917.” Sloan lists monographs and articles from over two hundred popular magazines (e.g., Atlantic Monthly, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, and Harper’s Weekly) and scholarly journals (Journal of Advertising, Princeton Review, and American Studies). Annotations explain the topic of each text and range from a sentence to a long paragraph in length.
ERNST STEIGER’S PRECENTENNIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY Arndt, Karl J. R. The Annotated and Enlarged Edition of Ernst Steiger’s Precentennial Bibliography “The Periodical Literature of the United States of
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America.” Millwood, NY: Kraus International Pubs., 1979. Orig. pub.: Steiger, E. The Periodical Literature of the United States of America: With Indexes and Appendices. New York: E. Steiger, 1873. While Frederick Leypoldt is remembered for his compilation of The American Catalogue, the catalog was modeled on a previous attempt at a catalog entitled “Specimen of an Attempt at a Catalogue of Original American Books, with an Index of Subject Matter” by Ernst Steiger, another nineteenth-century German American bookseller, collector, publisher, and bibliographer. Steiger was unsuccessful in obtaining support for his catalog of books, but he did produce a useful bibliography entitled The Periodical Literature of the United States of America. He emigrated from Germany to New York City in 1855, became an independent bookseller in 1865, and eventually turned to publishing.67 Although Steiger was known for publishing German American works, language textbooks, and educational books, especially kindergarten literature, his fascination with the explosion of magazines and newspapers in the United States led him to collect thousands of single issues of periodicals published from about 1872 to 1873 for display at the Vienna Exposition in 1873. Steiger’s amazing collection, obtained with personal funds, served as the basis for his bibliography The Periodical Literature of the United States of America: With Indexes and Appendices, a meticulous list of titles arranged by place of publication with a subject index so that users can identify publications by their content. Karl J. R. Arndt’s expanded edition The Annotated and Enlarged Edition of Ernst Steiger’s Precentennial Bibliography “The Periodical Literature of the United States of America” reprints Steiger’s original bibliography. Arndt provides additional content, including biographical information about the author and newspaper accounts of his exhibition at the Vienna Exposition. His marginal comments and footnotes result from his close examination of Steiger’s collection and two other periodical resources: Winifred Gregory Gerould’s American Newspapers, 1821–1936: A Union List of Files Available in the United States and Canada (H. W. Wilson, 1937) and the Union List of Serials in the Libraries of the United States and Canada (3rd ed., H. W. Wilson, 1965). Both union lists are described in the following section.
LOCATING PERIODICAL COLLECTIONS IN LIBRARIES Gerould, Winifred Gregory, ed. American Newspapers, 1821–1936: A Union List of Files Available in the United States and Canada. Under the auspices of the Bibliographical Society of America. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1937.
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Titus, Edna Brown, ed. Union List of Serials in the Libraries of the United States and Canada. 3rd ed. 5 vols. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1965. WorldCat. Dublin, OH: OCLC. www.oclc.org/firstsearch/. The standard print source for locating library collections of older periodicals is the third edition of the Union List of Serials in the Libraries of the United States and Canada, edited by Edna Brown Titus. The publication of the union catalog was first coordinated by the American Library Association in 1913; the third edition was completed under the sponsorship of the Joint Committee on the Union List of Serials with the cooperation of the Library of Congress. Although the five-volume set does not offer subject access, it gives information about magazines and journals held in libraries across the country as well as Canada. The volumes of New Serial Titles, intended as supplements to the original Union List, were issued monthly by the Library of Congress from 1953 to 1999. Since the Union List excludes most newspapers, researchers may also consult Winifred Gregory Gerould’s American Newspapers, 1821–1936: A Union List of Files Available in the United States and Canada, published under the auspices of the Bibliographical Society of America by H. W. Wilson in 1937. In addition to listing newspaper collections in libraries, Gerould identifies newspapers in county courthouses, newspaper collections, and other repositories. Chapter 3, “Library Catalogs,” discussed union catalogs and their role in identifying and locating research materials in libraries. In addition to verifying library holdings, union catalogs of periodicals provide bibliographic information and trace title changes occurring through the years. The most comprehensive and up-to-date catalog to consult is WorldCat, made available by OCLC (for details, see chapter 3). Searchers should consider moving directly to the “Advanced Search” mode and limiting their periodical title query to the serials format by selecting the limiter option for “Serial Publications.” As with books, the subtitle of the periodical may or may not be appropriate to include in the title search. WorldCat entries indicate library holdings of print, microform, and digital collections of a wide range of periodicals. The entries for newspapers in WorldCat are the result of the United States Newspaper Program, a national program funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The program is designed to provide federal support for state efforts to “locate, catalog, and preserve on microfilm newspapers published in the United States from the eighteenth century to the present.” 68 Researchers can borrow newspapers on microfilm through their library’s interlibrary-loan services. In addition to the efforts made by state repositories, eight national repositories with large collections of newspapers from most of the fifty states receive funding for newspaper cataloging: the
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American Antiquarian Society, Kansas State Historical Society, New York Historical Society, Western Reserve Historical Society, Wisconsin Historical Society, Rutgers University, New York Public Library, and the Center for Research Libraries. The Library of Congress, although not funded in the same manner, also participates in the program as a national repository.69 For more information on the U.S. Newspaper Program, visit the website http://www .neh.gov/projects/usnp.html. As a national repository the Library of Congress has begun to digitize some of its vast newspaper resources, but most of the library’s extensive collection of American newspapers is preserved on microfilm. Some print issues of nineteenth- and twentieth-century newspapers have been retained as bound periodicals. Since the material is housed in remote storage, researchers must request issues in advance of their visit. Selected titles are considered rare; their use requires a signed request form. Researchers who do not live in Washington, DC should contact the Newspaper and Current Periodical Room to verify the library’s holdings of specific issues and their handling requirements.70 CONCLUSION Thanks to the hard work of literary bibliographers and scholars throughout the years, today’s researchers can find their way through the enormous quantity of periodical publications from the American realism–naturalism era. From the serialized versions of famous novels in the house magazines to the poetry, stories, and published commentary of lesser-known writers in newspapers and general-interest magazines, there is much to be researched and much to be contributed to the scholarship of the period. Periodical texts can be the primary works to be studied, or the newspaper articles and editorials that inform researchers of the social context of literary production. While students and scholars once had to rely exclusively on microfilm collections for access to contemporary periodicals, now many magazines and newspapers have been reproduced digitally. The opportunities for periodical research will only increase as more collections become digitized and made available online. NOTES 1. Kenneth M. Price and Susan Belasco Smith, “Introduction: Periodical Literature in Social and Historical Context,” in Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century
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America, eds. Kenneth M. Price and Susan Belasco Smith (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 6. 2. Price and Smith, “Introduction: Periodical Literature in Social and Historical Context,” in Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, 9. 3. Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930–68), 3: 5, 4: 11. 4. Price and Smith, “Introduction: Periodical Literature in Social and Historical Context,” in Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, 5. 5. Green, “Periodicals,” in American History through Literature, 1870–1920, 2: 817. 6. Jean Marie Lutes, “Journalism,” in American History through Literature, 1870–1920, 2: 547. 7. Price and Smith, “Introduction: Periodical Literature in Social and Historical Context,” in Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, 6. 8. Michael Lund, America’s Continuing Story: An Introduction to Serial Fiction, 1850–1900 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 14; Green, “Periodicals,” in American History through Literature, 1870–1920, 2: 820. 9. Steven Jobe, “Literary Marketplace,” in American History through Literature, 1870–1920, 2: 610. 10. Catherine Seville, The Internationalisation of Copyright Law: Books, Buccaneers and the Black Flag in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 221–22, 247–48. 11. Lund, America’s Continuing Story, 13–15. 12. Patricia Okker, Social Stories: The Magazine Novel in Nineteenth-Century America (Charlotteswville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 17–19. 13. Henry Nash Smith, Democracy and the Novel: Popular Resistance to Classic American Writers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 105. 14. Okker, Social Stories, 116. 15. Madeline B. Stern, ed., Louisa May Alcott Unmasked: Collected Thrillers (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), xvi. 16. Lund, America’s Continuing Story, 116. 17. Lund, America’s Continuing Story, 117. 18. Kirk Curnutt, “Short Story,” in American History through Literature, 1870–1920, 3: 1041. 19. Sarah A. Wadsworth, “Innocence Abroad: Henry James and the Re-Invention of the American Woman Abroad,” The Henry James Review 22, no. 2 (2001), footnote no. 3, 123. 20. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 4: 113. 21. Curnutt, “Short Story,” in American History through Literature, 1870–1920, 3: 1041. 22. Curnutt, “Short Story,” in American History through Literature, 1870–1920, 3: 1045. 23. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 4: 114. 24. Curnutt, “Short Story,” in American History through Literature, 1870–1920, 3: 1039, 1041.
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25. “Amusements; Notes of the Week,” New York Times (May 27, 1888), 2. Available online via ProQuest Historical Newspapers. www.proquestk12.com/productinfo/ pq_historical_newspapers.shtml. 26. Paula Bennett, “Not Just Filler and Not Just Sentimental: Women’s Poetry in American Victorian Periodicals, 1860–1900,” in Periodical Literature in NineteenthCentury America, 202. 27. David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1976), 98. 28. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 4: 120. 29. Matthew Giordano, “‘A Lesson from’ the Magazines: Sarah Piatt and the Postbellum Periodical Poet,” American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography 16, no. 1 (2006): 26. 30. Giordano, “‘A Lesson from’ the Magazines,” 24. 31. Robert J. Scholnick, “‘Don’t Tell! They’d Advertise’: Emily Dickinson in the Round Table,” in Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, 166. 32. Susan Belasco, “From the Field: Walt Whitman’s Periodical Poetry,” American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography 14, no. 2: (2004): 248. 33. Susan Harris Smith, Plays in American Periodicals, 1890–1918 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), xi. 34. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 4: 69–70. 35. “Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine (1868–1935): Periodical Description,” in American Periodicals Series Online, 1740–1900, www.proquest.com. 36. Contemporary Authors Online (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2007), www.gale-edit .com/cas/), s.v. “S. S. McClure,” available via Biography Resource Center, www.gale group.com/BiographyRC/. 37. Dictionary of American Biography Base Set (New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1928–36), s.v. “Frank Leslie,” available via Biography Resource Center, www.galegroup.com/BiographyRC/. 38. James David Hart, ed., The Oxford Companion to American Literature, 6th ed., with revisions and additions by Phillip W. Leininger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), s.v. “Atlantic Monthly.” 39. Dominic Head, ed., The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, 3rd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), s.v. “Harper’s New Monthly Magazine,” www.credoreference.com. 40. The Oxford Companion to American Literature, s.vv. “Scribner’s Monthly,” “Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine.” 41. The Oxford Companion to American Literature, s.v. “Scribner’s Magazine.” 42. The Oxford Companion to American Literature, s.v. “Putnam’s Monthly Magazine.” 43. Richard Ohmann, “The New Discourse of Mass Culture: Magazines in the 1890s,” Studies in Literature 16, no. 2–3 (1984): 17. 44. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 4: 5–7.
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45. “Little Magazines,” in The Columbia Encyclopedia, eds. Paul Lagasse and others, 6th ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), www.credoreference.com. 46. Kevin J. Hayes, “Little Magazines and Small Presses,” in American History through Literature, 1870–1920, 2: 616–19. 47. Hayes, “Little Magazines and Small Presses,” in American History through Literature, 1870–1920, 2: 617–21. 48. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 4: 117–18. 49. Green, “Periodicals,” in American History through Literature, 1870–1920, 2: 817–18. 50. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 4: 118–20. 51. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 4: 125–26. 52. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 4: 127–28. 53. Ronald Lora and William Henry Longton, eds., The Conservative Press in Twentieth-Century America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 221. 54. Herbert Shippey, “William Tappan Thomas (1812–1882),” New Georgia Encyclopedia (Athens, GA: Georgia Humanities Council and the University of Georgia Press, 2004–), www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-530. 55. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” in The Reader’s Companion to American History (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1991), 1094. 56. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 4: 190–91. 57. John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America, 1741–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 131–33. 58. Edward E. Chielens, The Literary Journal in America to 1900: A Guide to Information Sources (Detroit: Gale Research, 1975), 15. 59. Further details on Poole and his index may be found in Peggy Keeran and Jennifer Bowers, Literary Research and the British Romantic Era: Strategies and Sources (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 130–33. 60. OED Online, s.v. “Newspaper, n.,” www.oed.com. 61. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Newspaper,” search.eb.com/eb/ article-9055609. 62. Ellen M. Mrja, “Ansel Nash Kellogg,” in American Newspaper Journalists, 1873–1900, Dictionary of Literary Biography 23 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1983), 180–81. 63. Charles Johanningsmeier, “Newspaper Syndicates,” in American History Through Literature, 1870–1920, 2: 773. 64. Karen Roggenkamp, Narrating the News: New Journalism and Literary Genre in Late Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers and Fiction (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2005), xiv–xv. 65. John Foster Kirk, A Supplement to “Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature” and “British and American Authors, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1899), s.v. “Daniel J. Kenny.” 66. Henry Lewis Suggs, ed., The Black Press in the South, 1865–1979 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 3.
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67. James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, eds., Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1888–89), s.v. “Ernst Steiger.” 68. National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), U.S. Newspaper Program (Washington, DC: NEH), www.neh.gov/projects/usnp.html (accessed 14 March 2007). 69. NEH, U.S. Newspaper Program, www.neh.gov/projects/usnp.html (accessed 14 March 2007). 70. The Library of Congress, “Serial and Government Publications Division: Using the Newspaper Collection,” American Memory (Washington, DC: The Library of Congress), memory.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/awser2/using_coll.html (accessed 14 March 2007).
Chapter Eight
Microform and Digital Collections
Important works of literature, manuscripts, newspapers, government documents, personal diaries, and other material related to the period are being preserved through microfilming and digitization projects. These preservation efforts are making it possible for researchers across the country to utilize material formerly held at only a few archives or libraries. Now, even if the original is in fragile condition, the work in its new form can be analyzed, saved, and copied to print and computer file. It can be transported from person to person or from library to library via the Internet, or via interlibraryloan mail services. Since researchers need to know how to locate and use these collections, details on applicable methods and resources are presented in this chapter along with descriptions of some of the major microform collections related to the American realism–naturalism period. The chapter also discusses selected commercial digital products that have been created from the microform collections. Readers should refer to chapter 10 for information on freely available digital collections on the Web.
PRESERVATION IN MICROFORM AND DIGITAL FORMATS John Benjamin Dancer (b.1812–d.1887), a British optician and instrumentmaker, developed a method of taking photographs of microscopic objects using silver plates, obtaining images that could be magnified up to twenty times the size of the originals. In 1852 Dancer created the process for microfilm, and by 1859 he was exhibiting microscope slides with miniaturized images of the British royal family.1 Eastman Kodak found a commercial use for Dancer’s invention in the late 1920s when the company was able to reproduce 215
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images in a reduced size on film using a special camera. Today, millions of miniaturized images are preserved on reels of film for storage in compact units. The information on the reels is viewed with a microfilm machine designed to magnify the images with lenses. Machines that both read and print the images allow users to obtain print copies. Microfilm is a relatively inexpensive method of preservation. The format has been popular for many years because it is durable and provides good facsimiles of black-and-white images. Some types of microfilm are more durable than others. Of the three types currently promoted (i.e., silver halide, diazo, and vesicular), only silver halide film is seen as having the longevity suitable for archival holdings. Microfilm of the 1800s had a nitrate base, which proved to be flammable. Acetate film, widely used from the early 1930s into the 1970s, was less combustible, but its cellulose base tended to deteriorate over time. Polyester-based film became the product of choice after the early 1980s because it did not degrade in the same manner as acetate film. Studies have shown that, under the proper conditions for production and storage, polyester-based silver-halide microfilm can last for one thousand years or more.2 The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the Association for Image and Information Management (AIIM), now known as AIIM— The Enterprise Content Management Association, have created a set of standards to encourage the best methods of production and preservation in the United States. There are various kinds of microform products on the market. Microfilm is produced in rolls of 16 mm and 35 mm film or 16 mm cartridges (a roll of film housed in a plastic container to make it easier to use). Strips of 16 mm or 35 mm film can be inserted into a plastic sheet to form a microfilm “jacket.” A microfiche is a four-by-five-inch single flat sheet of film— roughly the size and shape of an index card. While microfilm and microfiche are the most common microform products in libraries, library users may also encounter older products such as the ultrafiche, which is a microfiche with a huge number of smaller-than-usual images, and the micro-opaque, a sheet of opaque material with micro-images.3 By using microform products, libraries can safely hold large collections of originally brittle, bulky, and/or flammable items (e.g., newspapers) in storage units. Although microforms require special machines for reading and printing, staff members in libraries are trained to help users load them and adjust the reader–printer lenses for optimum magnification. Since microform products are durable, libraries are frequently willing to lend material in this format to other libraries. As an alternative to microfilm, recent years have seen increased interest in preservation by digitization due to the popularity of the Web. Commercial publishers, academic institutions, and nonprofit organizations are working to convert print and mi-
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croform material into electronic files that can be accessed through the Internet. Large-scale digitization projects have been organized in order to create free or subscription-based collections with nineteenth- or early twentieth-century material and related critical or historical resources in digital form. Individual library users are also scanning and saving microform images as PDF, GIF, JPEG, and TIFF files with digitizing microform readers. Scanning microform images into imaging software allows them to enlarge hard-to-read microform images and improve the contrast—a valuable tool for those who are examining older, handwritten documents, such as nineteenth-century diaries.4 Depending on the type of software available, text can be highlighted with personal notations and saved as a separate file. Since electronic images are designed for display rather than keyword searches, print and microform material is frequently converted with opticalcharacter-recognition (OCR) scanning software into machine-readable ASCII code, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. “Plain vanilla” ASCII (seven-bit code) produces a “no frills” type of text, a universal machine language that can be read by all kinds of computers—both older and newer models—and be imported into word-processing programs like Word and WordPerfect. OCR systems generally entail a scanner and a computer to drive the scanner and run the OCR software. Unfortunately, OCR systems are the most successful with modern printed text; nineteenth-century fonts pose more problems. Even if a 99.9 percent accuracy rate is achieved, that would bring a mistake every thousand characters. Some letter combinations do not transfer correctly (e.g., rn and mn), and similar characters are often substituted for their look-alikes, such as the letters h and b, and c and e.5 Since both the scanning process—and human keyboarders, if this method is chosen over scanning—can introduce errors in digital reproductions of literary works, publishers and others involved in large-scale digital projects use proofreaders to identify as many mistakes as possible. Digital projects also require the addition of special markup code that “tags” or marks specific features in the text. This is not the typical typographical code that can be seen when someone requests “Reveal Codes” while using wordprocessing software (i.e., codes for moving words five spaces to the right or down five lines).6 HyperText Markup Language (HTML) goes a step farther, but is still mainly concerned with indicators of presentation, such as the color or font size of a word. Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and, more currently, eXtensible Markup Language (XML) supply code that describes the meaning of the text to computer software. In the case of SGML, it can indicate that a group of characters is a “sentence,” or that they are a “line” of poetry. XML, a subset of SGML, accommodates an almost unlimited number of tags, and therefore can describe a word as a “person’s name” or “date.”
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This kind of code allows those searching a document to retrieve all words tagged as written in a foreign language or all of the occurrences of the word “bill” that mean a proposed law rather than a bird’s beak.7 Scholarly digital projects often utilize methods of encoding because information about both the presentation of the text and the meaning of words and phrases is important to scholars who study literature in digital formats. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) was founded in 1987 to establish markup-language guidelines for electronic texts related to the humanities and social sciences. This group of experts created the P3 Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange in 1994, which became the standard for encoding literary texts using SGML. The guidelines require that specific tags be utilized to describe the textual elements found in various forms of the printed word—e.g., prose, verse, performance texts, transcriptions of spoken material, letters and memoranda, and dictionaries. Tags were developed to handle all kind of elements, including graphs, formulae, graphics, and links to sound and video recordings. TEI “headers” were delineated in order to describe the four important attributes of an electronic work: (1) full bibliographical description of the computer file; (2) relationship between the electronic text and its source or sources; (3) nonbibliographic aspects of the text (i.e., the languages and sublanguages, the situation in which it was produced, the participants and their setting); and (4) summary of the revision history of the file.8 The P4 XML version of the Guidelines was created in May 2002, and the TEI is constructing a P5 revision. TEI Lite, An Introduction to Text-Encoding for Interchange (June 1995, revised May 2002) is an online tutorial written by Lou Burnard and C. M. Sperberg-McQueen in response to those who requested a “bare bones” version of the guidelines. In 2001, the TEI grew from its original group of experts and expanded to become a membership consortium, with member institutions located worldwide. Digitization projects currently using TEI are listed on the organization’s website (http://www.tei-c .org). At the present time, there are more than 100. Among them are Wright American Fiction, 1851–1875, African American Women Writers of the 19th Century, and the American Verse Project.9 All three projects are described in chapter 10. Images of illustrations and photographs also can be reproduced digitally. Optical scanners—electronic devices with light receptors designed to detect variations in light intensity and frequency—are used to scan the illustrations. The images may be preserved in black and white or in color as the scanners convert them into a format that computers can understand: images divided into grids of boxes called pixels. The term “pixel” is short for “picture element.” Each picture element or pixel is one element of a grid that comprises an image. The pixel then has a numeric value representing the intensity or
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brightness of the image at that location. In a pure black-and-white image, every pixel is given a single number value that means either black or white. Black is assigned the value of zero, and white is given the value of one. The numbers one and zero are called bits (binary digits) and the total matrix of bits, a bit map. The more pixels there are in a bit map, the better the resolution of the image. Bit maps can be stored in computer files and manipulated by software programs. While pure black is easily represented by a single digit, the various shades found in grayscale or color illustrations require a more complex numbering system. For grayscale images, scanners can assign an eight-bit number to each pixel to represent a particular value between 0 and 255, with the number 0 standing for pure black, 255 for pure white, and all of the other numbers for different shades of gray. For color images, the simplest method is to represent each pixel with three eight-bit RGB (red-green-blue) numbers. The first digit stands for the amount of red, the second for green, and the third for blue. There are additional methods available, among them the use of a color table with no more than 255 eight-bit numbers assigned to a specific color value. Although this technique is more complicated, the use of fewer bits per pixel produces a smaller file to transfer. Amazing color reproductions of illustrations can be seen in digital collections such as Godey’s Lady’s Book, made available as a subscription database by Accessible Archives. Godey’s Lady’s Book was an American journal created for women published from 1830 to 1885. The online collection of issues not only allows keyword searches of the journal’s literary works, book reviews, articles on social and housekeeping topics, and biographical sketches, but it also includes color reproductions of the journal’s hand-colored fashion plates and other illustrations. Users can identify examples of these reproductions by typing search statements such as color and fashion and plate—or rose and illustration.
ACCESS TO MICROFORM AND DIGITAL COLLECTIONS WorldCat. Dublin, OH: OCLC. www.oclc.org/firstsearch/. Also WorldCat .org. www.worldcat.org. Both microform and digital products require the use of equipment. The miniaturized images on microforms cannot be read with the naked eye or printed without a reader–printer, and digital collections require computers. While the digital products may seem easier to access, researchers often encounter limitations associated with these collections. A digital collection may be available
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as a commercial database, in which case only the lucky few (whose institutions can pay the necessary fee) can view the material. Another consideration is that libraries may not be permitted to send full-text items contained in commercial databases to users in other libraries through interlibrary loan. Purchasing agreements may stipulate that access should be limited to the library’s group of patrons. Even if an individual researcher identifies a freely available collection on the Web, she may not have the necessary software for viewing, printing, or manipulating the information found on that site. Some websites require a specific version of a Web browser, such as Internet Explorer, Netscape, or Mozilla Firefox, and do not state this requirement prominently on the home page, causing unsuspecting Web surfers to think that the site is no longer operating. Libraries try to advertise their access to microform and digital collections by loading descriptive records about them in their catalogs. This practice helps users to identify and locate collections at their own institutions—and others, as the records are also added to OCLC’s WorldCat database. Title searches may obtain the best results because many microform and digital collections have been given only minimal subject headings. However, even title searches can be challenging when alternative titles have been assigned to the same or similar versions of a particular collection. For example, the Wright American Fiction collection discussed in chapter 4 (and below) is known by a number of titles given to the various microform and digital products published by different companies and organizations: Wright American Fiction, 1851–1875 (website), American Fiction, 1774–1850 (microfilm), American Fiction, 1851–1875 (microfilm), Early American Fiction, 1789–1850 and Early American Fiction, 1789–1875 (commercial databases through Literature Online), American Fiction, 1774–1875 (microfilm), and the American Prose Fiction Series (microfilm). A search for the microfilm title American Prose Fiction in a library catalog will not retrieve the record for the electronic collection Early American Fiction, 1789–1850; yet, the researcher may prefer the digitized version in the Literature Online database to that of a microform set. Reference librarians who are familiar with all of the versions of this important collection can recommend the best way to obtain access at their institution. American realism–naturalism period researchers may be better served by the OCLC MARC records for individual titles or those distributed free of charge by publishers. A number of libraries have chosen to add the records to their local catalogs, depending on the loading capabilities of their catalog and the quality of the available records. Adding the MARC records allows users to identify these items by author, title, and subject as if they were print vol-
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umes. If a local library’s catalog does not contain the records, users may be able to view them in WorldCat. By selecting WorldCat’s “Advanced Search” interface, they can limit their title or author search to microform or electronic format. If a microform collection is identified, an interlibrary-loan request can be placed through the system. Information about the existence of a commercial digital version may be appreciated even if the works contained in the database are not eligible for interlibrary loan. Titles on free websites are, of course, easily accessed on the Web. If catalog records existed for the contents of all microform and digital collections, then individual titles would be easy to locate. This is not the case at the present time, although more records are being added to local library catalogs and WorldCat each year. Library users should consider asking reference librarians about collections that may be relevant to their research topics. Librarians can point out print and online guides published in conjunction with microform and digital collections, as well as standard reference guides related to these products. Descriptions of microform collections often list the bibliographies that served as the basis for the filming project. Relevant bibliographies and scholarly articles may “return the favor” by suggesting material found in these sets. The commercial websites of companies that publish microform and digital collections, for example, Thomson Gale’s Primary Source Microfilm, ProQuest (UMI and Chadwyck-Healey), Adam Matthews, and Readex (NewsBank) offer the most up-to-date descriptions of these resources. Some commercial websites contain tools for locating the individual titles found in microform collections. Primary Source Microfilm, for example, makes available a set of useful online guides to PSM products at http://microform guides.gale.com/?psm=guides. Researchers can link to the PSM list of microfilm collections and their descriptions, as well as to guides with information and microfiche numbers for the individual titles encompassed by the collections. They can choose to browse the subject classifications assigned to microform products. A search option locates words and phrases in the text of the online guides.
REFERENCE GUIDES AND DICTIONARIES Brogan, Martha L. A Kaleidoscope of Digital American Literature. With assistance from Daphnée Rentfrow. Washington, DC: Digital Library Foundation and Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), Sept. 2005. Online version at www.diglib.org/pubs/dlf104/dlf104.htm (28 April 2007).
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Frazier, Patrick, ed. A Guide to the Microform Collections in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division of the Library of Congress. Compiled by the staff of the Humanities and Social Sciences Division. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, Humanities and Social Sciences Division, 1996. Online at www.loc.gov/rr/microform/guide/intro.html (accessed 15 February 2007). Library of Congress, Catalog Management and Publication Division. Newspapers in Microform: United States, 1948–1983. 2 vols. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1984. Previous title: Newspapers on Microfilm (1948–67). K. G. Saur. Guide to Microforms in Print: Author, Title. Munich: K. G. Saur, annual. K. G. Saur. Guide to Microforms in Print: Subject. Munich: K. G. Saur, 1992–. Annual. Previous title: Subject Guide to Microforms in Print. Published by Microform Review, 1978–91 and by Microcard Editions, 1963–77. Incorporated: International Microforms in Print (Microform Review, 1975–78). Reitz, Joan M. Dictionary for Library and Information Science. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2004. Young, Heartsill, ed. The ALA Glossary of Library and Information Science. With the assistance of Terry Belanger, et al. Chicago: American Library Association, 1983. As readers can observe by the numerous terms mentioned in the “Preservation in Microform and Digital Formats” section of this chapter, users of microform and digital technology are likely to encounter numerous unfamiliar references to the equipment, products, and processes. Joan M. Reitz’s Dictionary for Library and Information Science is a helpful source of brief definitions for frequently used terms. The ALA Glossary of Library and Information Science (1983), edited by Heartsill Young, is especially valuable for assistance with older terms, such as micro-opaque or ultrafiche. For quickand-dirty explanations, Web surfers can type define: followed by the word or phrase (e.g., define: microfiche) in Google’s search box at Google.com. They can also seek one of the free online dictionaries described in chapter 10. K. G. Saur’s Guide to Microforms in Print: Author, Title and its companion volume Guide to Microforms in Print: Subject provide an annual list of microforms currently available for purchase, including monographs, journals, archival material, U.S. government publications, collections, and newspapers. The entries generally give author, title, volume, date, price, publisher, type of microform, and order information. The directory of publishers is organized alphabetically by company name and its two-letter country-code des-
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ignation. Supplements are issued six months after the annual guides. A modified version of the Dewey Decimal Classification system is used to classify microforms by subject in Guide to Microforms in Print: Subject. “English Language and Literature” items are given the number “420.” The Library of Congress holds many microform collections, and A Guide to the Microform Collections in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division of the Library of Congress describes these important collections. The print guide issued in 1996 and edited by Patrick Frazier combines the work of the two previous editions with updated information about two hundred collections acquired from late 1989 through December 1995. The Web version of the guide allows the Library of Congress to continue adding descriptions of new collections as they are received as well as entries for older collections that were not included in the 1996 print edition. Entries are listed alphabetically by collection title, although a Library of Congress–based index of subject headings and formats (e.g., “Books,” “Correspondence,” “Corporate Reports,” and “Dissertations”) is supplied. Cross-references lead users from personal or corporate names to appropriate collections. Although the collections hold valuable information, only eleven titles in the book are assigned the broad category of “American Literature.” At a time when new digital collections seem to appear each month, it is difficult to find an up-to-date reference guide that describes them. While it is intended to be a report rather than a reference guide, A Kaleidoscope of Digital American Literature by Martha L. Brogan is informative and surveys the availability and status of both free and commercial digital projects that are specifically related to American literature. Additionally, the report identifies current concerns about digital scholarship as expressed by specialists in the field, offers a selective review of recent literature, and examines six types of digital projects in progress: “(1) quality-controlled subject gateways, (2) author studies, (3) public domain e-book collections and alternative publishing models, (4) proprietary reference resources and full-text primary source collections, (5) collections by design, and (6) teaching applications.”10 Brogan, an independent library consultant, produced the 2005 report with assistance of Daphnée Rentfrow and the sponsorship of the Digital Library Foundation and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The report is one of a series issued by CLIR on Strategies and Tools for the Digital Library. Brogan’s A Kaleidoscope of Digital American Literature does not have an index, but it contains a table of contents with categories for “Introduction,” “Summary of Findings,” “Review of Resources,” and “Appendixes.” The subcategories for different types of digital resources under “Review of Resources” help readers to locate applicable sections and page numbers. Descriptions of digital projects are not lengthy, but the content is different from
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the usual publisher blurbs in that it comes from discussions with key participants in the various projects. An online version is available on the Web for those who do not have access to the print report.
MAJOR MICROFORM COLLECTIONS AND THEIR ELECTRONIC COUNTERPARTS American Literature Collections African American Poetry 1750–1900. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey; Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 1996–. Accessible via Literature Online. lion .chadwyck.com/. American Drama 1714–1915. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey; Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 2000–. Accessible via Literature Online. lion.chadwyck .com/. American Fiction, 1774–1910. 1,849 reels. Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications; Primary Source Microfilm (Thomson Gale), 1967–84. American Fiction, 1911–1920: From the William Charvat Collection of American Fiction at The Ohio State University Libraries. 502 reels. Woodbridge, CT: Primary Source Microfilm (Thomson Gale), 2001. American Poetry. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey; Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 1996–. Black Drama. Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press; Chicago, IL: In collaboration with University of Chicago, 2001–. alexanderstreetpress.com/. Black Literature, 1827–1940. 2,997 microfiches. Cambridge: ChadwyckHealey; Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 1987–96. Black Short Fiction. Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press; In collaboration with University of Chicago, 2001. alexanderstreetpress.com/. Dime Novels: Escape Fiction of the Nineteenth Century. 73 reels. Ann Arbor, MI: Universal Microfilms International, 1980. Early American Fiction, 1789–1850. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest; In collaboration with the University of Virginia, 2000. Accessible via Literature Online. lion.chadwyck.com/. Early American Fiction, 1789–1875. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest; In collaboration with the University of Virginia, 2002–. Accessible via Literature Online. lion.chadwyck.com/. English and American Drama of the Nineteenth Century. 26,000 fiches or microcards. New Canaan, CT: Readex, 1985–. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. Black Literature, 1827–1940: Index on CD-ROM. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1994–. Previous guides: Guide to Units
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1–3, 1992 (39 microfiches) and Black Literature, 1827–1940: Author/Title Index to Unit 1, 1990 (print guide). Hixon, Don L., and Don A. Hennessee. Nineteenth-Century American Drama: A Finding Guide. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1977. Nineteenth Century American Literature and History. 20,540 microfiches. Woodbridge, CT: Primary Source Microfilm (Thomson Gale). Previous title: Nineteenth Century American Literature (microprint, Lost Cause Press). North American Women’s Drama. Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press; In collaboration with University of Chicago, 2004. alexanderstreetpress.com/. University Microfilms International. Dime Novels: Escape Fiction of the Nineteenth Century: Guide to the Microfilm Collection. 7 vols. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1980–82. American realism and naturalism scholars are fortunate in the number and quality of published microform and digital collections that focus on the literature of the era. Additional compilations include the literature of the era as part of a larger group of literary works or historical material. The commercial products described below are only a selective list of the available titles. More are introduced each year, and chapter 10 talks about the digital projects of institutions and organizations that are making electronic texts available free of charge on the Web. One of the major targets of microfilming and digitizing projects has been the group of American fiction titles identified in Lyle H. Wright’s well-known bibliography American Fiction, 1774–1850: A Contribution toward a Bibliography and its supplemental volumes for 1851–1875 and 1876–1900 (described in detail in chapter 4). By reproducing the titles in Wright’s bibliography as well as Geoffrey D. Smith’s American Fiction, 1901–1925 (the follow-up bibliography), an impressive number of important editions of fictional works have been made accessible to scholars around the world. In the mid-1960s, Universal Microfilm International (UMI, then known as University Microfilms) published the American Prose Fiction microfilm collection. Research Publications issued American Fiction, 1774–1910 in five segments beginning in 1971, and Primary Source Microfilm (PSM), a Thomson Gale company, now distributes two microform collections: American Fiction, 1774–1910 and American Fiction, 1911–1920. American Fiction, 1774–1910 combines post-1900 works from the Library of Congress Shelf List of American Adult Fiction with those described by Lyle Wright, while American Fiction, 1911–1920 adds the titles from Geoffrey D. Smith’s bibliography by reproducing copies held in the William Charvat Collection of American Fiction at the Ohio State University.
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PSM’s American Fiction, 1774–1910 and American Fiction, 1911–1920 collections are organized alphabetically by author and title. They offer reproductions of thousands of American novels, tales, and short stories, which include first and hard-to-find editions of works by Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Henry James, and other wellknown authors. The writings of minor writers of the period help to build a comprehensive picture of the era’s literary offerings. Each of the two microfilm collections is divided into segments. Despite the convenient alphabetical organization, users may not want to browse through large piles of microfilm reels. Author indexes are available on PSM’s website to lead users to specific item numbers on the reels, and MARC records have been created for the individual works in the collections by ten libraries through a cooperative cataloging project of OCLC. The records allow researchers to fortuitously come upon important editions that they might not have ordinarily considered. Unfortunately for the libraries that invested in the early UMI microfilm product, the MARC records for PSM microfilm titles do not match the item numbers and reels of UMI’s American Prose Fiction on microform. Due to their importance to the study of the American culture, the Wright titles also have been the subject of numerous digitization projects sponsored by companies, organizations, and academic institutions. The electronic versions supply digitized page images along with fully edited and TEI-encoded texts. Early American Fiction, 1789–1850 and Early American Fiction, 1789–1875 are online commercial databases sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of Virginia Library; they are published by ProQuest in collaboration with the University of Virginia. The databases are offered as individual electronic collections in Literature Online. Although the University of Virginia makes available the manuscript items and non-text images to the general public, the UVA print volumes are only accessible through the commercial databases (except for a small number of titles). Researchers should also investigate the electronic texts presented at the Wright American Fiction 1851–1875 website, hosted by Indiana University,
Figure 8.1.
List of volumes and units. Source: American Fiction, 1774–1910.
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Figure 8.2.
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List of volumes and units. Source: American Fiction, 1911–1920.
and the Google Book Search site. Both sites are described in detail in chapter 10. The Wright American Fiction project utilized UMI’s American Prose Fiction microfilm set in order to digitize a subset of the books from Lyle Wright’s volume for 1851–1875. Project participants have created page images along with fully edited and encoded texts for thousands of literary works. The website presents both a simple and an advanced search interface. The word index indicates the number of times a word has been used in the online collection and locates occurrences in the various texts. The Google Books Library Project is an ambitious effort to make the books of the world’s major libraries accessible online for reading and research purposes. Since many realism– naturalism-era books are no longer copyrighted, they are available in full text at the Google Books Library Project website, making this a valuable resource for American realism–naturalism scholars. Nineteenth Century American Drama, featuring plays from 1831 to 1900, was originally published by Readex on micro-opaque as part of the larger collection English and American Drama of the Nineteenth Century. Now available for sale on microfiche, the collection consists of more than four thousand American plays and “Americanized” European plays ranging from comedies, tragedies, and minstrel plays to librettos, operas, operettas, and vocal scores. The plays are reproduced from print and manuscript formats, and include prompt books and acting editions in addition to published works. Nineteenth-Century American Drama: A Finding Guide, compiled by Don L. Hixon and Don A. Hennessee (see chapter 4), provides assistance to users of the collection by listing plays alphabetically by author/arranger/adaptor and supplying three appendixes with lists by series title, ethnicity of the cast, and subject/form (e.g., temperance play). The guide supplies cross-references from titles and other individuals. Nineteenth Century American Literature and History is another commercial product that started out as microprint. Originally published as Nineteenth
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Century American Literature by Lost Cause Press of Louisville, Kentucky, Thomson Gale’s Primary Source Microfilm now offers this collection of nineteenth-century American books on 20,540 microfiches. The Lost Cause Press set of micro-opaque cards was divided into three series that focused on different geographic areas of the United States: The Ohio Valley, The South, and The Trans-Mississippi West. PSM divides its microfiche set in two sections: The Ohio Valley and the South on 3,940 microfiches and the larger Trans-Mississippi West collection on 16,600 microfiches. Both collections reproduce primary source material intended to aid researchers in their study of the different American frontiers. The set is important to American realism–naturalism scholars because it emphasizes late nineteenth-century imprints and provides access to historical documents as well as literary works, with titles ranging from Edwin T. Adney’s The Klondike Stampede (1900) to The Slaveholders’ War: An Argument For the North and the Negro by W. E. Adams (1863). The Ohio Valley and the South examines sources related to the first frontier: the “Trans-Allegheny West” and the “Deep South,” while the Trans-Mississippi West collection examines the frontier region beyond the Mississippi River. Many of the valuable Americana sources found in Trans-Mississippi West are contained in PSM’s six hundred microfilm reels of Western American Frontier History, 1550–1900. As mentioned above, PSM provides a searchable online guide to the contents of Western American Frontier History, 1550–1900 and the Nineteenth Century American Literature and History microfiche collections, making it easy for users to look for titles of interest. A number of microform and digital collections focus on African American literature. Black Literature, 1827–1940 is a microfiche set by ChadwyckHealey (ProQuest) that reproduces poetry, fiction, book reviews, and literary notices published in nine hundred African American periodicals from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The collection is the result of the efforts of the Black Periodical Literature Project (BPLP) based at Harvard University and directed by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The BPLP is in the process of making the collection accessible online. The archive contains fiction titles, including those from Lunar Visitor, Anglo-African Magazine, and other African American periodicals. ProQuest has not produced MARC records for this collection. Black Literature, 1827–1940: Index on CD-ROM helps users to locate appropriate selections in the thousands of individual items. The index is also accessible online as a component of ProQuest’s Black Studies Center. The online version provides links to the full text of the Chicago Defender along with the bibliographic citations for these newspaper articles. A number of digital Alexander Street Press collections offer African American works of literature and reproductions of primary sources that give his-
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torical background information. Black Short Fiction, for instance, presents short stories, folk tales, and novellas. Black Thought and Culture consists of books, essays, speeches, and interviews that concern black identity, while Black Drama offers hundreds of African American plays along with playbills, production photographs, and details about related productions, theatres, and production companies. Black Drama is a component of Alexander Street Press’s North American Theatre Online PLUS, which combines the plays, theatre reference works, and related material of North American Theatre Online with Black Drama, Twentieth Century North American Drama, Asian American Drama, Latino Literature, and North American Women’s Drama. The databases contain resources from a wide range of years and do not focus specifically on the American realism–naturalism period. Dime Novels is a UMI microfilm set of more than three thousand dime novels published during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (1840–1900). Formerly entitled Dime Novels: Escape Fiction of the Nineteenth Century, the set is based on the titles described in The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels: The Story of a Vanished Literature, a three-volume illustrated bibliography by Albert Johannsen. Most of the novels in the collection were issued between 1860 and 1898 by this publishing firm, and works range from westerns to stories of pirates and romance to crime detection and war. Realism–naturalism researchers will find works like Wetzel the Scout: Or, The Captives of the Wilderness by Boynton Belknap (pseudonym of Edward Sylvester Ellis) and Tornado Tom: Or, Injun Jack from Red Core by T. C. Harbaugh. Some nonfiction works and reprints are included in the seven-unit collection. If they check Dime Novels: Escape Fiction of the Nineteenth Century: Guide to the Microfilm Collection (the guide issued with the microfilm set), users can look for the microfilm reel number of a particular title, author, or title in a series. Each of the seven volumes of the annotated guide refers to a single unit in the microform series. MARC records are available for the titles in the microform set. Northern Illinois University Library has announced that it intends to reproduce the novels held in Albert Johannsen’s collection of Beadle and Adams’s dime novels together with other popular literature of the era and make them available at a website for interested scholars (http://www.ulib.niu.edu/badndp/). Other Collections American Broadsides and Ephemera, Series I, 1760–1900. Chester, VT: Readex, 2005–. www.readex.com. The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries. Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press, 2001–. www.alexanderstreetpress.com/.
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American Periodical Series, 1850–1900. 771 reels. Ann Arbor: MI: University Microfilms, 1970–75. The Gilded Age. Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press (forthcoming) www .alexanderstreetpress.com/. In the First Person: An Index to Letters, Diaries, Oral Histories and Personal Narratives. Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press, 2005–. www.alexander streetpress.com/. Library of American Civilization. 12,474 microfiches. Chicago: Library Resources, 1971–72. The Microbook Library of American Civilization. 3 vols. Chicago: Library Resources, 1971–72. North American Women’s Letters and Diaries: Colonial to 1950. Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press, 2002–. www.alexanderstreetpress.com/. Literature scholars may require extra-literary collections with biographical and historical information. There are a large number to choose from, and additional titles seem to appear each month. The Gilded Age, for example, is a new electronic collection from Alexander Street Press that will, when complete, represent the post–Civil War period through documents, photographs, song recordings, video interviews with historians, and accompanying scholarship. The online collection provides primary materials from libraries, museums, and archives along with reference and secondary materials. The Gilded Age was inspired by Illinois During the Gilded Age, a freely available digital project of Northern Illinois University Library spearheaded by Drew VandeCreek (http://dig.lib.niu.edu/gildedage/). Documents focus on period-specific topics, such as social Darwinism, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, railroads, the Battle of Little Bighorn, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and the Women’s Temperance Campaign of 1873. A different kind of electronic collection from Readex brings together thousands of searchable facsimile images and PDF files along with the bibliographic records of American broadsides printed from 1820 to 1900 and ephemera from the years 1760 to 1900. American Broadsides and Ephemera, Series I, 1760–1900 is based on the American Antiquarian Society’s collection of these materials. The advertisement for the database on the Readex website (http://www.readex.com) states that “broadsides are single-sheet print materials created in response to a particular event with the purpose of conveying information to the general public.” Broadsides take the form of playbills, calendars, city directories, advertisements, musical programs, photographs, government proclamations, and other material. Images are in color, and can be enlarged with the zoom feature for a closer view. Since cross-
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searching is permitted with other Readex Archive of Americana collections, researchers not deliberately seeking this kind of publication may come across items of interest while investigating articles in America’s Historical Newspapers, a database described in chapter 7. The interface offers users the option of selecting either a basic or advanced search, or choosing tabs for browsing. Search results can be limited and sorted by date. The Library of American Civilization (LAC) is a large collection on ultrafiche that encompasses thousands of novels, biographies, county histories, periodicals, letters, pamphlets, songs, essays, and other works related to American life and literature from the exploration of America by the Europeans to the start of World War I. The collection is valuable to American realism and naturalism researchers, but difficult to use because of the nature of the microfiche product. Only special machines can read the fiche, which hold hundreds of tiny images. Users can consult the four-volume printed guide The Microbook Library of American Civilization. The guide contains author, title, and subject catalogs, as well as a bibliographic index that organizes the titles into broad topic groupings. Many of the works in the LAC are being discovered and reproduced in a digital format. The Quinnipiac University project, detailed at http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x1849.xml, found that numerous LAC titles have been digitized by the University of Pennsylvania Library and the Google Books Library Project. The Quinnipiac University website provides links to the LAC titles as they become available online. MARC records for the individual works contained in Library of American Civilization can be found in WorldCat. By selecting the “Advanced Search” mode and limiting the keywords library of american civilization to the “Notes” field, searchers can view the large number of LAC entries. Adding descriptive keywords to the search boxes may help them to identify specific LAC works that contain these words in their MARC records. A number of the digital compilations of periodicals discussed in chapter 7 were either formerly distributed as a microform product or are still being published in this medium. For example, one of the American periodicals databases, ProQuest’s American Periodical Series Online, 1740–1900, is distributed as the microfilm collection American Periodical Series. The collection is divided into three parts: American Periodical Series, Eighteenth Century (APS I); American Periodical Series, 1800–1850 (APS II); and American Periodical Series, 1850–1900 (APS III). APS III is the most applicable to American realism–naturalism research. The entirety of the 118 periodical issues on microfilm (including advertisements) come from the Civil War and Reconstruction era. American Periodicals, 1741–1900: An Index to the Microfilm Collections, the print guide to the collection published in 1979, consists of four indexes: title, subject, editor, and reel number. The
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subject index employs Library of Congress headings and includes categories for book and theatre reviews. Due to the current popularity of electronic collections, researchers who do not find this or another microform set they are seeking in a library may want to check with the reference desk to see if the set—like APS—has been converted to an online database with a different title. If an individual periodical from the collection is needed, the library may have issues of that title on microfilm or fiche, or be able to obtain it through interlibrary loan. Diaries and other personal narratives may be essential to a literary research project. American realism–naturalism scholars are fortunate in the number of resources related to the time period. Alexander Street Press’s electronic diaries are enhanced by indexing with search fields applicable to the personal content of the database. For instance, the diaries contained in North American Women’s Letters and Diaries: Colonial to 1950 are indexed by fields such as marital and maternal status as well as date range, occupation, and geography. Those examining The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries may decide to choose the material indexed under specific battles in the war. The database presents the writings of men and women from the North and South holding a variety of contrasting occupations: slaves and landowners, politicians and generals, and soldiers and their wives. The text is easy to read, although readers may wish that it was accompanied by images of the actual documents. An example of a search in The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries might involve the selection of a category in the “Table of Contents” option on the interface: “Authors,” “Months,” “Battles,” “Personal Events,” “Sources,” “Places,” and “Day-by-Day.” If “Personal Events” is chosen, a list appears with entries such as “Death of a Comrade,” “Desertion,” “Mental Illness,” “Pregnancy,” and “Surrender.” A searcher who selects the “Find” option on the interface also needs to make a choice from “Authors,” “Sources,” “Battles,” or “Day-to-Day” to display a secondary search interface tailored to that category. Another option requires users to pick from the choices of “Simple,” “Letters,” “Diaries,” “Memoirs,” and “Advanced,” addressing searches that would be limited to a particular type of personal narrative. There are help pages with detailed instructions, and the sources on which the database is based are listed in a bibliography to aid further research. The two Alexander Street databases are among those indexed by the company’s In the First Person: An Index to Letters, Diaries, Oral Histories and Personal Narratives, planned as a freely available online index to the many types of English-language personal narratives. In the First Person utilizes the software found in Alexander Street Press databases to search free scholarly materials available on the Web. Citation information will appear for all users, but only authorized
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subscribers will link to the full-text content in the Alexander Street databases. The database brings together the names and descriptions of collections that may have been missed by searchers looking for autobiographical and biographical accounts.
CONCLUSION Microform has been the standard format for long-term preservation and probably will remain so for many years. Microfiche and microfilm are relatively inexpensive to publish, are compact and durable products, and allow users to view and print a good facsimile of a text. Digital images offer easy online access through the Internet and the ability to utilize the information without day-to-day damage to the files. Currently, a number of companies are creating and storing archival microfilm, scanning the film, and using optical character recognition software to create a searchable image. Researchers benefit from the various technologies that allow them to utilize important collections that require long-term preservation and storage. They should not ignore any avenue in obtaining this information, whether it comes from online collections, their library microform collections, or interlibrary-loan services.
NOTES 1. “John Benjamin Dancer,” in Vol. 1 of The Biographical Dictionary of Scientists, eds. Roy Porter and Marilyn Ogilvie, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 273. 2. Susan Cates Dodson, “Microfilm: Still My Top Choice for a Preservation Medium (July 2001),” Microfilm Services Group, www.home.earthlink.net/ ~fyiglover/articles/preservation.html (accessed 28 April 2007). 3. Heartsill Young, ed., with the assistance of Terry Belanger, et al., The ALA Glossary of Library and Information Science (Chicago: American Library Association, 1983), 145. 4. Peggy Keeran and Jennifer Bowers, Literary Research and the British Romantic Era (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 146. 5. Susan Hockey, “Creating and Using Electronic Editions” in The Literary Text in the Digital Age, ed. Richard J. Finneran (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1996), 3–4. 6. Hockey, “Creating and Using Electronic Editions” in The Literary Text in the Digital Age, 5. 7. Norman Desmarais, The ABCs of XML: The Librarian’s Guide to the eXtensible Markup Language (Houston, TX: New Technology Press, 2000), 2.
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8. Text Encoding Initiative, “The TEI Header,” The XML Version of the TEI Guidelines 2004, www.tei-c.org/P4X/HD.html#HD4 (accessed 25 July 2007). 9. Text Encoding Initiative, “Projects Using the TEI,” TEI: Text Encoding Initiative, www.tei-c.org/Activities/Projects/ (accessed 1 May 2008). 10. Martha L. Brogan, with assistance from Daphnée Rentfrow, A Kaleidoscope of Digital American Literature (Washington, DC: Digital Library Foundation and Council on Library and Information Resources, Sept. 2005), 1.
Chapter Nine
Manuscript and Archival Material
Using manuscript and archival material can be one of the most exciting parts of literary research. Cultural artifacts of an era—photographs, drawings, manuscripts, letters, video and audio recordings—all bring the people and events of a historical period to life. An unpublished work with handwritten edits and cross-outs can provide deeper insight into the author’s thought processes and illuminate the evolution of a text. Letters to family members, lovers, editors, and mentors shed light on the personal contacts that influenced the writing environment. These and other manuscript and archival documents are important to the study of literature. Since they are unique or rare and irreplaceable documents, special guidelines have been established for their storage and handling to ensure their preservation for future generations. Chapter 9 is designed to aid researchers in the process of locating manuscript and archival material related to the American realism and naturalism period. The chapter begins with a general introduction to archives and primary sources, and then moves on to a discussion of the specific preservation concerns for nineteenth-century documents. We present search techniques for finding records for manuscript and archival material in library catalogs and recommend useful online and print bibliographies, reference guides, and finding aids for locating repositories and their collections. For those new to this type of research, the chapter covers some of the basic vocabulary associated with special collections as well as common guidelines for visitors of archival facilities.
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GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT MANUSCRIPT AND ARCHIVAL MATERIAL Brown, William E., Jr., and Laura Stalker, eds. Getting Ready for the Nineteenth Century: Strategies and Solutions for Rare Book and Special Collections Librarians: Proceedings of the Thirty-Ninth Annual Preconference of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section, Association of College and Research Libraries, Washington, D.C., June 23–26, 1998. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2000. Five College Archives & Manuscript Collections. Primary Source Research Guide, at asteria.fivecolleges.edu/help/intro.html (accessed 3 June 2007). Harvard University Film Study Center. DoHistory. Hosted by the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, at dohistory.org/ (accessed 4 June 2007). Kaplan, Diane E., and William R. Massa Jr. Using Manuscripts & Archives: A Tutorial: An Instructional Tool for Finding Manuscript and Archival Materials at Yale and Beyond. Yale University Library, 1997. www.library .yale.edu/mssa/tutorial/tutorial.htm (accessed 4 June 2007). The New York Public Library. The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature: Manuscript Collection Summaries, at www.nypl.org/research/chss/spe/brg/result.cfm?find=1 (accessed 11 June 2007). University of Delaware Library. Autograph Abraham Lincoln Documents from the Lincoln Collection at the University of Delaware (finding aid), at www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/findaids/autolinc.htm (accessed 4 June 2007). Primary Sources Most documents found in archival repositories are considered to be primary sources. Primary sources are contemporary documents that can function as evidence provided by a participant or an observer of a historical event. Primary sources may be created during the time period being studied (e.g., letters and diaries), or at a later date, as in the case of memoirs. Scholars value these sources because they are usually more reliable than accounts by intermediaries. They provide firsthand observations, whereas secondary sources disseminate, organize, and make deductions from information contained in primary sources. Contemporary newspaper articles fall into a gray area of usage; they are generally considered to be primary sources even though news reporters sometimes obtain their stories from witnesses rather than their own personal observations.1
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Primary sources are often converted to another format, such as microfilm or digital files, to preserve the original source and make it more accessible, reproducible, and transportable. However, reproduction provides another opportunity for errors to be introduced into the text. The image quality may be reduced, making some markings illegible. Any writing on the reverse side of pages or on envelopes of letters may be left out, and digitization software can misread characters in the text. In many cases researchers will find it necessary to seek out the original document. Collections The word “archives” may be used in a general way to refer to collections of documents that are old and of historical interest, and that deserve special preservation efforts because of their value to future generations. Anything— regardless of its format—is considered to be a record as long as it “provides lasting evidence of, or information about, past events.”2 Unlike books in a subject-oriented circulating collection, archival collections are frequently organized by origin or “provenance”—that is, grouped together because they were created or collected by one person, family, business, institution, or organization.3 Many facilities, for example, hold the papers of individual authors that were collected and donated by a family member. There are also subject collections that have been built by repositories with material acquired through donations or purchases from a variety of sources. The New York Public Library’s online Manuscript Collection Summaries lists a number of artificial collections that stemmed from the establishment of the renowned Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, including the Stephen Crane Collection of Papers. The personal correspondence of a single author may be dispersed into numerous collections, each created by a particular recipient, causing researchers to seek out anthologies of the author’s correspondence in order to follow the trail of letters to their different locations. Repositories Archival collections are stored in special facilities called repositories that are designed to house and preserve older and fragile materials. Repositories usually have temperature- and humidity-controlled rooms as well as extra security for the sake of the delicate and valuable material they hold. The rooms may be located on a floor or wing of an academic or a public library, a section of a museum or organization headquarters, or an independent institution.
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Repositories may house manuscript and rare book collections and/or the more official records of public or private institutions, governments, or organizations—or both. The more specific meaning of the word “archives” refers to repositories with the latter mission. Manuscript repositories, on the other hand, collect documents from sources other than the organization or institution that operates the facility.4 The two types of collections are often combined in college and university library facilities (e.g., the Mount Holyoke College Archives & Special Collections and also Cornell University’s Rare and Manuscript Collections, which houses the Cornell University Archives). Preservation Concerns Records of the American realism–naturalism literary period present a number of unique challenges to professionals who are responsible for preserving them for future generations. The nineteenth century produced an enormous amount of textual material that far surpassed that of earlier centuries due to advancements in printing technology, papermaking, and a growing readership. Since much of the paper produced during these years is made of acidic wood pulp that degenerates over time, there is concern that documents from this time period—already brittle—will disintegrate if not specially preserved through a de-acidification process. Even though regular use accelerates the disintegration, the majority of libraries house nineteenth-century material in the main stacks rather than in archival facilities. Space and cost are valid concerns, and primary source documents are not selected for special preservation facilities solely on the basis of their age or condition.5 There are many different ideas about what constitutes a “primary source” and what it means to “preserve” an artifact. As discussed in chapter 8, major efforts are being made to safeguard the text of books, periodicals, and other documents of the time period through microfilming and digitization projects. These preservation methods provide researchers with easy access to fragile material that would normally deteriorate with handling. At the same time, however, archivists are well aware that access to reproductions does not provide the same experience as viewing and holding the originals. Ironically, many documents of the period have been damaged by the very processes designed to preserve them for posterity. The question being discussed by preservation professionals is: under what circumstances are these methods considered adequate for preservation, and when should material be stored in its original form? At the 39th Annual Preconference of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (1998), librarians discussed the challenges and choices associated with nineteenth-century material. The collection of the
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plenary addresses from the preconference is available in Getting Ready for the Nineteenth Century: Strategies and Solutions for Rare Book and Special Collections Librarians. Edited by William E. Brown Jr. and Laura Stalker, Getting Ready for the Nineteenth Century offers essays by Paul Conway (Yale University), Abby Smith (Council on Library and Information Sources), James N. Green (Library Company of Philadelphia), James G. Neal (Johns Hopkins University), and Laura Stalker (Huntington Library). The volume contains the Modern Language Association of America’s Statement on the Significance of Primary Records along with statements of support for MLA’s position by the MLA’s Ad Hoc Committee on the Future of the Print Record and the English and American Literature Section (EALS) of the American Library Association, now known as the Literatures in English Section (LES). Finding Aids The contents of collections may be described in finding aids created by repository staff. There are different types of finding aids. Some are guides specifically designed to assist researchers, while others, such as inventories and shelf lists, enumerate the contents of the collection for members of the staff. If made available to researchers, the latter are sometimes more useful than the guides if they are more comprehensive. A calendar is a different type of finding aid that lists individual documents in chronological order with summaries of the contents.6 Visitors to repositories may need to request the facility’s finding-aid binder or locate them in a series of filing cabinets depending on the size and number of the collections. Increasingly, repositories post online finding aids with searchable descriptions. This is often the best mode of delivery, as it makes them accessible to distant researchers in their homes and offices. Finding aids offer detailed information about collections, beginning with the title, the creator’s name, the range of dates covered, the identification number, the location/contact information, and an overview or brief introduction to the collection. They provide researchers with an idea of the extent of the collection so they know what to expect. The information is valuable because collections vary considerably in size and type. Manuscript collections, for example, can range from a few letters to hundreds of boxes of personal papers. Finding aids usually offer a table of contents along with a contents list that includes a descriptive list of the items in the folders, boxes, or other file units in the collection. In addition, finding aids may have abstracts, scope and contents notes, series descriptions, and biographical or historical notes with details about the
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person, family, or organization that created the collection. They may list personal, corporate, and geographic names to aid in cataloging and searching; notes about related material (e.g., other collections, indexes, biographies, bibliographies); and specifications that include any restrictions to access, reproduction, or publication of the collection materials.7 Some donors place restrictions on all or part of a collection. The online Autograph Abraham Lincoln Documents from the Lincoln Collection at the University of Delaware is one example of a finding aid. Online Tutorials In addition to supplying finding aids and general information about their collections, a number of archival repositories now offer online tutorials to acquaint interested researchers with the basic vocabulary of archives, the scope of the repository’s collections, and its viewing policies. We found several Web tutorials to be useful. The Primary Source Research Guide of the Five College Archives & Manuscript Collections is made available by a consortium of college and university repositories in Massachusetts: the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and four colleges (i.e., Hampshire, Amherst, Mount Holyoke, and Smith). The Five College tutorial defines basic terms and concepts, and gives directions for locating archival material and visiting repositories. Especially helpful are the sections on the “Anatomy of a Finding Aid” and “Primary and Secondary Sources.” Yale University Library’s Using Manuscripts & Archives: A Tutorial: An Instructional Tool for Finding Manuscript and Archival Materials at Yale and Beyond was created in 1997 by Diane E. Kaplan and William R. Massa Jr. The tutorial offers general instructions and tips for using repositories along with specific directions on how to use the Manuscripts and Archives repository at Yale University. A lengthy section on “Finding Sources” instructs users in methods for finding sources in online library catalogs, union catalogs, and finding aids, and gives sample searches for topics, people, and texts. DoHistory, created by Harvard University’s Film Study Center, is hosted by the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. The website is a unique interactive case study that allows visitors to get to know the life of midwife Martha Ballard (b.1735–d.1812) through analysis of her handwritten diary and other primary documents that have been digitized and made available online. Despite its focus on another period of history, DoHistory is useful to American realism–naturalism researchers because it demonstrates how primary texts can be decoded, transcribed, and used in combination to piece together historical depictions of people and places. In doing so it encourages visitors to embark on their own archival projects.
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GLOSSARIES OF BASIC TERMS Bellardo, Lewis, and Lynn Lady Bellardo. A Glossary for Archivists, Manuscript Curators, and Records Managers. Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1992. Pearce-Moses, Richard. A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology. Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2005. www.archivists.org/glossary /index.asp (accessed 4 June 2007). Repositories function differently than more familiar library environments and use terminology for processes, material, and equipment that may be unfamiliar to inexperienced researchers. Standard English-language dictionaries may contain definitions of most of these terms and their abbreviations, but other terms may require a more specialized glossary. One of the more comprehensive online glossaries is the Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology of the Society of American Archivists, created by Richard Pearce-Moses and a team of advisors. The glossary consists of more than two thousand terms, many of which may be encountered when doing literary or historical archival research. Sources are provided for definitions, and terms are cross-referenced. There are links from broader to narrower and related terms. The society has also published a glossary of nearly one thousand terms and definitions by Lewis and Lynn Lady Bellardo entitled A Glossary for Archivists, Manuscript Curators, and Records Managers. Issued in 1992, the reference source is designed for both beginning and experienced professionals in the field of archival and records management.
RESOURCES FOR LOCATING ARCHIVAL AND MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS Abraham, Terry, comp. Repositories of Primary Sources. University of Idaho, at www.uidaho.edu/special-collections/Other.Repositories.html. Additional Lists, at www.uidaho.edu/special-collections/other.html (accessed 4 June 2007). ArchiveGrid. Dublin, OH: OCLC, 2006–. www.archivegrid.org. ArchivesUSA: Integrated Collection and Repository Information. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 1997–. archives.chadwyck.com. Hensen, Steven L. Describing Archives: A Content Standard. Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2007. Ljungquist, Kent P., ed. Bibliography of American Fiction through 1866. With the assistance of Judith S. Baughman. Vol. 1 of Facts On File Bibliography of American Fiction. New York: Facts On File, 1994.
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Nagel, James, and Gwen L. Nagel, eds. Bibliography of American Fiction 1866–1918. Vol. 2 of Facts On File Bibliography of American Fiction. New York: Facts On File, 1993. National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 1983–. archives.chadwyck.com/. Microfiche ed.: NIDS: Federal (2,054 microfiche); NIDS: Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (924 microfiche); NIDS: State Archives, State Libraries, State Historical Societies, Academic Libraries and Other Repositories (10/yr.). National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1959/1961–93. National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1986–. www.loc.gov/coll/nucmc/ (accessed 20 June 2007). Robbins, J. Albert, ed. American Literary Manuscripts: A Checklist of Holdings in Academic, Historical, and Public Libraries, Museums, and Authors’ Homes in the United States. 2nd ed. Compiled with the assistance of associates. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1977. WorldCat. Dublin, OH: OCLC. www.oclc.org/firstsearch/. Also available: WorldCat.org. Dublin, OH: OCLC, 2006–. www.worldcat.org. Descriptions in Library Catalogs Like secondary sources, archival and manuscript material is cataloged in a way that facilitates searching. However, catalog records usually describe collections rather than individual items in collections. The descriptions tend to be more detailed than those for published books and journals, and may contain a brief biographical sketch or institutional history, a description of the quantity of material (usually in linear feet or boxes), a summary of the types of items and their contents, and a list of key subjects and persons represented.8 Records in online catalogs may provide links to finding aids with more item-level detail. Library locations specified in catalog records (e.g., Special Collections) are frequently used by catalog searchers to limit their results to repository holdings, but only if the catalog is set to recognize this field. Describing the material at a repository for the public is a constant process that can become backlogged. Finding aids may not be available online, and records for manuscript and archival material may be maintained in a separate card catalog rather than the main online catalog of an institution or organization. Despite these problems, there is no doubt that the advent of the Web has seen improved access to and better descriptions of manuscript and archival material. Task forces of the Society of American Archivists and the Library of Congress produced the U.S. MARC format for Archival and Manuscripts
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Control (USMARC AMC), which became available for use by libraries in 1985.9 The current version of the rules for cataloging the material can be found in Describing Archives: A Content Standard, compiled by Steven L. Hensen and published in 2007 by the Society of American Archivists. Online Databases for Locating Collections OCLC’s WorldCat, the major union catalog discussed in detail in chapter 3, contains USMARC-AMC records from libraries. Using either the subscription-based FirstSearch interface or the new public interface at http://www .worldcat.org, researchers can limit their searches to archival materials. The search strategies that identify facsimiles and reproductions in library catalogs also apply to WorldCat. The Library of Congress provides a handy Web gateway for searching the OCLC catalog records (1986 to present) for manuscript material. The National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) gateway, available as a courtesy of OCLC, allows users to view hundreds of thousands of catalog records describing archival and manuscript collections. The OCLC records are, however, only a portion of the catalog records resulting from the Library of Congress’s National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) program. The NUCMC cooperative cataloging program solicits permission from repositories to allow their collections to be cataloged at no cost. Initially, the information was issued in print volumes for the years 1959–1993. At the time of this writing, researchers must use the print volumes to view the records for the years 1959–1985 unless they have access to the subscription-based database ArchivesUSA (below), which offers the early records. Each volume contains an index; the indexes were cumulated every five years. There is also a two-volume Index to Personal Names in the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, 1959–1984 and a three-volume Index to Subjects and Corporate Names in the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, 1959–1984—both published by Chadwyck-Healey. In 1986, NUCMC staff began using the Research Libraries Group RLG Union Catalog to publish electronic records, and from 1986 to 1993 NUCMC records were available both online and in print format. A portion of the NUCMC records are also searchable through OCLC. (See WorldCat and OCLC NUCMC gateway above.) The RLG merged with OCLC in 2006, and RLG Union Catalog records were added to WorldCat in 2006.10 Despite the fact that pre-1986 NUCMC records are available in print form, online researchers may prefer using ProQuest’s ArchivesUSA. The database makes NUCMC searchable in its entirety and incorporates additional descriptive material from repositories into the records. Since ArchivesUSA also
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contains records from the National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States (NIDS, described below), the database provides links to online finding aids created by repositories. Collections can be identified by searches for a name, repository name, repository city and state, or NUCMC/NIDS number. The database offers options for limiting searches by date range or record type, and keyword searches will find words in the contents of the oftenlengthy descriptions. Records include links to repository information such as address, telephone number, size of archival collection, and a summary of their complete holdings. The National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States (NIDS), originally published on microfiche, is available as an ArchivesUSA database (above) of finding aids from repositories throughout the United States. The search interface includes a field for the NIDS fiche number. NIDS also can be searched independently of ArchivesUSA using the print or CDROM indexes (title, name, and subject) that are updated ten times a year. Until 1988, NIDS was divided into four parts: federal records, the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, state records, and a catchall series that contains academic libraries, city and regional libraries, and organizational libraries. Parts three and four were merged in 1988.11 As can be expected, the detail level of the collection descriptions varies greatly depending on what repositories submit. ArchiveGrid is the Research Libraries Group’s database of collection descriptions from repositories around the world, including libraries, museums, and historical societies. RLG’s ArchiveGrid is particularly strong in descriptions of historical and genealogical resources.12 The descriptions, which number nearly one million, are mostly from bibliographic records. Also indexed is the full text of thousands of finding aids. Building off an older database called Archival Resources, ArchiveGrid was launched by RLG in early 2006 and is now a product offered by OCLC.13 Records consist of titles of the collection and repository, contact information, use restrictions, details about the collection, and subject descriptors. If working from a subscribing library, Web users will find ArchiveGrid records when performing Google searches.14 The ArchiveGrid search interface allows for Boolean and proximity searching as well as the use of wildcard and truncation symbols. Terry Abraham, Emeritus Professor, formerly head of Special Collections and Archives at the University of Idaho, maintains the Repositories of Primary Sources. The site is a gateway to the websites of more than five thousand repositories from around the world, and contains links that are organized by state and country. By selecting the “Additional Lists” link from the homepage, searchers will also find useful resources in the “Additional General
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Links” and “United States Links” sections. There are links to sites of interest to American realism–naturalism researchers, such as the Lilly Library at Indiana University; the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino; the New York Public Library; the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville; the Houghton Library of Harvard University; and the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley. The appearance of online resources has lessened the importance of more dated print resources, but some, like American Literary Manuscripts (1977), are still worth consulting for their thoroughness. The one-volume reference tool, edited by J. Albert Robbins and colleagues, lists the manuscript collections pertaining to American authors, publishers, editors, producers, actors, and other public figures held at American libraries, museums, and other historical institutions. Over six hundred repositories were inventoried to create this checklist. The bulk of this book is made up of authors’ names, followed by the abbreviations of institutions that hold their papers and the types and quantities of material held. The Facts On File Bibliography of American Fiction, discussed in detail in chapter 4, mentions the location of some of the principal collections associated with the authors covered in the four-volume set. Although the collections are not described, the reference work offers a quick-and-dirty way to start a search for collections of an author’s personal papers.
THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES The National Archives, at www.archives.gov (accessed 20 May 2007). The National Archives. Access to Archival Databases, at aad.archives.gov/ aad/ (accessed 24 June 2007). ———. Archival Research Catalog, at www.archives.gov/research/arc/ (accessed 24 June 2007). ———. Archival Research Catalog (ARC) Galleries: American People & Family History, at www.archives.gov/research/arc/topics/gallery-people .html (accessed 24 June 2007). ———. Archives Library Information Center, at www.archives.gov/ research/alic/tools/online-public-access-catalog.html (accessed 24 June 2007). ———. Our Documents.Gov: 100 Milestone Documents, at www.ourdocuments .gov/ (accessed 24 June 2007). Print: Our Documents: 100 Milestone Documents from the National Archives. Foreword by Michael Beschloss. Introduction by John Carlin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
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The National Archives preserves important legal and historic records produced by the federal government of the United States throughout history. Despite the fact that the government repository holds billions of paper records and millions of photographs, maps, and charts, this is only 1–3 percent of all the material created by the federal government and selected for special preservation.15 The archives are maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in locations that can be visited by the general public in seventeen states and Washington, DC. The main locations are the National Archives Building at 700 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC and National Archives–University Park on the University of Maryland campus. Regulations for visitors to the archival facilities are explained on the website. Visitors do not have to be American citizens, and are not required to present credentials or a letter of recommendation.16 Even though the focus of the National Archives is not on American realism–naturalism literature, this storehouse of information offers collections of primary sources that will interest period researchers. Some documents have been digitized for Web access at the online Archival Research Catalog (ARC) Galleries, such as those related to Buffalo Bill, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Native Americans, and the Chinese Exclusion Acts. Web surfers also may be interested in the digitized 100 Milestone Documents of the National Archives online at http://www.ourdocuments.gov/ and in the print volume published by Oxford University Press. Access to Archival Databases (AAD) is another online resource that makes available records in a small group of historic databases selected for permanent preservation. They represent 475 of nearly two hundred thousand NARA data files.17 The material held at the two main National Archives locations is cataloged online and can be searched and browsed in the Archives Library Information Center (ALIC). Users look for items by title, author, subject, call number, and format, limiting their searches by publication year. An index of search terms for each can be browsed.18 Still a work in progress, the Archival Research Catalog (ARC) will be the complete catalog of NARA’s nationwide holdings in the Washington, DC area, regional archives, and presidential libraries. There is no expected completion date, and NARA advises contacting one of its regional offices if material cannot be found in the catalog. The ARC interface allows for searching by keyword and limiting by date; location; material type (e.g., artifact, maps and charts, moving images, webpages); level of description (collection, series, file unit, and item); media type (e.g., audiotape, cylinder, microfilm, and negative); organization name; personal name; and topic. Topics must be selected from an index and imported into the search page (e.g., “American Civil War, 1861–1865,” “Reconstruction,” “Literature,” “Newspapers,” “Arts,” and “Humanities”).19
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THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS The Library of Congress. Library of Congress Rare Books and Special Collections: An Illustrated Guide. Washington, DC: The Library, 1992. Available online, at www.loc.gov/rr/rarebook/guide/ (accessed 7 June 2007). ———. Library of Congress Finding Aids, at lcweb2.loc.gov/faid/faidfrquery .html (accessed 7 June 2007). Sellers, John R., comp. Civil War Manuscripts: A Guide to Collections in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1986. Available online at purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS61054 (accessed 7 June 2007). The Library of Congress in Washington, DC holds a large collection of literary manuscript material in the Manuscript Reading Room of the James Madison Memorial Building, part of the United States Capitol Complex. Established in 1897 as a repository for political and military records, the Manuscript Reading Room began to concentrate on collecting cultural items after World War II. Some of the key literary collections are those of Mark Twain, Henry James, Walt Whitman, Booker T. Washington, and novelist Owen Wister. In addition to literary material, the Reading Room holds twenty-three groups of presidential papers, ranging in time from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge, as well as papers of government officials from every period of American history and a variety of the papers of nongovernmental organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association.20 To discover more about the repository’s holdings, researchers can search or browse the online finding aids or read one of the published guides to the collections that can be found either at most major academic libraries or online. Library of Congress Rare Books and Special Collections: An Illustrated Guide (1992) is a series of overviews on different segments of the repository’s collections with brief essays on American literature and American history holdings. The more comprehensive Civil War Manuscripts: A Guide to Collections in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress (1986) outlines the more than one thousand collections related to the Civil War housed at the James Madison Memorial Building. Listed are personal accounts of soldiers, the papers of war relief organizations, and diaries and memoirs of women whose husbands and sons are away at war. The Manuscript Reading Room is only open to visitors doing serious research for publication or graduate-level academic assignments. Undergraduate students working on major year-end projects are admitted with a letter of
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reference from a professor. Some manuscript material is stored offsite, so researchers are advised to call or write to the repository prior to their visit so that items are retrieved ahead of time. Members of the staff are on call to answer reference questions about the repository’s collections.
VISITING ARCHIVAL REPOSITORIES Most repositories are open to the public, although many do not have regular business hours. They may require their visitors to make an appointment by telephone or e-mail. Since every facility has slightly different rules, researchers should consult the facility’s website for information regarding hours, expectations, and guides to the collections prior to their visit. Advance notice may be needed so that repository staff can retrieve the requested material from storage. Some donors place restrictions on all or part of a collection; it is best to ask about the status of a particular collection of interest. Upon their arrival, visitors are often asked to produce photo-identification cards and sign waivers acknowledging their responsibility for the items they handle. If a registration card is issued, they will be expected to bring the card on subsequent visits. Since archival material is housed in closed stacks, a call slip must also be filled out to request that each individual item be retrieved from the storage area. Visitors may be permitted to view only one item or folder of documents at a time, and only in the facility’s designated reading room. Some facilities prefer their visitors to view photocopies or microform copies of items rather than the originals in order to save the originals from damage caused by handling.
PHOTOCOPIES, DIGITAL IMAGES, AND COPYRIGHT Fishman, Stephen. The Public Domain: How to Find & Use Copyright-Free Writings, Music, Art & More. 4th ed. Berkeley, CA: Nolo Press, 2008. Ebook available for purchase online, at www.nolo.com. Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and University of Reading Library. WATCH: Writers, Artists, and Their Copyright Holders, at tyler.hrc.utexas.edu/ (accessed 4 June 2007). Researchers may request photocopies or scanned images of repository material, although their requests may be denied if the documents are considered to be too fragile. Some facilities allow their visitors to take photographs with digital cameras. Use of these images or the digital images that repositories
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place on the Web may depend on the copyright and ownership status of the original documents. Those interested in publishing the images may have to contact the author, the author’s heirs, or a legal representative for permission. Fortunately for American realism–naturalism scholars and students, many of the literary works of the period are no longer under copyright restrictions; they are now in the public domain, as most of the authors have been dead for more than seventy years. The U.S. Copyright Revision Act of 1976 (as amended) gives federal copyright protection to unpublished manuscripts created on or after January 1, 1978, for the life of the author plus seventy years. The “fair use” provision of the law (Section 107) permits limited use of unpublished material for research, but the extent to which an unpublished manuscript may be quoted is not defined.21 Repositories often provide a link to WATCH: Writers, Artists, and Their Copyright Holders on their websites. WATCH is one of the world’s largest databases of copyright contacts for writers, artists, and prominent figures in other creative fields. The database, founded in 1994, is maintained as a cooperative effort of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Reading Library. WATCH lists individuals and organizations that reportedly hold a specific author’s copyright for unpublished material or who are responsible for representing a copyright holder. Since the claims have not been verified by WATCH staff, literary scholars should use the information as a starting point in their copyright investigation. For further reading about utilizing works in the public domain, the WATCH site suggests The Public Domain: How to Find & Use Copyright-Free Writings, Music, Art & More by Stephen Fishman, attorney and author of a number of legal guides (e.g., The Copyright Handbook). In The Public Domain, Fishman explains copyright law and how to find creative works that are in the public domain. He covers the steps involved in doing research in the United States Copyright Office. Fishman provides appendixes and an index as well as a table of the icons used as symbols throughout the book. The guide is available in e-book format from the publisher’s website.
CONCLUSION Locating archival materials requires treading down different avenues of resources, from union catalogs to repository websites and unpublished local finding aids. But even in this age of digitization these techniques must be learned, as the most serious literary projects will require the study of some manuscript, unpublished, or long out-of-print material from the period. Archival research means handling the original pages on which ideas were
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created—ideas that contributed to the culture of an era. Thanks to the efforts of archivists, historians, and collectors, primary sources of all types are easily accessible to the researcher who knows the procedures for finding and gaining access to archival collections. Some of the most groundbreaking studies often begin with the discovery of an insightful comment in a letter, a variation in an unpublished version of a literary text, or an interesting fact from a publishing company’s records.
NOTES 1. Richard Pearce-Moses, A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2005), s.v. “Primary Sources,” www .archivists.org/glossary/index.asp (accessed 4 June 2007). 2. Pearce-Moses, A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology, s.v. “Archives,” www.archivists.org/glossary/index.asp (accessed 4 June 2007). 3. Pearce-Moses, s.v. “Provenance,” www.archivists.org/glossary/index.asp (accessed 4 June 2007). 4. Philip C. Brooks, Research in Archives: The Use of Unpublished Primary Sources (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 5–7. 5. James M. Green, “Revaluing the Nineteenth Century,” in Getting Ready for the Nineteenth Century: Strategies and Solutions for Rare Book and Special Collections Librarians: Proceedings of the Thirty-Ninth Annual Preconference of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section, Association of College and Research Libraries, Washington, DC, June 23–26, 1998, eds. William E. Brown Jr. and Laura Stalker (Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2000), 82–84. 6. Brooks, Research in Archives, 30–31. 7. Five College Archives & Manuscript Collections, “Finding Aids,” Primary Source Research Guide, asteria.fivecolleges.edu/help/findaids.html (accessed 3 June 2007). 8. Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University Library, “Finding Sources,” Manuscripts & Archives Tutorial, www.library.yale.edu/mssa/tutorial/findingsources.htm (accessed 26 July 2007). 9. Victoria Irons Walch, comp., “Chapter 3: Information Exchange Formats (Data Structure Standards),” Standards for Archival Description: A Handbook (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2004), www.archivists.org/catalog/stds99/chapter3 .html (accessed 26 July 2007). 10. OCLC, “RLG Transition Information, FAQ: Impact on RLG Products and Services,” OCLC Online Computer Library Center: A Worldwide Library Cooperative, www.oclc.org/community/rlg/faq/productimpact/default.htm (accessed 26 July 2007). 11. ProQuest, “National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States,” www.proquest.com/products_umi/descriptions/National-Inventory-of-Documentary -Sources-in-the-United-States-260.shtml (accessed 26 July 2007).
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12. Martha Brogan, “Prospecting for Gold?” Internet Genealogy 1, no. 1 (April/ May 2006): 14, internet-genealogy.com/ArchiveGrid_A.pdf (accessed 26 July 2007). 13. Chronicle of Higher Education, “Indexing Scholarly Materials (blog),” The Wired Campus (March 6, 2006), chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/1069/indexing scholarly-materials (accessed 26 July 2007). 14. Brogan, “Prospecting for Gold?” (accessed 26 July 2007). 15. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), “About the National Archives,” The National Archives, www.archives.gov/about/ (accessed 26 July 2007). 16. NARA, “Planning Your Research Visit,” The National Archives, www.archives .gov/research/start/plan-visit.html (accessed 26 July 2007). 17. NARA, “ADD: Getting Started Guide,” Access to Archival Databases (AAD), aad.archives.gov/aad/help/getting-started-guide.html (accessed 26 July 2007). 18. NARA, “Archives Library Information Center Online Public Access Catalog,” The National Archives, www.archives.gov/research/alic/tools/online-public-access -catalog.html (accessed 26 July 2007). 19. NARA, “ARC,” The National Archives, www.archives.gov/research/arc/ (accessed 26 July 2007). 20. Library of Congress, “Manuscript Reading Room: About the Manuscript Division,” The Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/rr/mss/mss_abt.html (accessed 26 July 2007). 21. Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Reading Library, “About WATCH,” WATCH: Writers, Artists, and Their Copyright Holders, tyler.hrc.utexas.edu/about.cfm (accessed 26 July 2007).
Chapter Ten
Web Resources
There are a number of advantages to using the free Web as a literary resource. Although realism–naturalism researchers can expect to find most of the primary material, historical information, and critical scholarship needed for studying and writing in published form—either in print or through commercial databases subscribed to by a library—they are likely to find the most recent discussions of a subject on an online message board, blog, discussion list, or a scholar’s personal webpage. The Internet acts as a communication device, allowing researchers worldwide to send letters, post messages, and chat electronically. A writer can disseminate a critical essay around the world in the same hour it was completed, even if it contains unconventional ideas that never would have made it into print. Users of the Web are able to access copies of remote graphical, audio, or video material that otherwise could not be shared. This chapter presents methods of finding reliable, authoritative sources and recommends a combination of general reference sites; informational websites about the realism–naturalism period, writers, and their works; and the directory sites that help to identify them. There are hundreds of websites that are potentially useful to the realism–naturalism scholar. Those described here are the most critical to the study of the literary period at this time. Since new sites continually appear on the Web, researchers should use the directories listed in this chapter, along with the information about search engines and searching instructions provided in chapter 1, to find additional resources of interest.
EVALUATING WEBSITES Internet resources and tools can supplement research accomplished through more vetted mediums as long as they are evaluated with care. While there is 252
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a significant presence of digitized primary material and scholarly critical material on the Web, the sites on which they reside are often hard to pinpoint in search engine results that contain large quantities of unverified and outdated webpages. When visiting an unfamiliar website, there are some guidelines to follow in order to determine whether its content is reliable. First, it is important to consider the source of the information. Who hosts the site? Is it connected with a professor, college, or other type of academic institution? Some websites clearly state their publisher on the homepage. Others require users to search for links labeled “About Us” or “Who We Are,” or even mailing addresses listed under “Contact Us.” Often the domain name contained in the Web address or Uniform Resource Locator (URL) can serve as an indicator of source. The URLs of educational institution websites usually end in “.edu,” as seen in the addresses of Harvard University (http://www.harvard.edu) and Smithsonian Institution (http://www.si.edu). Government agency URLs end in “.gov,” e.g., The Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov); nonprofit organizations typically use “.org” in their addresses, commercial sites “.com,” and network organizations “.net.” A country code in a URL specifies a location other than the United States, such as the “uk” in http://catalogue.bl.uk/, the URL of the British Library Integrated Catalogue. Evaluating the sites of network organizations (.net) and others with lesserknown domain names requires more caution on the part of researchers. Personal sites belonging to scholars and enthusiasts may be associated with their academic work, but be created independently from their institutions or organizations. They can be a source of bias or lack of objectivity if the author has an “ax to grind.” Users should consider whether the author appears to be an expert in the field, and whether he considers his audience to be American literature scholars, the general public, or elementary and high school students. Class exercises or assignments offered on websites are often good indicators of the intended audience. In addition, users should try to ascertain who, in particular, is responsible for the material on the website. The author does not have to be the administrator of the site. There are websites that include submissions from various writers. Becoming increasingly popular are “wikis”— sites that look like scholarly resources but allow any visitor to edit the text, making it difficult to credit a particular writer or group of writers. Another way to check the reliability of a website is to determine the currency of the information. Users can check the date of the last update given on the homepage, either as part of the latest posting or at the bottom in the credits. Individual pages on a site also may be given a date. Of course, recent updates really only indicate an author’s continued interest in maintaining the site. The changes may have been minor mechanical adjustments to pages of text. Testing the links to see if they work often helps users judge the reliability of a site. If parts of the website are missing, or if links to other sites only
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lead to error messages, then the reliability of the entire site may need to be questioned. Often a website will appear to be a reliable source of information, but present no obvious ways to verify its credibility. In this case, the researcher should find the fact, quote, or attribution in a published resource before using it in her studies or scholarship. A savvy researcher uses the Web to find leads that can then be followed elsewhere. For example, someone who types words from a poem in a Google search may retrieve only one site that is obviously a personal one. The lack of other sites in the search results may be due to the obscurity of the work. More frequently, however, it can mean that the particular keywords selected are retrieving an incorrect version of the poem. By noting the title and author, and any other bibliographical or biographical details supplied by the author of the personal site, a more authoritative source can be found. If this strategy is not successful, a final option is to try to contact the creator of the site to discover the original source.
WEB DIRECTORIES A Celebration of Women Writers, at digital.library.upenn.edu/women/ (accessed 16 March 2007). Google Directory, at directory.google.com/ (accessed 23 March 2007). H-SHGAPE Internet Resources, at www.h-net.org/~shgape/netindex.html (accessed 30 April 2007). Internet Public Library, at www.ipl.org (accessed 22 February 2007). Literary Resources on the Net, at andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Lit/ (accessed 16 March 2007). Voice of the Shuttle, at vos.ucsb.edu/ (accessed 19 February 2007). Websites for the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, at bss.sfsu.edu/cherny/ gapesites.htm (accessed 30 April 2007). World Wide Web Virtual Library History Central Catalogue, at vlib.iue.it/history/ index.html (accessed 19 April 2007). WWW.History, at historymatters.gmu.edu/browse/wwwhistory/ (accessed 19 February 2007). Yahoo! Directory Search, at dir.yahoo.com/ (accessed 23 March 2007). While search engines have been popular for a number of years, experienced users know that Web directories are also an option. The standard search engines apply algorithms that take into account term frequency and site linkage in compiling results. In directory searches, websites are handpicked for classification by category. Users then either browse the categories or run keyword
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searches through all of the sites in the directory. As with subject indexing, websites are tagged by their string of categories and subcategories. Once someone finds one appropriate site, its category heading can be used to find others. Directories created by competent indexers can help to reduce the time people need to spend combing through search results. Two well-known commercial sites offer general directories to the contents of the Web: Yahoo! and Google. Yahoo! was born as a directory in 1994. In 2002 it switched to a search engine for its homepage search tool, adopting Google’s technology before developing its own in 2004. Yahoo! Directory Search is accessed at dir.yahoo.com or through links on the Yahoo! homepage at yahoo.com. In the directory there are categories for “Literature” and “American Literature” under the more general heading of “Arts & Humanities,” and subcategories for “African American,” “Native American,” and “Southern Literature.” The Google Directory offers a category for “American Literature” under “Arts.” “American Literature” contains subcategories for various types of literature: “nineteenth-century,” “twentieth-century,” “African American,” “Native American,” and “Southern literature.” Realism–naturalism researchers can select one of these subcategories or the link to “Realism and Naturalism,” or perform a keyword search of all— or selected—sites in the directory to obtain additional choices. For instance, someone who types “jim crow” into Google Directory will obtain hits from many different categories, including “Society⬎History⬎By Region⬎North America⬎United States⬎Civil Rights Movement.” By choosing “Civil Rights Movement,” the Google user can identify even more sites about Jim Crow laws along with other forms of racism and antiracism in the late nineteenth century. In comparison, a regular Google keyword search for “jim crow” retrieves different sites because the search criteria are based on term frequency, not subject. Figure 10.1 has examples of Google Directory categories of interest to American realism–naturalism researchers. The number of links for each category appears in parentheses. Researchers should also be aware of the subject-specific Internet gateway sites that are created and maintained by scholars in their respective fields. Generally, these sites will be more thorough than the commercial search-engine directories. However, because they are often maintained by volunteers, they are less likely to be up to date. With the explosion of sites since the 1990s, website maintenance is a time-consuming operation. Web addresses change, sites merge into other sites, and some disappear altogether when larger sites offer the same material, stealing their traffic and rendering them unnecessary. It is difficult for webmasters to delete links to award-winning websites even when many have broken links and the advertised “construction” on their sites appears to be permanent rather than temporary. The more
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Figure 10.1. Useful categories in the Google Directory. Source: google .com (accessed 23 March 2007).
comprehensive the directory is, the more chances there are for the website to be connected to sites that are linked to other sites with dead links. Started in 1995 by the University of Michigan’s School of Information as a graduate seminar project, the Internet Public Library is now maintained by the I School at Drexel (Drexel University’s College of Information Science and Technology) with support from the College of Information at Florida State University and the University of Michigan’s School of Information. The goal of its creators is to have it perform the functions of a physical library, but with online material. Included are directories and links to reference sources, recreational reading sources, and subject specialties. There are a few corners of this website that are of potential use to the realism–naturalism researcher. The “Ready Ref-
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erence” section links to authoritative almanacs, dictionaries, and encyclopedias. “Reading Room: Books” connects to dozens of e-text sites. Probably of the most value is the “Special Collections: Literary Criticism” section, which leads searchers to both contemporary and historical sites of literary criticism. This section features more descriptive content and better indexing than some of the others, and is divided into pages devoted to specific authors, titles, national literatures, and time periods. There are separate pages for “American Literature: 1865–1900” and “American Literature: Twentieth Century.” Some author pages currently do not have any links listed, while others connect to online biographical resources. Resources include chapters from literary texts from the early twentieth century as well as monographs and articles from journals and newspapers dating from the 1980s to the present. The brainchild of Alan Liu, professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Voice of the Shuttle (VoS) is a well-known portal to humanities websites that are useful to scholarship and research. While the directory is not updated as frequently as it could be, it is still one of the best places for literary scholars and students to browse for resources on the Web. The “American Literature” category is divided by century and resource type. There are subcategories for “Criticism,” “Courses,” “Journals,” “Listservs (called discussion lists in this book) and Newsgroups,” and “Conferences.” The “Nineteenth Century” and “Modern Literature” subcategories are mostly devoted to author-specific websites. “General Resources in American Literature” at the top of the page also provides a healthy list of directory and e-text sites that offer an overview of the national literature, such as American Literature on the Web (see below), American Studies Electronic Crossroads, and the Keele University American Literature page. Naturally, the “Literature (in English)” collection of links offers the most content related to American literature, with websites categorized into the literary periods, genres, or the writers that they cover. Other subject categories may also prove useful, such as “General Humanities Resources,” “Cultural Studies,” “Gender and Sexuality Studies,” “History,” “Literatures Other Than English,” “Minority Studies,” “Philosophy,” and “Religious Studies.” Each category includes a list of links to general resources and then links by subcategory. In 2001 VoS was remodeled to improve its function as an organized list of humanities resources on the Web. Unfortunately, the homepage currently announces that it is still a work in progress, and that users will find many broken links among the listings. Jack Lynch’s Literary Resources on the Net is also a standard gateway site for Web resources dealing with literature. Associate professor of English at the Newark campus of Rutgers University, Lynch specializes in eighteenth-century English literature. The “American literature” section of his website lists
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dozens of general websites as well as a list of author-specific sites, including those about Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, and Mark Twain. Users may want to try the useful links under “Feminism and Women’s Literature,” such as Domestic Goddesses: AKA Scribbling Women (a moderated online journal devoted to writers of domestic fiction) and African American Women Writers of the 19th Century. The section on “Ethnicities and Nationalities” is particularly strong in Native American resources. Categorized under “Miscellaneous” on the website is the “General Guides to Literary Web Resources” listing, which may lead to other useful websites. Part of the History Matters website, WWW.History is a directory of selected websites that have been identified as being particularly useful in aiding the teaching of United States history to high school and college-level students. They are good places for a literary researcher to get a historical overview of a period he or she is studying. Each listed site is given a oneparagraph review that explains the site and outlines its strengths and weaknesses, although often the reviews are based on versions of the site that are a number of years old. Websites are organized by time periods (e.g., “Civil War and Reconstruction, 1850–1877”; “Development of the Industrial United States, 1870–1900”; and “Emergence of Modern America, 1890–1930”) and topics (“African Americans,” “Economy,” “Ideas and Ideologies,” “Southern States,” and “Western States”). Many websites come under multiple categories. If users need a more specific list of Web resources, they can use the “Full Search” option that allows them to search the records and annotations by keyword and, in addition, place limiters by time period, site content (i.e., text, images, audio, or video) and site type (e.g., archive, gateway, organization, and journal). Audio and video files require applicable software that is specified. A keyword search for literature limited to the realism–naturalism period brings up twenty-one hits, including the African American Texts from the Modern English Collection and the Florida Heritage Collection. The World Wide Web Virtual Library History Central Catalogue is maintained by the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. WWW-VL is an extensive listing of links pertaining to virtually every aspect of world history. The “History: United States” resources are divided into periods and then into groupings, such as bibliographies, biographies, timelines, research tools, and sites pertaining to specific years, specific cultural events, and phenomena of the period. Most links are operational and lead to websites of reputable cultural and academic institutions (e.g., Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and HarpWeek’s The Chinese American Experience, 1857–1892). Literary sites are included in the cultural and biographical sections. The Society of Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE) maintains a helpful listing of Gilded Age and Progressive Era
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resources on the H-SHGAPE Internet Resources page. The page is part of the larger H-Net Humanities and Social Sciences Online website, produced by an international organization of scholars who promote research and teaching of the social sciences, humanities, and arts. The selected links represent about thirty literary and cultural resources as well as sections entitled “General Resources”; “Political Leaders”; “Transformation of the West”; “The Rise of Big Business and American Workers”; “The Crisis of the 1890s”; “The War with Spain, 1898 and Aftermath”; “The New Immigration and Urban America”; and “Progressive Reform, 1901–1917.” Among the sites promoted are American Variety Stage: Vaudeville and Popular Entertainment, 1870–1920 and The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory. Some subject-specific directories have been created as a side-project by intrepid scholars. Robert W. Cherny, professor of history at San Francisco State University, has compiled a list of important websites related to the realism– naturalism period on his site Websites for the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, such as On the Lower East Side: Observations of Life in Lower Manhattan at the Turn of the Century and Mark Twain on War and Imperialism. A Celebration of Women Writers, edited by Mary Mark Ockerbloom of the University of Pennsylvania, offers links to writings by and about female writers from more than one hundred countries. Some of the links lead to digitized versions of texts hosted by the website; many others connect directly to Project Gutenberg texts (see below). Hundreds of American writers are listed, including all of the major female realism–naturalism writers and many minor ones, such as Katharine Lee Bates, author of the poem “America the Beautiful,” and Gulielma Zollinger.
DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ON THE WEB African American Women Writers of the 19th Century, at digital.nypl .org/schomburg/writers_aa19/toc.html (accessed 21 February 2007). Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts, at www.infomotions.com/alex/ (accessed 12 May 2007). American Verse Project, at www.hti.umich.edu/a/amverse/ (accessed 21 February 2007) Bartleby.com, at www.bartleby.com (accessed 19 February 2007). Colorado’s Historic Newspaper Collection, at www.coloradohistoricnews papers.org (accessed 18 August 2007). Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls, at www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/dp/pennies/ home.html (accessed 20 April 2007).
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Documenting the American South, at docsouth.unc.edu/ (accessed 19 February 2007). Electronic Text Center, at etext.lib.virginia.edu/ (accessed 4 May 2007). Google Book Search (Beta), at books.google.com/ (accessed 19 February 2007). Ishikawa, Akihito. American Literature on the Web, at www.nagasaki-gaigo .ac.jp/ishikawa/amlit/ (accessed 19 February 2007). Making of America, at www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp/ (accessed 19 February 2007). Making of America, at cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/ (accessed 19 February 2007). National Digital Newspaper Program, at www.neh.gov/projects/ndnp.html (accessed 25 April 2007). NINES: A Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship, at www.nines.org (accessed 28 April 2007). The Nineteenth Century in Print: The Making of America in Books and Periodicals, at memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpcoop/moahtml/ncphome.html (accessed 19 February 2007). The Online Books Page, at onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/ (accessed 3 May 2007). Project Gutenberg, at www.gutenberg.org (accessed 19 February 2007). Street and Smith’s Preservation and Access Project, at library.syr.edu/digital/ guides/s/StreetAndSmith/ (accessed 20 April 2007). Wright American Fiction 1851–1875, at www.letrs.indiana.edu/web/w/ wright2/ (accessed 19 February 2007). Scholars and students generally use digitized material for three reasons: as a substitute for a print version of a published text or image when one is not readily available; to gain access to unpublished or hard-to-obtain printings and manuscripts; and to utilize a convenience of technology, such as the ability to search a text for the occurrence of a word or phrase. Each of the websites discussed below offers e-texts suited to these applications. Hundreds of thousands of works have been digitized and made available as part of a larger commercial venture or purely for the sake of scholarly inquiry. The form that they take differs according to the digitization process employed. Some e-texts have been scanned from microfilm copies (e.g., Wright American Fiction, 1851–1875) and others from print copies. Public-spirited volunteers may have collected and proofread the resulting text (Project Gutenberg), or staff may have been hired for this purpose. Due to the potential for errors in the scanning process, this proofreading is important, as is the recognition that some errors may not be spotted in the text. Scholarly research may necessi-
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tate examination of the original work in print. The digital collections discussed below are freely available on the Web. Collections that require a library subscription are covered in chapter 8. The Google Book Library Project is the largest digitization project ever, with the goal of including the text of fifteen million books found at some of the world’s largest libraries. Currently, those working with Google are the libraries of Harvard University, Princeton University, University of Michigan, the New York Public Library, Oxford University, Stanford University, the University of California system, University of Wisconsin–Madison, University of Virginia, University of Texas at Austin, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, the Library of Barcelona, and Bavarian State University. The Library of Congress is also conducting a pilot project with Google. The Google Book Library Project is ongoing with an expected completion date of 2015. However, American realism–naturalism researchers may find that many of the titles they are looking for have already been added. Martha L. Brogan reports in A Kaleidoscope of Digital American Literature (2005) that the participating libraries hold close to 80 percent of the titles included in Lyle Wright’s American Fiction bibliographies.1 The scanned books are fully searchable on the Web through the Google Book Search interface, currently in beta form. Access to the full text of a book depends on its copyright status and/or the user’s connection with the institution that supplied the book for scanning. If the work is in the public domain, or if the user is a member of that particular academic community, he can download the book as a PDF file; otherwise, he is restricted to the citation and a few lines of text—“snippets” related to his search—along with information about where he can buy or borrow the book. Despite this limitation, Google Book Search improves access, as researchers are able to use its search capabilities to identify mentions of topics, particularly in scholarship. The “Advanced Search” interface allows them to search books by title, author, publisher, publication date, or ISBN. It is more difficult to limit results to works of American literature because there are no search options for place of publication or subject classification. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, anticipated the coming of the Web when he started his free e-book collection in 1971. Today, the Project Gutenberg website has a collection of over twenty thousand e-books available in plain text (ASCII) as well as other types of files. ASCII enables users with limited computer resources to read the books. The majority of the titles in the Project Gutenberg collection have expired copyright dates and are in the public domain. Most are works of Western literature, including the most popular texts of key realism–naturalism writers. The e-texts are donated and proofread by volunteers, so they are not considered reliable for scholarly textual
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study. However, literary researchers will appreciate the ability to search or browse texts by author, title, or language. The “Advanced Search” feature allows searching by subject as well as the additional options of limiting by Library of Congress call number (e.g., PS Language and Literatures: American Literature) and by file types, such as plain text, Adobe PDF, or XML. Unfortunately, there is no option at the current time for limiting a search to a specific date range or year. The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts includes about fourteen thousand public-domain American and English works of literature and texts on Western philosophy. The majority of the e-books come from Project Gutenberg (above). A small percentage of the titles were obtained from early electronic text centers, such as Internet Wiretap and the Eris Project of Virginia Tech, which offered ASCII files on Gopher—a system that predated the hypertextbased Web for organizing and displaying files on Internet servers.2 Eric Lease Morgan of Infomotions, Inc., developer of the site, is using Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines to mark up the already digital items.3 The Alex Catalogue assists searchers by providing full-text searching as the default option. They are not directed to the place of the requested word or phrase in the text. There are additional options offered for “Browse by Author” and “Browse by Title” that retrieve these alphabetical lists. Searches that retrieve longer lists of titles can be broadened or narrowed by adding subject tags, author names, or title words. The smaller sites Bartleby.com and American Literature on the Web provide literary works in electronic form. Most of their digitized versions of texts can be found on the sites described above. Bartleby.com is a commercial site that presents select anthologies and multivolume sets of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction of the period. American realism–naturalism researchers may find the site of interest—despite its annoying pop-up and flashing advertisements—because it offers early twentieth-century poetry anthologies. Among the works provided are An American Anthology (1900), The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), Yale Book of American Verse (1919), and Modern American Poetry (1919). Users can search the entire collection for keywords or limit searches to all verse, all fiction, all nonfiction, or to a particular author. The other website American Literature on the Web was created by Akihito Ishikawa of the Department of English at Nagasaki University in Japan. The site is divided into time periods. The 1865–1914 section is of interest to realism– naturalism researchers because it focuses on American literature and contains some literary texts by lesser-known writers (e.g., Abraham Cahan, Owen Wister, and Clinton Scollard). At present, American Literature on the Web has not been updated since December 28, 2001, and searchers will note a number of broken links.
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Making of America is a collaborative digitization project between the University of Michigan and Cornell University. The mission of the project is to preserve and make available primary texts relating to the development of the United States infrastructure in the second half of the nineteenth century. The project is divided into two collections accessible on two separate webpages hosted by the two universities. According to both websites, plans to combine the collections and the sites, as well as include other universities, are in the works. The Michigan database consists of 1,500 books and runs of ten periodicals, the majority of which were published between 1850 and 1877. The Cornell database is made of 109 books and twenty-two journal runs ranging from the years 1840 to 1900. (See chapter 7 for more details of the periodicals included in the collections.) The subjects with the most coverage in both collections are education, psychology, American history, sociology, science and technology, and religion. Each collection must be searched separately. Michigan’s Making of America homepage presents a single field for keyword searching of books and periodicals, but the “Other Searches in MoA” link leads to an “Advanced Search” page with multiple search fields and Boolean, proximity, and bibliographic searching interfaces. There are also separate pages for searching exclusively books or journals. The books page features subject searching. Literary texts can be found under subject terms “American literature,” “American Poetry,” “Books and Reading,” and “Poetry,” as well as place names. Cornell’s Making of America site also features subject searching as part of its bibliographic and index searching interface. Visitors may want to browse Cornell’s periodical or multivolume monograph collections by title, or look through the entire collection by author and title. Books can be displayed as images, as PDFs, or in plain text. Topical books that are part of the collections include Southland Writers: Biographical and Critical Sketches of the Living Female Writers of the South (1870), Cyclopedia of American Literature (1875), and A Literary History of America (1900). The texts were digitized using optical character recognition (OCR) with, according to the administrators, 1 percent of the characters scanning incorrectly. Because of this, full-text searching may miss occasional instances of a word or phrase. Scanned images of the pages of texts from Wright’s American Fiction bibliography can be found on the Wright American Fiction 1851–1875 website hosted by Indiana University. The site offers almost three thousand texts for searching and browsing. Editors are currently working to correct errors in the text files and add SGML encoding according to Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines. The texts that are currently fully edited offer both the e-text and the page images. Visitors to the site can complete both a simple and an advanced search of all the texts as well as a word index. The word index alerts the user to the amount of times a word has been
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used throughout the collection and takes him to instances in the texts. At libraries that subscribe to the database, many of the same texts can also be accessed electronically through Literature Online’s Early American Fiction 1789–1875 collection, published by Chadwyck-Healey, a division of ProQuest. ProQuest procured its copies of the fiction works from the University of Virginia. Similar to the Indiana University’s website, the pages are available as scanned images and are also fully searchable. The Electronic Text Center of the University of Virginia Library is yet another major online location for e-texts, with significant holdings in American literary and historical works. Many of the texts have been linked to The Online Books Page, so researchers may want to begin their search at that website. Only certain collections and texts digitized by the Electronic Text Center are available outside of the University of Virginia (UVA) community. Among the collections that require UVA authentication are the American Poetry Database, the African American Poetry Database, African American Newspapers, and The Civil War: A Newspaper Perspective (Accessible Archives). Portions of the Modern English Collection, the Electronic Text Center’s largest collection, as well as a part of the Early American Fiction (1789–1885) collection are available on the free Internet. However, even the collections that are accessible by the public contain texts that are copyrighted and cannot be republished without the permission of the university. Conveniently, researchers are able to isolate searches to only the portions of each collection that are accessible by the public. The Modern English Collection consists of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, letters, newspapers, and manuscripts. The collection has been grouped into subcollections, which include Texts by and about African Americans, Texts by and about Native Americans, Texts by Women Writers, and Texts about the American Civil War. The Early American Fiction Collection consists of 886 texts, but only 158 are accessible to the public. Works by Louisa May Alcott, Ambrose Bierce, Bayard Taylor, and Mary J. Holmes are among the publicly available works that can be searched separately. Most novels in the collection are accompanied by reproductions of manuscript materials such as letters and photographs. Launched in 1993, The Online Books Page was one of the earliest projects to attempt to catalog online texts. John Mark Ockerbloom, its creator and editor, today boasts of more than twenty-five thousand e-texts in the catalog which continues to grow. In some cases the text is linked directly to Ockerbloom’s site hosted by the University of Pennsylvania; in other cases the catalog is linked to the webpage where the text is originally available. Ockerbloom’s criteria for inclusion in the catalog are that the title must be out of copyright or be permitted to be included by the author, that it be a text that can be found in a print library, that the link is stable, and that the text be in a
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standard format. There are numerous ways to access the catalog records. In addition to a subject index, most of the texts have Library of Congress call numbers, meaning that visitors can virtually browse the shelves of this collection. They can also search the titles and authors of the texts (but not the full text). While many of the records of works by realism–naturalism writers link to Project Gutenberg webpages, Ockerbloom also offers texts from more obscure domains. Researchers may find it worthwhile to begin their book search here. The Online Books Page features a listing of other digitization and e-text directory sites. As stated on its website, the twenty-year plan of the National Digital Newspaper Program is to make freely available on the Internet historically significant newspapers from every state published between 1836 and 1922. This joint project between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress will also produce a historic newspaper directory containing bibliographic and holdings information maintained by OCLC. The program is only in its initial stages of development, but researchers can already access some digitized content. A prototype of the program called Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers is available on the Library of Congress website. Visitors can search and view the pages of twenty-five newspapers, fourteen of which are from the District of Columbia. Others are from Florida, Kentucky, Utah, New York, Virginia, and California. Issues between the years of 1900 and 1910 are available. Search results can be limited by year or date range, and page images can be printed. Chronicling America allows users to explore the prototype (beta) version of the national newspaper directory, which includes the MARC records of newspapers from 1690 to the present. The records are borrowed from the United States Newspaper Program, an NEH-sponsored project begun in 1980 (see chapter 7). Users can search by frequency, language, and type of newspaper, as well as by ethnicity or labor press. Colorado’s Historic Newspaper Collection is an exciting new online resource for researchers of the American West. The full contents of 107 newspaper titles from the years 1859 to 1930 are searchable and available in digital form. The images come from the microfilm collection of the Colorado Historical Society, and are the result of the collaborative digitization efforts of the society and the Colorado State Library. New pages and issues are continually being digitized, and the coordinators intend to make the entire print run of Colorado newspapers of that period (over two million pages) freely available to all. Visitors to the website can select a county of Colorado from a map and search for keywords from articles. Although they can browse issues and limit searches to articles, pictures, or advertisements and by language, there is no true advanced search interface where multiple fields can be
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searched at once. Despite this shortcoming, the website is a useful resource that may spur other states to initiate similar projects. The Nineteenth Century in Print (NCP) book and periodical collections are part of the American Memory project of the Library of Congress. American Memory began as a CD-ROM project and was launched online in 1994 as part of the National Digital Library Program to increase public access to historical and cultural materials. The NCP collections were digitized by Cornell University Library in cooperation with the Preservation Reformatting Division of the Library of Congress. The periodicals collection consists of print runs of various lengths of twenty-three popular magazines, most of which have literary content. The periodicals with the longest runs available are Atlantic Monthly (1857–1901), Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (1850–1899), Living Age (1844–1900), New Englander (1843–1892), Scribner’s Monthly (1870–1881), and North American Review (1815–1900). Users can search the entire collection or the text of individual periodicals. The book collection is borrowed from the University of Michigan’s contribution to the Making of America project (described above). The collection of 1,500 books touches on a wide assortment of subjects. Although the site boasts a strong collection in American poetry, there are few literary texts altogether; the collection is better suited to historical research. A keyword search for “poetry or poems” only produces ninety-two hits. The book search function may be useful in locating mentions of people or places and cultural facts. NINES: A Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship is an online federation of scholarly digitization and research projects on British and/or American nineteenth-century literature, art, and other forms of culture. While all of the content of the projects associated with NINES is available independently on their individual websites, the NINES website features a selection of multifunctional federated search interfaces designed to, as described on the website, “aid collation, comparative analysis, and enable pedagogical application of scholarly electronic resources.” NINES is in the process of adding new projects to its database. Among the current ones are the Charles Chesnutt Archive, Dickinson Virtual Reference Shelf, Ambrose Bierce Project, Walt Whitman Archive, Willa Cather Archive, and the Whitman Bibliography. (See the “Author Sites” section below.) The primary search tool for the NINES database is Collex, a complex interface that takes practice to learn. Once mastered, it greatly broadens searching ability. The search box is located in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. If someone enters a term, it appears in the “Your Constraints” box. He can also use the “Constrain Further” box to limit the search by phrase, year, and name. Results appear beneath both search boxes. Links in the “Constrain Further” allow the searcher to view results by specific project. Selecting a re-
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sult brings him directly to the text or image in its original online context. He will notice a “Collect” link under each search result. The searcher must create a password and login in order to use this function, which offers him the ability to make unique lists of results from various searches, to annotate these lists, and save them. According to NINES, users soon will be able to make online exhibits including syllabi, bibliographies, and timelines, and post them onto the NINES website to share with the online community. Documenting the American South is sponsored by the University Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The material in the collection originates from the library’s various special collections. There are numerous ways to search or browse the contents of the website. Users can browse lists of authors, titles, and Library of Congress subject headings, or browse by state. A Google-powered search engine sits on the top of every page of the site, allowing all of the collections to be searched at once. In addition, the material of the site is organized into topical collections. Some collections pertain exclusively to the University and the state of North Carolina, but the most useful to realism–naturalism researchers is “Library of Southern Literature,” and to a lesser extent “First Person Narratives in the American South” and “The Church in the Southern Black Community.” “Southern Literature” contains digitized works of Frederick Douglass, Joel Chandler Harris, O. Henry, Ellen Glasgow, Grace Elizabeth King, Thomas Nelson Page, and Mark Twain, along with lesser-known writers. The other two collections provide autobiographies, diaries, tracts, sermons, and other documents that may construct a useful context to the writing of literature in the South. Although no longer being updated, the American Verse Project, run by the University of Michigan’s Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) and the University of Michigan Press, may be a resource for poetry of lesser-known writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The collection consists of poetry published before 1920, compiled from the works of writers covered in major poetry anthologies and surveys, which include The Columbia History of American Poetry (1993), Literary History of the United States (1974), American Poets from the Puritans to the Present (1968), and The Oxford Book of American Verse (1950). A list of the writers included can be found at quod .lib.umich.edu/a/amverse/authlist.html. The online collection is particularly strong in the poetry of women and African American writers. Boolean, proximity and bibliographic searching are allowed. Users can also browse by title, author, or keyword in text. African American Women Writers of the 19th Century, a project of the New York Public Library, consists of fifty-two digitized works published before 1920. Many of the collected texts were for many years rare and have only recently been rediscovered. The works are organized into categories—fiction,
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poetry, autobiography and biography, and essays—which can be searched individually. The site provides biographies of Eloise Bibb, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, Olivia Ward Bush, and other writers of interest to American realism–naturalism scholars. Since dime novels have become collector items and the focus of scholarly research, it is useful to know that the Web features a number of sites that offer bibliographic information about dime novel series and titles. In particular, two academic libraries have created dime novel websites with online catalogs and full-color images of the book covers. Stanford University’s Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls provides records from over eight thousand dime novels and penny dreadfuls from the United States and Great Britain. Most records contain a scanned image of the cover. The records can be browsed by series title, novel title, genre, theme, setting, time period, type of character, or audience age or gender. Street and Smith’s Preservation and Access Project, created by Syracuse University Library’s Department of Special Collections, primarily consists of a catalog of bibliographic information and cover images of 1,922 dime novels published by Street and Smith, a dime novel and magazine publisher based in New York City that published inexpensive fiction from the 1850s to the 1940s. Street and Smith published major writers such as Horatio Alger Jr., Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London. Subject indexing of the novel records is much less intensive than in Stanford University’s catalog.
READY REFERENCE SOURCES ON THE WEB The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, at www .bartleby.com/cambridge/ (accessed 24 March 2007). The Chronology of American Literature: America’s Literary Achievements from the Colonial Era to Modern Times, at www.answers.com/library/ Works%20by%20Authors (accessed 29 March 2007). Citizendium: The Citizen’s Compendium (beta), at www.citizendium.org (accessed 15 May 2007). Columbia Encyclopedia (6th ed., 2001), at www.bartleby.com/65/ (accessed 24 March 2007). The Encyclopedia of World History (6th ed., 2001), at www.bartleby.com/67/ (accessed 24 March 2007). One Look Dictionary Search, at www.onelook.com/ (accessed 15 May 2007). The Reader’s Companion to American History, at www.answers.com/library/ American%20History (accessed 29 March 2007). Wikipedia, at www.wikipedia.org (accessed 1 March 2007).
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While chapter 2 presents the most relevant encyclopedias, biographical dictionaries, databases, and histories for study of the period, there are times when a researcher needs a quick answer to a brief, factual question or a brief biographical or historical overview that can be easily found on the Web. This section covers a number of free online “ready reference” sources that may come through when library materials are not at hand. Being free offerings, the guides only give cursory coverage of topics and should only be used when library-owned and subscribed print or database materials are unavailable. Many can be identified for personal bookmarks on gateway sites (e.g., Internet Public Library) and the virtual reference collections of libraries. Both academic and public libraries often offer virtual collections on their websites. A search for the phrases “virtual reference shelf,” “virtual reference collection,” “online ready reference,” or “ready reference tools” in Google or Yahoo! will find a large number of them on the Web. There is an abundance of free dictionaries of various types and quality to be found on the Web. In addition to looking for dictionaries on the gateway sites or the virtual reference shelves of libraries, searchers may want to try the One Look Dictionary Search. Typing the keyword “muckrakers” or “gilded” or even the phrase “gilded age” locates freely available Web dictionaries that contain this term, presenting a list for evaluation and selection. The tool may be used to identify the most appropriate source. To the exasperation of many in the academic community, Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that any visitor can edit, is being used in place of standard encyclopedias. When most nouns (proper and improper) are typed into a major search engine, one of the first hits is usually a Wikipedia entry. The encyclopedia is interesting as a cultural phenomenon and can be fun to explore with its almost two million articles in English (as of May 2007). The site made headlines in 2006 when the journal Nature reported that Wikipedia’s articles had the same frequency of errors as Encyclopaedia Britannica articles.4 Britannica disputed the claims.5 While the reliability of the online encyclopedia is the subject of heated discussions, the site is useful for quick-and-dirty lookups—especially for current topics of interest to literary researchers, such as the Google Books Library Project—and as a gateway source to information on other sites.6 For instance, the article on Joel Chandler Harris gives links to an entry on Harris from an online encyclopedia, his works in Project Gutenberg, Theodore Roosevelt’s comments about Harris, and an online research guide prepared by a scholar. A brand-new reference project, Citizendium, is modeled after Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia claims to be more reliable since its articles are approved by subject experts. Currently, it has very little information on American literature, although its editors plan for it to become comprehensive in all subjects.
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Online researchers may also appreciate the convenience of Columbia Encyclopedia offered by Bartleby.com, a free website devoted to literary and reference works. First published in print form in 1935, the sixth edition of this respected, one-volume encyclopedia is now offered by Columbia University Press as an electronic tool with most entries being no more than a few paragraphs. Unlike a print encyclopedia, the full text can be searched as well as the entry word. Although it is a general encyclopedia, its broad coverage of subjects includes realism–naturalism topics ranging from dime novels, muckrakers, and Darwinism to lesser-known writers of the period. The online encyclopedia offers searching by main entry or by keywords found in the full text of the articles. Both methods can be useful, depending on the topic. Bartleby.com makes available other electronic versions of published reference texts at http://www.bartleby.com/reference/. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (fourth edition) provides definitions of over ninety thousand words with accompanying audio word pronunciations for quick lookups. Bartleby.com’s online version of the tenth edition (1919) of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations helps users identify thousands of quotations. The sixth edition of The Encyclopedia of World History is a chronology of world events that can be searched or browsed. Most entries are not longer than two sentences. Section H is on “North America, 1789–1914.” The eighteen-volume Cambridge History of English and American Literature was published from 1907 to 1921. A benchmark in size and coverage for literary reference in its day, it is still used for researching pre-Modernist literature.
AUTHOR SITES The Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive, at faculty.berea.edu/browners/chesnutt/ intro.html (accessed 27 February 2007). The Edith Wharton Society, at www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/wharton/index.html (accessed 11 March 2007). The Henry James Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites, at www2.newpaltz.edu/ ~hathaway/ (accessed 27 February 2007). The Jack London Online Collection, at london.sonoma.edu/ (accessed 1 March 2007). Mark Twain in His Times, at etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/index2.html (accessed 18 February 2007). Mark Twain Project Online, at www.marktwainproject.org/ (accessed 5 November 2007). Paul Laurence Dunbar Digital Collection, at www.libraries.wright.edu/special/ dunbar/ (accessed 27 February 2007).
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The Stephen Crane Society, at www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/crane/index.html (accessed 11 March 2007). The Walt Whitman Archive, at www.whitmanarchive.org/ (accessed 27 February 2007). The Willa Cather Archive, at cather.unl.edu/about.html (accessed 1 March 2007). The William Dean Howells Society, at www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/howells/ index.html (accessed 1 March 2007). Running a search for an author’s name in a major search engine frequently retrieves unwanted historic landmark and amateur fan sites. To find more reliable biographical information and bibliographies, electronic versions of the author’s works as well as leads to discussion groups and the contact information of experts, researchers should look for the websites of societies and collections associated with the author. Gateway sites like Voice of the Shuttle and others listed above will also outline these resources for the study of major authors. The more reliable author websites will have a “.edu” in the Web address, signifying that the site is hosted by an academic institution, or a unique URL, such as http://www.whitmanarchive.org. They will not be found for every minor author. In these cases, researchers should consult a subscription database or a print resource. The following are informational sites of some of the major authors of the period. The Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive is a collection of writings by and about the nineteenth-century author. While the collection is not a complete representation of his works, Associate Professor Stephanie P. Browner (Berea College, Berea, Kentucky) makes available some texts that have been out of print since the nineteenth century. About one hundred contemporary reviews of his works are also archived on the site. The Paul Laurence Dunbar Digital Collection presents a selective but extensive collection of Dunbar’s poetry, including song lyrics. Poems are arranged in both an alphabetical list and by published collection. The Henry James Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites is a regularly updated directory of writings by and about Henry James on the Web. Some links are useful for finding information about other period writers as well. The site is maintained by Richard D. Hathaway, Professor Emeritus of English at SUNY–New Paltz. Written and directed by Stephen Railton, professor of American literature at the University of Virginia, the Mark Twain in His Times website focuses not only on Twain’s works and their genesis but also shows through historical texts and images how the works were marketed and disseminated in their time. Sections on “Sam Clemens as Mark Twain” and “Marketing Twain” are filled with images that give researchers an intimate look at the creation of the
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icon. Mark Twain Project Online, currently in beta, is the product of collaboration between the Mark Twain Papers and Project of The Bancroft Library, the California Digital Library, and the University of California Press. The site presents Twain writings and letters, and states that the goal is to “produce a digital critical edition, fully annotated, of everything Mark Twain wrote.” UC Press and Mark Twain Project Online have been given exclusive rights by the Mark Twain Foundation to publish copyright-protected writings by the author. The Walt Whitman Archive, edited by Ed Folsom, the Carver Professor of English at the University of Iowa, and Kenneth M. Price, University Professor and Hillegass Chair of American literature at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, provides a plethora of digital texts by and about Whitman. Included are page images of his poetry, finding aids of manuscripts, a bibliography of criticism since 1975, a chronology of his life, and even a searchable gallery of all known photographs of Whitman. Started in 1997 at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, The Willa Cather Archive offers digital versions of all the author’s pre-1922 major works in addition to her speeches, interviews, and public letters. There are also full runs of periodicals dedicated to studies of the author, photographs, biographies, and the latest announcements from Cather scholars. In the near future, the website plans to feature transcripts of the author’s manuscripts from the Special Collections of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Library. The William Dean Howells Society webpage has links to all of his published writings in addition to bibliographies of scholarship and teaching resources. Similarly, The Jack London Online Collection, created by Roy Tennant and Dr. Clarice Stasz, and sponsored by the Sonoma State University Library, Rohnert Park, California, presents a comprehensive collection of e-texts including manuscripts and personal letters, bibliographies, photographs, teaching resources, and links to other sites related to Jack London. Washington State University hosts The Edith Wharton Society and The Stephen Crane Society websites. Both contain information about the societies, links to the full text of the writer’s novels, short stories, poetry, and nonfiction together with bibliographies of scholarship. The Edith Wharton Society site gives summaries of her major works, while The Stephen Crane Society pages offer a searchable index of the text of Crane’s works.
CURRENT AWARENESS RESOURCES Amazon.com, at www.amazon.com (accessed 26 April 2007). American Literature Association, at www.calstatela.edu/academic/english/ala2/ (accessed 16 March 2007).
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Calls for Papers: American, at cfp.english.upenn.edu/archive/American/ (accessed 1 April 2007). CataList, at www.lsoft.com/lists/listref.html (accessed 23 March 2007). H-Net Discussion Networks, at www.h-net.org/lists/ (accessed 26 April 2007). Reading new journal issues will keep someone updated on the latest analytical trends, but often to get a completely current understanding of an idea or theory one must communicate with other scholars and students. Much of the casual interaction between researchers takes place online, through email groups, message boards, and live chats. Many researchers subscribe to discussion lists, which are subject-centered e-mail networks. Discussion lists are also known as listservs, mailing lists, and e-lists. Members post messages via e-mail to the entire group and responses are automatically received. A discussion list may have from as many as ten to ten thousand members. Some discussion lists allow members to access archives of past discussions; others post their discussions on a website for anyone to read. Awareness of discussion lists largely travels by word of mouth, although there are discussion-list directories on the Web, the most current being CataList, which has an index of over fifty thousand lists. Visitors use subject keywords to locate appropriate discussion lists. H-Net, an international organization of humanities scholars and teachers, hosts more than one hundred discussion lists from its H-Net Discussion Networks webpage, many of which focus on an aspect of American studies. Subscribing to a discussion list involves sending an e-mail, usually with a one-word command (such as “subscribe”), to a particular address and then responding to an email that is sent back. Some discussion lists that realism–naturalism researchers may want to subscribe to are given below. Discussion of African American Literature/Criticism
[email protected] Website: listserv.uic.edu/archives/afam-lit.html African American Literature Discussion Forum
[email protected] H-NET List for American Studies
[email protected] Mark Twain Forum
[email protected] Website: listserv.yorku.ca/archives/twain-l.html
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Emily Dickinson Discussion List
[email protected] listserv.uta.edu/archives/dicknson.html The American Literature Association acts as an umbrella organization for many of the author-specific and time period–specific literary societies in the United States. The American Literature Association website (http://www .calstatela.edu/academic/english/ala2/) offers a “Directory of Affiliated Societies” with links to the various organizations. Among them are the African American Literature and Culture Society, American Humor Studies Association, Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures, and Willa Cather and Charles Chesnutt Societies. The site also describes the association’s past and upcoming annual conferences. Researchers looking for publishing opportunities will need to monitor “Call for Papers” lists. The most popular of these is run by the English Department of the University of Pennsylvania. Visitors to the Calls for Papers site can sign up to receive e-mails about calls in the study of different literary traditions and eras. They can also scan the lists of recent calls on the website. Calls for papers posted in the American literature list in March 2007 include “19th Century Representations of Race and Place,” “Figurative Language in 19th Century American Literature,” and “Mark Twain, War, and Peace.” Along with research library catalogs and book reviews in scholarly journals, the major online bookstore Amazon.com can be used to keep up to date with new books in a particular field. While not entirely comprehensive, Amazon stocks most university press books, making its website a good bibliographic resource. From Amazon’s homepage visitors must navigate to the “Product Categories” tab to the page for “Books.” A link at the top of the screen leads to the “Advanced Search” screen that includes a subject search field. Results can be limited by category (which includes literature and fiction, nonfiction, and reference) and publication date. They can be sorted by publication date, popularity, and price. In some cases, when Amazon has received permission from the publisher, site visitors can either “Search Inside” or “Look Inside” the books for sale. Usually available for view in “Look Inside” are digitized images of the front and back covers, the copyright page, the title page, the table of contents, and a few pages from the body of the book. The “Search Inside” feature adds a concordance of the one hundred more frequently used words in the book. Amazon users can also take advantage of the search box provided to look for occurrences of specific words on pages of the book. The results list brings page numbers and sentence context, but the user must be signed into an Amazon.com account that has purchased the book in order to view the actual page.
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BOOKS AND PERIODICALS ON RESEARCHING THE WEB American Reference Books Annual. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 1970–. ARBAonline (1997–). www.arbaonline.com. Bracken, James K., and Larry G. Hinman. The Undergraduate’s Companion to American Writers and Their Web Sites. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 2001. Dean, Katharine A., Miriam Conteh-Morgan, and James K. Bracken. The Undergraduate’s Companion to Women Writers and Their Web Sites. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2002. Much has been written in books and periodicals to help researchers navigate and evaluate the Web. Publishers and editors of instructional books and review sources are recognizing that the Web is a legitimate research tool and are devoting more pages of their publications to its resources. Since 2002, American Reference Books Annual (ARBA) and its online counterpart American Reference Books Annual Online (ARBAonline) have produced reviews of websites deemed useful to librarians, with the intention of making their coverage as comprehensive as it is for reference books. Many libraries subscribe to one or both of the ARBA products. Online bibliographies, such as Expanded Academic ASAP Plus and Academic OneFile, can be used to identify reviews of websites in Choice, Technology & Learning, and other periodicals. The reviews in ARBA and other serial publications will help to keep researchers current. Up-to-date bibliographies focused on the Web and its resources are difficult to find, as websites are only recently being recognized as important to scholarly research. Another problem is that, unlike print resources, they can change from day to day. Some bibliographies are available, but a researcher using print guides to websites will no doubt find a different landscape of material online than what is described in the books. Some sites recommended in the books may be altogether missing while others may have changed their content so much that the descriptions in the book are no longer accurate. Even so, these books are worth browsing if available at a local library because they can still provide leads to important content online. A site mentioned may have grown to become an essential resource, or a site that is no longer updated may redirect visitors to a more current resource. Two guides to consider are The Undergraduate’s Companion to American Writers and Their Web Sites, by James K. Bracken and Larry G. Hinman, which gives descriptions of websites related to nearly three hundred authors, and The Undergraduate’s Companion to Women Writers and Their Web Sites, published one year later and featuring bibliographies for 180 women writers from around the world. The latter volume, authored by Katharine A.
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Dean, Miriam Conteh-Morgan, and James K. Bracken, covers print resources such as bibliographies, biographies, handbooks, indexes, and concordances. In addition to the subject-specific guides, there are many general guides to Web searching that are continually released as the Web evolves. Researchers may want to check Amazon.com or the computer section of their bookstore every six months to see what new searching advice is offered.
CONCLUSION Unfortunately it is hard for a book to act as a gateway to subject-specific websites since content, design, and even Web addresses change frequently. Many of the sites recommended in this chapter may be defunct in a few years while new ones will have cropped up. Websites run by large institutions, such as university-hosted sites and major search-engine sites, are most likely to remain available throughout the years. Personal and organizational websites have a tendency to change or disappear. Researchers should browse major directories once a year to check for new sites. They should also follow developments in major digitization projects, such as the Google Books Library Project, to learn about the availability and accessibility of new material. It is also important for researchers to communicate with fellow scholars to keep up with new content and technological developments on the Internet.
NOTES 1. Martha L. Brogan, with assistance from Daphnée Rentfrow, A Kaleidoscope of Digital American Literature (Washington, DC: Digital Library Foundation and Council on Library and Information Resources, Sept. 2005), 65. 2. Eric Lease Morgan, e-mail message to author Peter Lehu, May 10, 2007. 3. Text Encoding Initiative Consortium, “Projects Using the TEI,” TEI: The Text Encoding Initiative, www.tei-c.org/Applications/ (accessed 26 July 2007). 4. Wired Magazine, “Wikipedia, Britannica: A Toss-Up,” Wired (Dec. 15, 2005), www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2005/12/69844 (accessed 26 July 2007). 5. BBC, “Wikipedia Study ‘Fatally Flawed,’” BBC News (March 24, 2006), news .bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4840340.stm (accessed 26 July 2007). 6. Cathy N. Davidson, “We Can’t Ignore the Influence of Digital Technologies,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 53, no. 29 (March 23, 2007): pNA.
Chapter Eleven
Researching a Thorny Problem
As this book has shown, there is a wide range of literary resources to consider, and not all questions can be answered with a single source. Chapter 11, the final chapter, demonstrates how the various strategies and sources discussed can be put into practice in an investigation of Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle. In a hypothetical scenario, a graduate student (Leslie) at a university library discovers that there are a number of important editions of the novel to consider due to the unusual circumstances surrounding its initial publication. Each step of the research process is followed by a strategy mentioned in one of the chapters.
BACKGROUND ON THE JUNGLE The Jungle is Upton Sinclair’s famous exposé of the miserable working and sanitary conditions of Chicago’s Union Stock Yards at the turn of the twentieth century. Immigrant and African American workers labored for long hours and low wages as “wage-slaves of the Beef Trust,” living in poverty in some of the worst slums of the city.1 An unsuccessful strike by the workers in 1904 inspired Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (b.1878–d.1968) to submit a challenge addressed to the strikers to Appeal to Reason, a popular socialistic magazine founded by ardent socialist and publisher Julius A. Wayland. Fred D. Warren, managing editor of the magazine, was impressed with Sinclair’s zeal as well as his recently published Civil War novel Manassas and hired him to write a novel about oppressed workers for serialization in the periodical.2 The young writer’s personal investigation of the labor conditions at the stockyards and packing plants resulted in his novel The Jungle, which appeared in Appeal to 277
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Reason from February 25 to November 4, 1905. The journal stopped the story after two thirds of the novel was published, but Wayland’s One-Hoss Philosophy, a quarterly with a smaller readership, issued the ending as part of its simultaneous printing of the novel (April to October 1905).3 The Jungle tells the story of Lithuanian immigrants who have been lured to the United States with promises of high wages at Chicago’s Union Stock Yards and their struggle to survive in this dehumanizing work environment. Sinclair uses the horror of one family’s experiences to spotlight the corrupt practices of big businesses in the United States and point out their exploitation of workers and unsafe food products. Instead of achieving the American dream, Jurgis Rudkus and his family suffer from starvation and poverty. At the end of the novel, Jurgis, the protagonist of “Packingtown,” comes to view socialism as the nation’s answer to the evils of capitalism. Anxious to get his novel printed and distributed in book form, Sinclair sent the manuscript to a number of publishing firms. Macmillan had initially advanced him money for the novel, but demanded changes that Sinclair refused to make. After four other commercial publishers turned down the disturbing and politically challenging novel, Sinclair, with the help of Jack London, solicited donations from potential customers in an attempt to initiate a selfpublishing venture. He found that book production would be costly, and submitted The Jungle to yet another commercial firm—Doubleday, Page, and Company. The firm agreed to take a chance on the novel after sending its own investigator to Chicago to confirm Sinclair’s findings. Doubleday, Page recognized the author’s previous commitment to his backers and allowed him to simultaneously print copies for his clientele of “sustainers” under the imprint Jungle Publishing Company. This version is now known as the “Sustainers’ Edition” of the novel. The book was an instant success. Sinclair became an international celebrity, although he did not feel satisfied with his efforts. He had hoped to write the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the labor movement” and convince his fellow Americans that socialism was the solution to the evils of capitalism.4 They chose, instead, to focus on the issue of unsanitary food production. Sinclair said of their reaction: “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”5 Despite the author’s reservations, Sinclair’s “muckraking” novel was instrumental in the passage of both the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 during President Theodore Roosevelt’s administration. In a second attempt to promote American socialism, Sinclair used most of the profits from the novel to build the Helicon Hall Colony, a commune near Englewood, New Jersey. The attempt was unsuccessful as the colony burned down in 1907, and many of Sinclair’s carefully preserved personal papers were destroyed.6
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LESLIE’S INVESTIGATION OF THE PUBLISHING HISTORY OF THE JUNGLE Leslie, a graduate student, is interested in pursuing a research topic related to The Jungle. She is having trouble identifying the “best” edition—or editions— of the novel to use for her study. A fellow student recommended an annotated Upton Sinclair bibliography by “Alhouse,” but she has not been able to find a record for the author’s works in the university library’s online catalog. A keyword search for alhouse and bibliography has also been unproductive, and the query sinclair and bibliography obtained a discouraging 180 catalog records. Unwilling to give up on the bibliography, Leslie brings her problem to the reference desk. The librarian is able to locate the record by dropping alhouse and adding upton to the search query (bibliography and upton sinclair). Strategy: “Chapter 1: Strategies for Online Searching” and “Chapter 3: Library Catalogs” emphasize the need to consider different combinations of keywords if catalog searches result in either large sets of records or zero records. Once the appropriate record is viewed, it is obvious that Leslie’s simple misspelling of the author’s name (Alhouse instead of Ahouse) is the cause of her problem. Her investigation, however, is just beginning. Since Ahouse’s Upton Sinclair: A Descriptive, Annotated Bibliography was published in 1994, Leslie decides that she needs additional sources to update her information. By cutting and pasting the subject heading assigned to the Ahouse bibliography into the search box of the catalog (sinclair, upton, 1878–1968–bibliography), she easily retrieves a list of all of the related bibliographies, and is ready to move on to a title search for jungle. Strategy: “Chapter 3: Library Catalogs” suggests that keyword searches be augmented by the use of subject headings in records. The other bibliographies are older than the Ahouse bibliography, but they are still useful for their descriptive lists of Sinclair manuscript and archival material. Ahouse is particularly valuable at this point because it identifies the various editions and reprintings of The Jungle. The bibliography provides some brief publishing history details as well as physical descriptions of the editions, including points of issue for the first edition. While reading the annotations in the volume, the student learns that the standard edition of the novel is the Doubleday, Page, and Company publication of 1906, which was issued almost simultaneously with the Sustainers’ Edition. She also notes that an earlier serialized version was published in 1905 in Julius Wayland’s journal
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Appeal to Reason. To her surprise, the volume also mentions a “Lost First Edition” (St. Lukes Press, 1988) that provides the 1905 text of the serialized version in Appeal to Reason.7 What, exactly, is the “Sustainers’ Edition,” and why is the St. Lukes Press edition nicknamed the “Lost First Edition” of The Jungle? There seems to be an interesting story associated with the original publication of the novel—one that may affect Leslie’s choice of an edition for her research project. Strategy: “Chapter 4: Bibliographies, Indexes, and Annual Reviews” and “Chapter 6: Publishing History Resources” note the benefits of descriptive bibliographies and their use in identifying standard editions of literary works. “Chapter 6: Publishing History Resources” defines points of issue and other terms related to bibliography and printing. By searching the library catalog, the student is able to identify the call numbers of biographical and critical sources along with several more recent editions of The Jungle that appear to be worth pursuing. The library holds the first annotated, critical edition of The Jungle, edited by James R. Barrett (University of Illinois Press, 1988), a copy of The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition (See Sharp Press, 2003), and The Jungle, An Authoritative Text: Contexts and Backgrounds Criticism, edited by Clare Virginia Eby (Norton Critical Edition, W. W. Norton, 2003). The word “uncensored” in the title of the See Sharp Press volume seems to indicate that the novel was censored— a detail that is new to Leslie. Since the exact title of the “Lost First Edition” is not given in the Ahouse bibliography, Leslie uses the phrase lost first edition in a keyword search of the library’s catalog and locates the record. Inexplicably, the MARC record lists the title as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle: The Lost First Edition even though the book itself inverts it (i.e., The Lost First Edition of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”). This is a puzzle until she finds an explanation in Earl Lee’s “Foreword” in the See Sharp “Uncensored” edition. Lee, librarian at Pittsburg State University (Kansas), states that the publisher apparently decided to change the title after the book was pre-cataloged by the Library of Congress. Books in Print listed the original title and did not provide an entry under Sinclair’s name as author. Since the University of Illinois Press edition of The Jungle was also issued in 1988, the title change caused some confusion.8 Strategy: “Chapter 6: Publishing History Resources” suggests using multiple search strategies and sources to verify publishing details. They can vary in library catalogs, bibliographies, trade catalogs, and other references.
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Unfortunately, the student is not as successful in finding records in the library catalog for issues of Appeal to Reason, the Sustainers’ Edition of The Jungle, or the 1906 edition published by Doubleday, Page. Not having access to at least a reproduction of these versions of the novel could cause her some problems. Remembering that the title of the Norton Critical Edition of the novel stated that it was an “authoritative text,” Leslie guesses the text follows the standard 1906 edition. She cannot look for a statement in the preface of the book at the moment because it is checked out of the library. However, she knows from experience that the online commercial booksellers frequently make this information available on the Web, and she is lucky. Even though Amazon.com does not provide its helpful “Look Inside” at the preface of the book, BarnesandNoble.com states that the Norton Critical Edition uses the standard 1906 text. Strategy: “Chapter 10: Web Resources” recommends the use of commercial bookseller websites (e.g., Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com) for quick information on books. The student is advised by the reference librarian to try Google Book Search as a possible source of digital reproductions of The Jungle. A search for jungle sinclair rewards her with a digital reproduction of the 1906 Doubleday, Page edition. The entire book (owned by Harvard University) is available for reading and printing because the copyright has expired. For a moment Leslie believes she has found a reprint of the Sustainers’ Edition on the Web, but the Ahouse bibliography helps her to establish that the copy is actually a digital reproduction of the “Sinclair Edition” held by the University of Michigan Library, an edition self-published by the author in 1920.9 Portions of other editions are also made available through Google Book Search, although full text cannot be provided because of copyright. To make sure she did not miss a copy of the Sustainers’ Edition, Leslie tries a search for sustainers jungle. She is linked to useful information in Ronald Gottesman’s introduction to the 1985 Penguin Classics version of The Jungle. The book is still covered by copyright, but she can obtain a print copy. There also seems to be a 2006 Penguin Classics Deluxe edition available for purchase. Strategy: Google Book Search’s ability to retrieve literary works and useful sources of information is covered in “Chapter 10: Web Resources.” Throughout her inquiry the graduate student has seen references to Sinclair being a “muckraker” and The Jungle as being the most famous of the “muckraking” novels. Leslie can easily verify her own understanding of the term “muckrake”—“to search for and expose misconduct in public life”—by a quick look at the online version of The American Heritage Dictionary of the
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Figure 11.1.
Selected text from modified entry, “Muckraking.” Source: OED Online.
English Language. She also can note the origin of the word in John Bunyan’s Man with the Muckrake “who cannot look up to heaven because he is so obsessed with the muck of worldly profit” (Pilgrim’s Progress).10 But she wonders: did President Theodore Roosevelt really refer to writers as muckrakers, and when, and on what occasion? Was he referring specifically to Upton Sinclair and The Jungle at the time, or to that particular breed of writers? The online Oxford English Dictionary (OED) provides some assistance with her questions as it displays both the current meanings of words and their historical use over time. According to the OED, the New York Evening Post mentioned President Roosevelt’s use of the word “muck-raking” in 1911, but the OED reference does not state the date or the occasion.11 Strategy: The Oxford English Dictionary and OED Online are described in “Chapter 2: Literary Reference Sources.” Encouraged by the reference to President Roosevelt in the OED, the student types roosevelt muckraker into the search box of Google.com and reads the portion of the text of the speech that relates to the quote in Wikipedia. Although she knows that she still needs to verify the text, date, and occasion in additional sources, the reference gives her a starting place for her search. “Roosevelt Speech Reference Note” in Modified Wikipedia Entry for “Muckrakers” In Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck-rake, the man who could look no way but downward, with the muck-rake in his hand; who was offered a celestial crown for his muck-rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor. In “Pilgrim’s Progress” the Man with the Muckrake is set forth as the example of him whose vision is fixed on carnal instead of on
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spiritual things. Yet he also typifies the man who in this life consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing. Now, it is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing. There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake; and there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed. But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats with the muck-rake, speedily becomes, not a help to society, not an incitement to good, but one of the most potent forces for evil. There are, in the body politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man whether politician or business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful. Source: The Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt, Condensed from the Original Edition, Supplemented by Letters, Speeches, and Other Writings, Wayne Andrews editor (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913, rep. 1958) pages 246–7. Source: Wikipedia (accessed June 9, 2007)
Her subsequent search for filth on the floor roosevelt in Google Book Search brings not only the text of the speech as reported in Putnam’s Magazine and Roosevelt’s Writings: Selections from the Writings of Theodore Roosevelt (edited by Maurice Garland Fulton, Macmillan, 1920) but also “snippets” and “limited preview” access to a number of books that appear to discuss the topic, which include U.S. Presidents as Orators: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook edited by Halford Ryan (Greenwood Press, 1995) and Michael McGerr’s A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (Free Press, 2003). The limited preview of Lincoln Steffens: A Biography by Justin Kaplan (Simon and Schuster, 2004), a book that Leslie ordinarily would not have considered, provides the desired details. Roosevelt tested out his next move on the occasion of a Gridiron Club off-therecord speech on March 17. He spoke hotly and recklessly of a group of writers who, he explained by an extended reference to John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, were concerned only with “that which is vile and debasing,” with “the filth of the floor.” (This particular reference to Bunyan may have been suggested to Roosevelt by an item in Collier’s for February 10, 1906, “The Man with the
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Muckrake Improved.”) Roosevelt named no names in his speech, but in a letter to his Secretary of War, William H. Taft, he confided that he had been thinking of [David Graham] Phillips, Upton Sinclair and Thomas Lawson, and also the writers for McClure’s, Cosmopolitan, and Collier’s—his list was practically a directory of what from then on would be known as muckraking [p. 149] . . . Roosevelt said he was going to repeat his speech publicly and for quotation so that it could be reported, and understood, in full [p. 150].12
Strategy: “Chapter 10: Web Resources” presents Wikipedia and Google Book Search as gateways to print and online sources. “Chapter 7: Magazines and Newspapers of the Period” provides a discussion of contemporary periodicals and the resources related to their description and indexing. By now, Leslie knows that Julius Wayland’s two socialistic magazines Appeal to Reason and One-Hoss Philosophy published the serialized version of The Jungle. Gene DeGruson, then Curator, Pittsburg State University, presents the text from Appeal to Reason in the “Lost First Edition,” adding the ending from One-Hoss Philosophy, while the See Sharp “Uncensored Original” edition uses the version issued by One-Hoss Philosophy. According to the prefatory section of the See Sharp edition, the two serialized versions of the novel are similar, but not identical. The OneHoss Philosophy version is complete (as opposed to the incomplete Appeal to Reason), is five chapters longer than the 1906 standard text (36 versus 31), and contains a different ending than the standard text.13 Earl Lee’s story of DeGruson’s rescue and patient reconstruction of water-damaged issues of Appeal to Reason, letters, and other papers of the magazine’s office, is an amazing one, but it leads Leslie to wonder how accessible print copies of the two periodicals will be if her advisor prefers her to examine the originals. If she chooses to use the serialized versions in her study of the novel, will microform or digitized copies be sufficient? At what location(s) would the originals and reproductions be available, and are there any surviving copies of Sinclair’s manuscript? Leslie decides to consult The Literary Manuscripts of Upton Sinclair (Ohio State University, 1972) by Ronald Gottesman and Charles L. P. Silet for a description of the manuscript. There is also A Catalogue of Books, Manuscripts, and Other Materials from the Upton Sinclair Archives, issued by Indiana University’s Lilly Library in 1963, and Ronald Gottesman’s Upton Sinclair: An Annotated Checklist (Kent State University Press, 1973). Remembering that she saw a mention of the manuscript in the preface by Gottesman in the Penguin Classics Edition supplied by Google Book Search, she locates a copy of the book. Leslie learns the manuscript burned in a fire at the New York City apartment of Sinclair’s mother.
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As the Introduction to this edition of The Jungle makes clear, the compositional and publication histories of this novel are uncommonly complicated. The manuscript of the work survived the Helicon Hall fire of March 16, 1907, which destroyed most of Sinclair’s papers, only to be lost in a later fire in his mother’s apartment house in New York City. In the absence of the manuscript, there is no certain way to establish authority as between the texts of the Appeal to Reason and One Hoss Philosophy serial versions on the one hand and the Doubleday, Page and Jungle Publishing Company book versions on the other. However, Sinclair took very great pains with the galleys of the book version, and only one change was introduced after initial book publication on February 26, 1906. Sinclair, deeply concerned to have all the facts straight, changed, on page 46, “The inspector wore a blue uniform, with brass buttons . . .” to “The inspector wore an imposing silver badge . . .” No other substantive or accidental changes were ever authorized.14
Leslie is disappointed to read about the destruction of the manuscript, but is still willing to verify this information by checking other sources such as the various Sinclair bibliographies, the commercial database ArchivesUSA, and the freely available NUCMC. She asks the reference librarian if it is possible that Appeal to Reason and One-Hoss Philosophy have been digitized. He searches the available full-text periodical databases (e.g., American Periodicals Series Online), WorldCat, and some of the microform/database publisher websites. WorldCat allows him to limit the search to serial publications categorized as “Internet Resources” and microform products. Strategy: “Chapter 3: Library Catalogs” suggests that researchers try local libraries first, and then extend their search to the holdings of other libraries by searching WorldCat. “Chapter 4: Bibliographies, Indexes, and Annual Reviews” and “Chapter 8: Microform and Digital Collections” provide details about full-text periodical databases. “Chapter 9: Manuscript and Archival Material” offers information about ArchivesUSA and NUCMC. Appeal to Reason has been microfilmed and may be available through the library’s interlibrary loan services. The Center for Research Libraries holds the reels, and the library is a member. One-Hoss Philosophy has been microfilmed, but may not be as easy to obtain on loan; she may need to visit the nearest university library that holds print issues in its special collections or microform reproductions of the original. The reference librarian prints a list of the nearest libraries from WorldCat and ArchivesUSA. Most of Sinclair’s papers appear to be preserved in Indiana University’s Lilly Library; the finding aids and inventory lists are online on the university’s website. Leslie is amazed to see that the collection offers such a wide range of material to
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researchers—anything from typescripts and notes for speeches to a plaster cast of Sinclair’s teeth. The librarian suggests that Leslie telephone or e-mail any of the facilities she intends to visit. Strategy: Readers learn about resources related to manuscript and archival material in “Chapter 9: Manuscript and Archival Material.” Interlibrary loan services and the Center for Research Libraries are described in “Chapter 3: Library Catalogs.” It is clear from Leslie’s preliminary investigation that she needs to talk with her advisor about the different versions of The Jungle that she has identified and their unique contributions: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
9. 10.
The Appeal to Reason serialized version (1905) One-Hoss Philosophy serialized version (1905) Doubleday, Page standard edition (1906) “Sustainers’ Edition” self-published by Sinclair (1906) “Sinclair Edition” self-published by Sinclair (1920) “Lost First Edition” of Appeal to Reason, Gene DeGruson, St. Lukes Press (1988) First annotated, critical edition, ed. James Barrett, Univ. of Illinois Press (1988) Penguin Classics with introduction by Ronald Gottesman (1986), or the Penguin Classics Deluxe edition (2006) with a new foreword and introduction Norton Critical Edition, ed. Clare Virginia Eby (2003) “Uncensored Original Edition” of One-Hoss Philosophy, See Sharp Press (2003)
The student is left with a decision to be made. On the one hand she has the text of the two serialized versions of The Jungle; on the other, she has the text of the 1906 Doubleday, Page edition. The various editors are either contending that Sinclair preferred the serialized version of the novel to the “censored” version he produced for a commercial publisher—or, that the “censoring” was intentional and retained by Sinclair even when he selfpublished the work in 1920 and had the opportunity to restore the missing chapters. Obviously, Leslie will need to continue her research of this novel by reading critical studies of The Jungle, Sinclair biographies and autobiographies, and book reviews—all strategies recommended in this book. Intrigued by the mention of an unsuccessful dramatized version of The Jungle in the Lilly Library’s A Catalogue of Books, Manuscripts, and Other Materials from the
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Upton Sinclair Archives, she thinks that she may make it the focus of her project.15 The play was performed in 1906, shortly after the publication of the book. A quick look at the New York Times database brings up a review from April 23, 1907, an article with the headline “Upton Sinclair Tells Why He Wants to Act,” and announcements of the production. The playwright’s name, Margaret Mayo, allows her to search for margaret mayo and jungle in WorldCat and identify a microform copy of the play (copyright deposit) at the Library of Congress and also a microform reproduction at the University of Missouri Library in Columbia, Missouri. These few details only serve to pique the student’s curiosity. Why did the play fail? Was Sinclair ever able to take the part of the “little violinist” in the production? Who was Margaret Mayo, and how much of the novel’s plot was changed to create the play script? These are just some of the questions that can be answered with further literary research.
CONCLUSION There are endless combinations of resources that can be used to answer research questions, and the hypothetical scenario above is only one example of how a researcher might progress from one to the next. Some of the connections between resources are obvious, while others are only apparent to someone who is familiar with the types of resources available. The purpose of this book is to equip researchers with a general knowledge of the many sources and strategies they can pursue and to highlight those most useful to the study of the literature of the American realism–naturalism period. The discovery of new knowledge generates more interest in a field and demand for new resources, which coming full circle, leads to more discoveries. Add the engine of technological advancement to the circle, and today’s academic environment is described. The authors encourage researchers to look beyond this book and watch for resources not mentioned since no research guide can cover an entire landscape of literature that is constantly evolving and expanding. They will need to talk to colleagues about new monographs and articles and to reference librarians to learn about recently added journals, online databases and microform collections, as well as the latest websites and digitization efforts. As this book is part of a series, researchers may want to peruse the other volumes as they are published. By becoming familiar with the basic resources, being clever and creative in using them alone and in combination, and relying on other outlets to remain up to date on new tools and sources, anyone can be prepared to make literary discoveries.
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NOTES 1. Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 27. 2. Tim Sougstad, “The Jungle,” in Vol. 2 of American History Through Literature 1870–1920, eds. Tom Quirk and Gary Scharnhorst (Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2006), 552. 3. Gene DeGruson, ed., “Introduction,” in The Lost First Edition of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” by Upton Sinclair (Memphis and Atlanta: St. Lukes Press/ Peachtree Publishers, 1988), xvi–xix. 4. James R. Barrett, ed., “Introduction,” in The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), xi. 5. Upton Sinclair, The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), 126. 6. Ronald Gottesman, ed., “A Note on the Text,” in The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), xxxvii. 7. John B. Ahouse, Upton Sinclair: A Descriptive, Annotated Bibliography (Los Angeles: Mercer and Aitchison, 1994), 10–12. 8. Earl Lee, “Foreword,” in The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition, by Upton Sinclair (Tucson, AZ: See Sharp Press, 2003), v. 9. Ahouse, Upton Sinclair: A Descriptive, Annotated Bibliography, 10–12. 10. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin/New York: Bartleby.com, 2000), s.v. “muckrake,” www.bartleby .com/61/23/M0462300 (accessed 27 July 2007). 11. OED Online (New York: Oxford University Press), s.v. “muckrake, n.,” www .oup.com. 12. Justin Kaplan, Lincoln Steffens: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 149–50. 13. Kathleen De Grave, “Introduction,” in The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition, by Upton Sinclair (Tucson, AZ: See Sharp Press, 2003), vii–viii. 14. Ronald Gottesman, ed., “A Note on the Text,” in The Jungle, xxxvii. 15. Lilly Library, A Catalogue of Books, Manuscripts, and Other Materials from the Upton Sinclair Archives (Bloomington: The Lilly Library, Indiana University, 1963), 19.
Appendix Resources in Related Disciplines
There are times when the realism–naturalism researcher may require a reference book or a database in a discipline other than literary studies. The following list presents selected sources that can be used as starting points for investigating areas of study that coincide with American literature. Subject searches of library catalogs will uncover additional resources. Typing a subject heading—music, science, biology, Christianity, etc.—followed by subheadings such as bibliography, bibliography of bibliographies, bio-bibliography, dictionaries, or encyclopedias in a library’s catalog will lead the searcher to appropriate reference sources. Resources on theatre fall into the literary realm, and may help students to understand a text in the context of its performative environment. Historical reference works provide context as well as source material; they may also discuss the impact of a text or literary movement on society over time. Dictionaries and encyclopedias related to science, the social sciences, art, and music fill in gaps of knowledge and illuminate references and allusions. Online and print bibliographies facilitate more in-depth research in these subject areas, and guides serve to locate handbooks, chronologies, atlases, and other specialized reference works.
GENERAL Statistical Sources Carter, Susan B., et al., eds. Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present. Millennial Edition. 5 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. www.cambridge.org/us/americanhistory/hsus/. 289
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A new “Millennial Edition” of the standard reference work. Each of the five volumes covers a different type of statistic: “Population,” “Work and Welfare,” “Economic Structure and Performance,” “Economic Sectors,” and “Government and International Relations.” Statistical Abstract of the United States. Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1878. Historical statistics: www.census.gov/compendia/statab/ hist_stats.html. Published annually since 1878, the Statistical Abstract of the United States is an important source of U.S. political, social, and economic data. Sources of statistics include federal agencies such as the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The World Almanac and Encyclopedia, New York: Press Pub., 1894–1922. Previous title: The World Almanac (1868–93). Current title: The World Almanac and Book of Facts. New York, NY: World Almanac Books, 1923 to present. Content from older issues is provided online at www.world almanac.com with a password from the book. The World Almanac is a source of facts and statistics on a wide range of subjects. The first was issued by the New York newspaper World in 1868. Publication of the almanac was suspended in 1876, but Joseph Pulitzer revived it in 1886 when he bought the newspaper.
GUIDES The New Walford Guide to Reference Resources. 9th ed. London: Facet Publishing, 2005–. Previous edition: Walford’s Guide to Reference Material. 8th ed., vols. 1–2 and 7th ed., vol. 3. London: Library Association, 1998–2000. Walford’s is the British Library Association’s Guide to Reference Books in three volumes: Science and Technology (vol. 1), Social and Historical Sciences, Philosophy and Religion (vol. 2, 2000), and Generalia, Language and Literature, The Arts (vol. 3). The New Walford Guide to Reference Resources: Science, Technology and Medicine (2005), edited by Ray Lester, updates the information contained in volume 1 of the eighth edition (1999). Directories Laguardia, Cheryl, Bill Katz, and Linda Sternberg Katz, eds. Magazines for Libraries. 15th ed. New York: R. R. Bowker, 2006. Magazines for Libraries Update (quarterly e-mail service). bowkersupport.com/mfl/ update/.
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In addition to the standard bibliographic information, Magazines for Libraries gives the journal’s price, circulation statistics, whether or not the publisher provides sample copies, whether it is refereed, where it is indexed, the approximate number of book reviews in each issue, and the intended audience. R. R. Bowker Company. Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory. New Providence, NJ: R. R. Bowker, 2000–. Available online at Ulrichsweb.com. Issued in both print and online formats, Ulrich’s offers comprehensive and authoritative information on titles published throughout the world. Indexes and Bibliographies Academic OneFile. Ann Arbor, MI: Thomson Gale, 2006–. www.gale.com. The database contains records for journals in most academic subjects. Much of the content is peer-reviewed and available in full text. Academic Search Premier. Ipswich, MA: EBSCO Publishing, 2000s. www.epnet.com/. Indexes journals in all subject areas. Many of the journal articles are available in full text. The database includes indexing for monographs, reports, and conference proceedings. Expanded Academic ASAP Plus. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 1980–. www.gale group.com. The database selectively indexes titles from a wide variety of academic disciplines from 1980 to the present. Many articles are offered in full text. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (PQDT). Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest/UMI, 2004–. www.proquest.com. Print volumes for humanities and social sciences: Dissertation Abstracts International. A, the Humanities and Social Sciences (DAI). Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 1969–. Previous titles: Dissertation Abstracts. A, the Humanities and Social Sciences (1966–1969); Dissertation Abstracts (1952–1966). Available as Dissertation Abstracts Ondisc. The database covers dissertations and selected master’s theses, starting with the first U.S. dissertation accepted in 1861. The print version DAI, A has addressed the humanities and social sciences since the mid-1960s.
ART Dictionaries and Encyclopedias Grove Art Online. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999–. www .groveart.com.
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Online access to the entire text of The Dictionary of Art (see below) as well as entries from The Oxford Companion to Western Art (ed. Hugh Brigstocke, 2001). Morgan, Ann Lee. The Oxford Dictionary of American Art and Artists. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Leading American artists and their work are covered in this reference source along with art techniques, styles, schools, and movements. Turner, Jane, ed. The Dictionary of Art. 34 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Available online through Grove Art Online, at www.groveart.com. This thirty-four-volume encyclopedia, available at most academic libraries, contains information on artists, artworks, periods, movements, theories, and terms. The full text of The Dictionary of Art is available online as part of Grove Art Online (see entry above). Indexes and Bibliographies Art Index. New York: H. W. Wilson. Available online through various vendors and on WilsonDisc (CD-ROM). Print version (Jan. 1929/Sept. 1932–). Art Index examines periodical articles and bulletins from museums from 1984 to the present. A variety of subjects is covered, from painting, architecture, and photography to folk art and sculpture. Art Retrospective extends the indexing back to 1929. Other online versions of Art Index are Art Abstracts (1984 to present), with its short descriptions of articles, and Art Full Text (1984 to present), which provides links to full-text articles (1997–) from about 160 journals. Schmidt, Mary Morris. Index to Nineteenth-Century American Art Periodicals. 2 vols. Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1999. Available online through OCLC/RLG, 2007–. This is an index to forty-two American art periodicals published from 1840 to 1907. HISTORY Encyclopedias and Handbooks Batchelor, Bob. The 1900s. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. Blanke, David. The 1910s. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. Two volumes from Greenwood Press’s American Popular Culture through History series answer questions about everyday living during the earliest years of the twentieth century.
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Cayton, Mary Kupiec, and Peter W. Williams, eds. Encyclopedia of American Cultural & Intellectual History. 3 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001. The set addresses history through the major cultural trends and schools of thought that have shaped it. Morris, Richard B., and Jeffery B. Morris, ed. Encyclopedia of American History. 7th ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. This reference book has four parts: a chronology of political and military events, a chronology of nonpolitical events and trends, a collection of biographies, and an explanation of the federal government. Spiller, Robert, and others, eds. Literary History of the United States. 4th ed., rev. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1974. An overview of American writings from a political perspective. Writings of literary and historical figures are discussed in this classic work. Realism– naturalism researchers will be interested in sections VII, VIII, and IX. A lengthy bibliography is included. Indexes and Bibliographies America: History & Life. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio. Available online at www.ebscohost.com. Print format discontinued in 1993 (covers 1964–1993). The database America: History & Life offers article abstracts and bibliographical citations of reviews and dissertations on U.S. and Canadian history (prehistoric to the present). Arksey, Laura, Nancy Pries, and Marcia Reed. American Diaries: An Annotated Bibliography of Published Diaries and Journals. 2 vols. Detroit: Gale Research, 1983–87. The bibliography includes diaries by men and women. The entries are arranged chronologically with diaries beginning in the same year alphabetized by the name of the author. Davis, Gwenn, and Beverly A. Joyce, comps. Personal Writings by Women to 1900: A Bibliography of American and British Writers. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989. This resource covers the years from 1475 to 1900. The entries are alphabetized by author name and contain descriptions of autobiographical and travel literature, diaries, and letters. Goodfriend, Joyce D. The Published Diaries and Letters of American Women: An Annotated Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. Goodfriend describes the published personal writings of American women and gives the dates of the author, when known; the location in which the author was writing; and some of her experiences and personal feelings.
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MUSIC Dictionaries and Encyclopedias Sadie, Stanley, and John Tyrrell, eds. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Available online at Grove Music Online, at www.grovemusic.com. A standard reference work for music studies that is available both in print and as an online database. Most entries have bibliographies. The dictionary is available online through Grove Music Online. The online version includes recordings and links to related websites. Indexes and Bibliographies The Music Index Online. Sterling Heights, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 2003–. www.ebscohost.com. A bibliographic database of music periodical literature from 1975 to the present. Articles from over eight hundred music periodicals are indexed by author and subject. RILM Abstracts of Music Literature. New York: RILM International Center. www.rilm.org. Print version: International Repertory of Music Literature (New York: RILM, 1967–). An annotated bibliography of music scholarship that lists articles, books, bibliographies, dissertations, and both audio and video recordings. Not as wide in scope as the Music Index, but valuable for its abstracts. Available online through various database providers.
SCIENCE Dictionaries and Encyclopedias Lindberg, David C., and Ronald L. Numbers, eds. The Cambridge History of Science. 8 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. All eight volumes of this reader on the history of science may come to the aid of the realism–naturalism researcher as period texts may allude to earlier periods. Sebastian, Anton. A Dictionary of the History of Science. New York: Parthenon Pub. Group, 2001. Contains brief entries for scientific and medical terms as well as scientists. Illustrations and etymologies are included.
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Indexes and Bibliographies Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED). Philadelphia, PA: Institute for Scientific Information/Thomson Scientific, 1998–. scientific .thomson.com/. Science Citation Index Expanded is an online index to the journal literature of the sciences. The database offers retrospective citations back to 1900, which makes it useful to realism–naturalism researchers. In addition to providing citations from indexed articles, the database contains the references cited by the authors of the articles covered by the index. SCI-EXPANDED is one of the three databases of ISI’s Web of Science. (For information on Web of Science, see chapter 4.)
SOCIAL SCIENCES Dictionaries and Encyclopedias Calhoun, Craig, ed. Dictionary of the Social Sciences. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. This useful dictionary provides definitions of terms, concepts, theories, and issues related to human geography, anthropology, political science, sociology, economics, and other social sciences; it does not cover topics related to law, education, and public administration. Cayton, Mary Kupiec, Elliott J. Gorn, and Peter W. Williams, eds. Encyclopedia of American Social History. 3 vols. New York: Scribner, 1993. Scholarly essays focus on topics of interest related to American life and culture in this three-volume set. Indexes and Bibliographies Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). Philadelphia, PA: Institute for Scientific Information/Thomson Scientific. scientific.thomson.com/. SSCI is an online index to the journal literature of the social sciences, offering coverage from 1956 to present. In addition to providing citations from indexed articles, the database contains the references cited by the authors of the articles covered by the index. SSCI is one of the three databases of ISI’s Web of Science. (For more information on Web of Science, see chapter 4.) Sociological Abstracts. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest. www.proquest.com. Print version published by Sociological Abstracts beginning in Jan./Oct. 1952/53.
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The database includes abstracts of articles from journals as well as of conference papers, selected sociology books and book chapters, and dissertations. There are also bibliographic citations for book reviews.
THEATRE Dictionaries and Encyclopedias Harrison, Martin. The Language of Theatre. New York: Routledge, 1998. A dictionary of theatrical terms plus everyday words and phrases that were coined in the theatre business. Terms are not only defined but also shown in context and cross-referenced. Kennedy, Dennis, ed. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. A two-volume extensive encyclopedia encompassing theatre, opera, film, dance, radio, circuses, and parades. Almost half of the entries are short biographies; those on trends, theories, and ideas are mostly a page or longer. Appendixes include a “Selective Index of Dramatic Titles” and a timeline. Directories Frick, John W., Carlton Ward, and John B. Heil, eds. Directory of Historic American Theatres. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. Discusses performance sites in the United States that operated before 1915. Information is based on questionnaires sent to caretakers of the theatres. Indexes and Bibliographies The International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance / International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance with Full Text. Ipswich, MA: EBSCO Publishing, 2005–. www.ebscohost.com. Online sources of bibliographical references on theatre and dance. The EBSCO databases replace the print periodical International Bibliography of Theatre (1982–1999), which was initiated by the American Society for Theatre Research and published by the Theatre Research Data Center. International Index to Performing Arts / International Index to Performing Arts Full Text. Alexandria, VA: ProQuest/Chadwyck-Healey, 2006–. The IIPA databases provide indexing and abstracts for performing arts journals from 1864 to the present. They index a wide range of topics, from storytelling to dance.
Bibliography
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Index
Abbreviations and Technical Terms Used in Book Catalogs and in Bibliographies, 136, 139 ABC for Book Collectors, 135, 136 Abdullah, Omanii, 90, 93–94 Abraham, Terry, 241, 244–45 Academic OneFile, 291 Academic Search Premier, 291 Accessible Archives, 203, 204 Access to Archival Databases, 245, 246 access versus ownership, 60–61 accuracy of biographies, 27–28 advanced searches: catalog, 60; interfaces, 7–8, 8; JSTOR, 101; WorldCat, 69 African American Authors, 1745–1945, 32–33 African American Literature Discussion Forum, 273 African-American Newspapers and Periodicals, 202, 203 African American Poetry 1750–1900, 224 African American resources: bibliographies, 93–94; biographical sources, 32–33; journals, 117–18, 120; literary encylopedias, 21, 22–23; microform/digital collections,
228–29; newspapers, 202–3; websites, 273 African American Review, 116, 117–18 African American Women Writers of the 19th Century, 259, 267–68 African-American Writers, 32, 33 The Afro-American Periodical Press, 1838–1909, 183, 185, 203 Afro-American Poetry and Drama 1760–1975, 90, 93 The Age of Romanticism and Realism, 1815–1914, 19–20 The ALA Glossary of Library and Information Science, 222 Albinski, Nan Bowman, 162, 164 Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts, 259, 262 Allen, Charles, 181, 182–83 Alter, Horatio, 124, 127–28 Altick, Richard, 26 Altick, Richard Daniel, 104, 106 Amazon.com, 272, 274 Ambrose Bierce, 87, 89 America: History & Life, 293 American Biographical Archive, 26, 28–30 American Biographical Index, 26, 28–30, 29
301
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American Book Prices Current, 148, 152–53 The American Book Publishing Record Cumulative, 1876–1949, 140, 144–45 American Broadsides and Ephemera, 229, 230–31 The American Catalogue, 139, 141–42, 144 The American Catalogue of Books, 140, 141–42 The American Civil War, 229, 232 American Critical Archives series, 158 American Diaries, 293 American Drama 1714–1915, 224 American Fiction, 149–50 American Fiction, 1774–1910, 224, 225–26, 226 American Fiction, 1851–1875, 82, 85–86 American Fiction, 1876–1900, 82, 85–86 American Fiction, 1901–1925, 82, 86 American Fiction, 1911–1920, 224, 225–26, 227 American History through Literature, 1820–1870, 40–41, 179–80 American History through Literature, 1870–1920, 40–41, 179–80 American Humor Magazines and Comic Periodicals, 184, 185 American Indian and Alaska Native Newspapers and Periodicals, 183, 184–85 Americanisms—Old & New, 41–42, 44 American Journalism, 198, 199 American Journalism History, 207 American Literary and Drama Reviews, 155, 159–60, 160 American Literary Gazette and Publishers’ Circular, 146–47 American Literary History, 113, 114 American Literary Magazines, 181–82 American Literary Manuscripts, 242, 245
American Literary Publishing Houses, 1638–1899, 162, 163 American Literary Publishing Houses, 1900–1980, 162, 163 American Literary Realism, 108–9, 110, 111 American Literary Scholarship, 103–4 American Literature, 113–15 American Literature Association website, 272, 274 American Literature on the Web, 260, 262 American Mass-Market Magazines, 183, 184 American Memory Collection, 73–74 American Memory project, 266 American National Biography, 26, 30 American Naturalistic and Realistic Novelists, 31, 32 The American Newspaper Directory and Record of the Press, 199, 200–201 American Newspapers, 1821–1936, 208, 209 American Periodicals, 116, 118 American Periodical Series, 1850–1900, 230, 231–32 American Periodicals Series Online, 1740–1900, 3, 187, 188–90, 189, 190 American Poetry, 224 American Publishers’ Circular and Literary Gazette, 146, 147 American Quarterly, 114, 115 American Realists and Naturalists, 31, 32 American Reference Books Annual, 17, 19, 275–76 American Verse Project, 259, 267 American Women Writers, 1900–1945, 32, 33 and operators, 5–6, 7 Andrews, William L., 21, 22–23, 37 The Annotated and Enlarged Edition of Ernst Steiger’s Precentennial Bibliography, 207–8 An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Henry James, 86, 88
Index
An Annotated Journalism Bibliography, 1958–1968, 207 Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, 97, 100 annual reviews, 77–78, 103–4 Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, 148, 153, 153 Applegate, E.C., 31, 32 archival material, 237. See also manuscript/archival material Archival Research Catalog, 245, 246 Archival Research Catalog Galleries, 245, 246 ArchiveGrid, 162, 165, 165, 241, 244 Archives Library Information Center, 245, 246 The Archives of Harper and Brothers, 1817–1914, 162, 164 archives of publishing history, 162–66 ArchivesUSA, 162, 241, 243–44 Arizona Quarterly, 114, 115 Arksey, Laura, 293 Arndt, Karl J. R., 207–8 The Arthur H. Clark Company, 162, 163 Art Index, 292 The Art of Literary Research, 26 art resources, 291–92 Arts & Humanities Citation Index, 97, 102–3 asterisk symbol, 8 Astor, William Waldorf, 159–60, 160 ATQ: American Transcendental Quarterly, 110, 112 authority headings, 55–56 authors: bibliographies, 86–90; catalog searches, 55–56; literary resources, 46–48; newsletters and journals, 109–10, 123–29; periodical publishing, 172–75; websites, 270–72 The Authors, 36 Autograph Abraham Lincoln Documents from the Lincoln Collection at the University of Delaware, 236, 240 Ayer’s Directory, 199, 200
303
Baillie, Laureen, 26, 28–30 Bain, Robert, 36, 37, 38 Bales, Jack, 87, 89 Bamberg, Robert D., 154, 158 Bartleby.com, 13, 259, 262, 270 Batchelor, Bob, 292 Bauer, Dale M., 21, 24 Baum, L. Frank, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153 Bellardo, Lewis, 241 Bellardo, Lynn Lady, 241 Bendixen, Alfred, 20, 21 Besterman, Theodore, 104, 105–6 Bibliographia Oziana, 148, 154 A Bibliographical Companion, 135, 137 Bibliographical Guide to the Study of the Literature of the U.S.A., 104, 106 Bibliographic Checklist of African American Newspapers, 202, 203 bibliographies: of authors, 86–90; of bibliographies, 104–6; defined, 77–78; genre-specific, 90–95, 291–96; of journalism, 206–8; of nineteenth century, 78–81; of periodicals, 199–201; of primary works, 81–86 Bibliography of American Fiction 1866–1918, 90, 91–92, 150, 242 Bibliography of American Fiction through 1865, 150 Bibliography of American Fiction through 1866, 241, 245 Bibliography of American Literature, 81, 82–83, 83, 149–50, 151 Bibliography of American Literature: A Selective Index, 82, 83–84 Bibliography of Bibliographies in American Literature, 104–5 Bibliography of Dime Novels, 1860–1928, 90, 95 A Bibliography of Henry James, 87, 88 A Bibliography of the Writings of Henry James, 87, 88 Bibliotheca Americana, 141 Bickley, R. Bruce, Jr., 86, 89
304
Index
bio-bibliographies, 16–17 biographical resources: accuracy of, 27–28; general, 26–31; regional dictionaries, 36–39; specialized, 31–39 Biography and Genealogy Master Index, 26–28, 28 Black American Writers, 1773–1949, 90, 94 Black Drama, 224, 229 Black Literature, 1827–1940 (CDROM), 95 Black Literature, 1827–1940 (microfiche), 224, 228 Black Playwrights, 1823–1977, 90, 93–94 The Black Press in the Middle West, 1865–1985, 202, 203 The Black Press in the South, 1865–1979, 202, 203 Black Short Fiction, 224, 229 Blanck, Jacob, 81, 82–83, 83, 148, 149, 151, 153, 154 Blanke, David, 292 Bond, Cynthia D., 90, 94 Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books, 135, 138–39 The Bookman’s Glossary, 135, 137–1378 Book Review Digest, 154, 161 Book Review Digest Plus, 161 book trade magazines, 146–48 Boolean operators, 5–7 Bordman, Gerald M., 22, 24–25 Boutell, Henry Sherman, 148, 152 Bracken, James K., 17, 18–19, 275 Bradbury, Nicola, 86, 88 Bragin, Charles, 90, 95 British Library, 74–75 British Library Integrated Catalogue, 72, 74–75 Brodersen, Martha, 162, 164 Brogan, Martha L., 221, 223–24 Brown, William E., Jr., 236, 239
browse searches: for authors, 55–56; for subject headings, 56–59, 57, 58; for titles, 51–54 Bruccoli, Matthew, 149 Bruccoli, Matthew J., 81, 84 Brunet, Patrick J., 162, 163 Bryan, Mary E., 155–56 Budd, John, 87, 89 Budd, Louis, 46, 48 Buenker, John D., 39, 41 Bullock, Penelope, 203 Bullock, Penelope L., 183, 185 Burt, Daniel S., 25 Burt, Elizabeth V., 201 Calder M. Pickett, 207 Calhoun, Craig, 295 The Call, 123, 126 Calls for Papers: websites, 273, 274 The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism, 22, 24 The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain, 47, 48 Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature, 32, 33–34 The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing, 21, 24 The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre, 22, 25 The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, 268, 270 The Cambridge History of Science, 294 Camfield, Gregg, 46, 48 Carnes, Mark, 26, 30 Carter, John, 135, 136 Carter, Susan B., 289–90 Cassidy, Frederic G., 41, 45–46 Caswell, Lucy Shelton, 198–99 CataList website, 273 catalogs, library. See library catalogs catalogs, trade, 139–46 Cather, Willa website, 271, 272 Cather Studies, 123, 129
Index
Caudle, David J., 87, 89 Cayton, Mary Kupiec, 293 A Celebration of Women Writers, 254, 259 Center for Research Libraries, 64–65 Challen, Howard, 139–40, 142 Champion, Laurie, 32, 33 Chap-Books, 177 The Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive, 270, 271 Chesnutt, Charles website, 270, 271 Chielens, Edward E., 181–82 Chopin, Kate, 189, 189 chronologies, 25 The Chronology of American Literature, 25, 268 citation trails, 102–3 Citizendium, 268, 269 Civil War: Illustrated Civil War Newspapers and Magazines, 187, 193 The Civil War: Primary Documents on Events from 1860 to 1865, 201 Civil War Manuscripts, 247–48 Clark, Robert A., 162, 163 Clarke, Graham, 154, 159 Clements, William M., 90, 94–95 Collex, 266–67 Collins, M. A., 156 Colorado’s Historic Newspaper Collection, 259, 265–66 Columbia Encyclopedia, 268, 270 The Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry in Anthologies, 96 The Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry in Collected and Selected Works, 96 The Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry, 95, 96–97 Combined Retrospective Index to Book Reviews in Humanities Journals, 1802–1974, 154, 160 comics. See humor companions, 16 A Companion to Mark Twain, 46, 48
305
The Companion to Southern Literature, 36, 38 Comprehensive Index to EnglishLanguage Little Magazines, 1890–1970, 194, 195–96 Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, 31, 32 concordances, 16, 46, 48 Concordance to the Letters of Emily Dickinson, 46, 48 connecting words. See Boolean operators The Conservative Press in Eighteenthand Nineteenth-Century America, 183, 186–87 The Conservative Press in TwentiethCentury America, 183, 186–87 Conteh-Morgan, Miriam, 275–76 The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature, 20, 21 controlled vocabulary, 3 Copac, 67, 72 copyright, 249 Cox, J. Randolph, 22, 23 Craigie, William A., Sir, 41, 44 Crane, Stephen, 271, 272 The Criterion, 146, 147 Critical Heritage Series, 158 current affairs, 170 current awareness resources, 272–74 Danky, James P., 202, 203 database indexes, 2–3 data collection. See online searches Davidson, Cathy N., 22, 23–24 Davis, Gwenn, 293 Dean, Katharine A., 275–76 Describing Archives, 241, 243 Dickerson, Donna L., 201 Dickinson, Emily websites, 274 Dickinson Studies, 123, 125 dictionaries: art, 291–92; biographical, 31–32, 36–39; defined, 16–17; microform/digital collections, 222;
306
Index
pseudonym, 27, 34–36; science, 294; theatre, 296 Dictionary for Library and Information Science, 222 A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, 41, 44 A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles, 42, 44–45 Dictionary of American Regional English, 41, 45–46 The Dictionary of Art, 292 A Dictionary of Book History, 135, 138, 138 Dictionary of Literary Biography, 30–31, 89–90 Dictionary of Midwestern Literature, 36, 37, 39 Dictionary of Native American Literature, 33 Dictionary of Pseudonyms, 34, 36 A Dictionary of the History of Science, 294 Dictionary of the Social Sciences, 295 digital collections: access to, 219–21; extra-literary, 230–31, 232–33; guides to, 221–24; by literary format/type, 224–29; major titles, 224–29; overview, 233; preservation, 216–19; on the Web, 259–68 digital image use, 248–49 dime novel bibliographies, 95 The Dime Novel Companion, 22, 23 dime novel ghostwriters, 34–36 Dime Novel Round-Up, 116, 118–19 Dime Novels, 225, 229 Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls, 259–68 directories: library catalogs, 62–63; periodicals, 199–201, 290–91; publishing, 162–66; theatre resources, 296; on the Web, 12, 254–59 Directory of Historic American Theatres, 296 discussion lists, 273–74
document delivery, 63–64 Documenting the American South, 260, 267 DoHistory, 236, 240 domain name, 253 Don Etherington, 135, 138–39 drama resources: bibliographies, 92–93, 296; dictionaries/ encyclopedias, 296; directories, 296; encyclopedias, 22, 24–25; indexes, 296; in periodicals, 175; scholarly articles, 117, 122 Dramatic Compositions Copyrighted in the United States, 1870 to 1916, 90, 92–93 Dreiser Studies, 109, 111–12, 123, 124–25 Dunbar, Paul Laurence: websites, 270, 271 Dzwonkoski, Peter, 162, 163 Early American Fiction, 1789–1850, 224, 226–27 Early American Fiction, 1789–1875, 224, 226–27 Early American Newspapers (Series IV), 203, 204–5 Edel, Leon, 87, 88 Edith Wharton A to Z, 47, 48 Edith Wharton Review, 123, 125 The Edith Wharton Society, 270, 272 editions, first. See first editions Eichelberger, Clayton L., 154, 159 electronic collections. See digital collections; online searches Electronic Text Center, 260, 264 ELH, 129, 131 Ellen Glasgow Newsletter, 123, 126 Emberson, Frances Guthrie, 47, 48 Emily Dickinson Discussion List, 274 Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, 123, 125 The Emily Dickinson Journal, 123, 125 Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, 40, 41
Index
Encyclopedia of American Cultural & Intellectual History, 293 Encyclopedia of American History, 293 Encyclopedia of American Literature, 19–20 Encyclopedia of Frontier and Western Fiction, 37, 39 Encyclopedia of Frontier Literature, 36, 39 Encyclopedia of Southern Literature, 37, 38–39 Encyclopedia of the Book, 135, 137 Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century, 40, 41 Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century, 40, 41 The Encyclopedia of World History, 268, 270 encyclopedias: art, 291–92; history resources, 292–93; literary, 19–25, 36–39; science, 295; specialized, 21–25, 296 Endres, Kathleen L., 183, 186 English and American Drama of the Nineteenth Century, 224, 227 Epitome of Bibliography of American Literature, 82, 83–84 Erisman, Fred, 36, 38 Ernst Steiger’s Precentennial Bibliography, 207–8 ethnic resources, 116, 120. See also African American resources; Native American resources Etulain, Richard W., 36, 38 The European Library, 67, 71–72 Expanded Academic ASAP Plus, 291 expert searches, 69 extra-literary collections, 229–33 Facts On File Bibliography of American Fiction Through 1865, 90, 91–92, 245 The Facts On File Dictionary of American Regionalisms, 42, 46 Falk, Byron A., 204, 206
307
Falk, Valerie R., 204, 206 Farber, Evan Ira, 154, 160 Farmer, John S., 41–42, 44 Feather, John, 135, 138, 138 federated searches, 61–62 Fiction, 1876–1983, 140, 145 field searching, 9–10 Fifty Southern Writers After 1900, 36, 37, 38 Fifty Southern Writers Before 1900, 38 Fifty Western Writers, 36, 38 film. See drama finding aids for manuscript/archival material, 239–40 Finkelman, Paul, 40, 41 first editions, 148–54 First Editions, 148–49, 152 First Editions of To-day and How to Tell Them, 148, 152 First Printings of American Authors, 81, 84, 149 Fishman, Stephen, 248, 249 Flora, Joseph M., 36, 37, 38 folk literature, 119 Foster, Frances Smith, 21, 22–23, 37 Frank Norris Studies, 123, 125–26 Frazier, Patrick, 222, 223 Frick, John W., 296 Funston, Judith E., 87, 89 fuzzy searches, 8–9 Gabler-Hover, Janet, 40–41, 179–80 Gale Virtual Reference Library, 40–41 Garraty, John, 26, 30 Gary Scharnhorst, 179–80 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 224–25, 228 genre bibliographies, 90–95, 296 genre-specific journals, 116–23 George Palmer Putnam, 162, 163 Gerould, Winifred Gregory, 208, 209 The Gerritsen Collection, 193–94, 197 Getting Ready for the Nineteenth Century, 236, 239 The Gilded Age, 230 Glaister, Geoffrey Ashall, 135, 137
308
Index
A Glossary for Archivists, Manuscript Curators, and Records Managers, 241 A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology, 241 Glossary of the Book, 135, 136–37 Godey’s Lady’s Book, 219 Gohdes, Clarence Louis Frank, 104, 106 Goode, Stephen H., 194, 195 Goodfriend, Joyce D., 293 Google Book Library Project, 261 Google Book Search, 260, 261 Google Directory, 254, 255, 256 Gould, Philip, 21, 24 Granger, Edith, 96 Greasley, Philip A., 36, 39 Green, Suzanne Disheroon, 87, 89 Greenspan, Ezra, 162, 163 Grove Art Online, 291–92 guides: general reference, 290; literary criticism, 154–62; literary works, 17–19; magazines, 181–83; microform/digital collections, 221–24; newspapers, 202–3; specialized periodicals, 183–87 A Guide to Book Publishers’ Archives, 162, 164 A Guide to Critical Reviews of United States Fiction, 1870–1910, 154, 159 Guide to Microforms in Print, 222–23 Guide to Sources in American Journalism History, 198–99 “Guide to the Archives of Publishers, Journals, and Literary Agents in North American Libraries,” 162, 164 A Guide to the Microform Collections in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division of the Library of Congress, 222, 223 Guide to the Study of United States Imprints, 104, 105 Handbook of Native American Literature, 33 handbooks of history, 292–93
Harbert, Earl N., 31, 32 Harner, James L., 17–18 Harper’s Weekly, 196–97 HarpWeek: The Civil War Era (1857–1865), 196–97 Harris, Trudier, 21, 22–23, 37 Harrison, Martin, 296 Hart, James David, 19, 20–21, 37 Hart, Michael, 261 Hatch, James V., 90, 93–94 Hatch, Shari Dorantes, 32, 33 Hawk, Pat, 34, 35–36 Hawk’s Authors’ Pseudonyms III, 34, 35–36 Hayes, Kevin J., 154, 158 Heil, John B., 296 Helm Information Critical Assessments of Writers in English series, 159 Hendrickson, Robert, 42, 46 Hennessee, Don A., 90, 92, 225, 227 Henritze, Barbara K., 202, 203 Henry James, 154, 158 Henry James, 1866–1916, 87, 89 Henry James, 1917–1959, 87, 89 Henry James, 1960–1974, 87, 89 Henry James, 1975–1987, 87, 89 Henry James: A Bibliography of Criticism, 1975–1981, 87, 89 Henry James: A Bibliography of Secondary Works, 87, 88 The Henry James Review, 123, 126 The Henry James Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites, 270, 271 The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, 236, 237 Hensen, Steven L., 241, 243 Hinman, Larry G., 275 Hischak, Thomas S., 22, 24–25 Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960, 183, 184, 202 Historical Dictionary of the Progressive Era, 1890–1920, 39, 41 Historical Statistics of the United States, 289–90
Index
History and Present Condition of the Newspaper and Periodical Press of the United States, 179, 180, 198, 199 A History of American Magazines, 179, 180 A History of Book Publishing in the United States, 163 history resources: encyclopedias/ handbooks, 292–93; indexes/ bibliographies, 293; literary sources, 39–41; websites, 258–59 Hixon, Don. L., 90, 92 Hixon, Don L., 225, 227 H-Net Discussion Networks, 273 H-NET List for American Studies, 273 Hoffman, Frederick J., 181, 182–83 Horatio Alger, Jr., 87, 89 The House of Putnam, 1837–1872, 164 Howells, William Dean, 150–51, 151, 271, 272 H-SHGAPE Internet Resources, 254, 258–59 Hulbert, James R., 41, 44 humor resources, 117, 121–22, 184, 185 Huttner, Sidney F., 140, 144 Illustrated Civil War Newspapers and Magazines, 187, 193 images, 218–19 indexers, 2–3 indexes: defined, 77–78; to Harper’s Weekly, 196–97; to literary sources, 95–97; to The Nation, 196; to newspapers, 203–6; online, 2–3, 187–94; print, 194–96; scholarly, 97–103; to the Web, 2 Index to American Little Magazines, 1900–1919, 194, 195 Index to Nineteenth-Century American Art Periodicals, 292 Index to Southern Periodicals, 183, 185 interlibrary loans, 63–64, 74 The International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance, 296
309
International Index to Performing Arts, 296 Internet Public Library, 254, 256–57 In the First Person, 230, 232–33 Ishikawa, Akihito, 260, 262 Jack London Journal, 123, 126 The Jack London Online Collection, 270, 272 James, Henry, 87, 89, 123, 126, 154, 156–57, 158, 270, 271 Jason, Philip K., 90, 95 Joel Chandler Harris, 86, 89 Joshi, S. T., 87, 89 journalism bibliographies, 206–8 Journal of American Drama and Theatre, 116, 122 Journal of American Folklore, 116, 119 The Journal of the Midwestern Modern Language Association, 129, 130 The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 116, 120 Journal of Women’s History, 116, 120 journals. See magazines of the period; scholarly journals Joyce, Beverly A., 293 JSTOR, 97, 100–101, 187, 193 Juba to Jive, 42, 45 The Jungle, 277–87 Kale, Tessa, 96 A Kaleidoscope of Digital American Literature, 221, 223–24, 261 Kanellos, Nicolás, 183, 184, 202 Kantowicz, Edward R., 39, 41 Kaplan, Diane E., 236, 240 Kate Chopin, 87, 89 Katz, Bill, 290–91 Katz, Linda Sternberg, 290–91 Keenan, Hugh T., 86, 89 Kelly, James, 140, 141–42 Kennedy, Dennis, 296 Kenny, Daniel J., 199, 200–201
310
Index
keyword searches: authors, 56; The Jungle example, 279–80; maximizing, 9; subjects, 59–60; titles, 54; WorldCat, 68–69 Knight, Denise D., 32, 33 Kutler, Stanley, 40, 41 L. Frank Baum, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” 148 Laguardia, Cheryl, 290–91 The Language of Theatre, 296 The Language of the Civil War, 42 Later American Plays, 1831–1900, 90, 92 Laurence, Dan H., 87, 88 LCSH (Library of Congress Subject Headings), 3, 16, 56–60, 91 Legacy, 116, 119–20 lexicons, 16 LexisNexis Academic, 3 Leypoldt, Frederick, 143–44 Libdex, 62 library catalogs: access versus ownership, 60–61; Center for Research Libraries, 64–65; directories of, 62–63; interlibrary loans and, 63–64, 74; for manuscript/archival material, 242; MARC records, 10–12; for microform and digital collections, 220; organization of, 50–51; records in, 51–52, 52, 53; for reference materials, 16–17. See also online searches; union catalogs Library of American Civilization, 230, 231 Library of Congress, 72, 74, 210, 247–48 Library of Congress Finding Aids, 247 Library of Congress Online Catalog, 72–73 Library of Congress Rare Books and Special Collections, 247 Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), 3, 16, 56–60, 91
Lib-Web-Cats, 62 Lighter, J.E., 42, 45 Lindberg, David C., 294 literary criticism of the period, 154–62, 178 Literary History of the United States, 293 The Literary Index to American Magazines, 1850–1900, 195 The Literary Journal in America, 1900–1950, 181, 182 The Literary Journal in America to 1900, 181, 182 Literary Research Guide, 17–18 literary resources: author sources, 46–48; biographical sources, 26–39; chronologies, 25; encyclopedias, 19–25; guides to, 17–19; historical sources, 39–41; identifying, 16–17; indexes, 95–97; journal articles, 100–101; The Jungle example, 282–84; magazines, 181–83; overview, 15, 48–49; vocabulary sources, 41–46 Literary Resources on the Net, 254, 257–58 Literary Reviews and Essays, on American, English, and French Literature, 154, 158 Literary Writings in America, 81, 84–85, 155, 160–61, 194, 195 literature: journalism and, 198; magazines/newspapers publishing, 170–75; reviews of, 154–62 Literature, English & American, 104, 105–6 Literature of Journalism, 206, 207 Literature Online, 9, 96, 97 Literature Resource Center, 31, 89, 97, 101–2 Littlefield, Daniel F., Jr., 183, 184–85 The Little Magazine, 181, 182–83 little magazines, 177, 181–83 Ljungquist, Kent P., 90, 91–92, 241, 245 local union catalogs, 65–66
Index
London, Jack, 270, 272 Longton, William Henry, 183, 186–87 Lora, Ronald, 183, 186–87 Lord & Thomas’ Pocket Directory of the American Press, 199, 200 LOUIS Union Catalog, 65 lowbrow fiction, 177 Lueck, Therese L., 183, 186 Lungquist, Kent P., 150 MacKenzie, Cynthia J., 46, 48 MacKethan, Lucinda H., 36, 38 Magazines for Libraries, 290–91 Magazines of the American South, 184, 185 magazines of the period: book trade, 146–48; guides to, 181–83; histories of, 179–80; individual indexes to, 196–97; literature in, 170–75; types, 175–79; women writers and, 183, 184, 186 Major, Clarence, 42, 45 Making of America, 187, 193, 260, 263, 266 Malpezzi, Frances M., 90, 94–95 Mansell, 66–67 manuscript/archival material: copyright issues, 249; defined, 237; digital images, 248–49; finding aids, 239–40; general information, 236–40; glossaries, 241; The Jungle example, 285–87; in The Library of Congress, 245–46; locating, 241–45; in The National Archives, 245–46; online tutorials, 240; overview, 235, 249–50; photocopy issues, 248–49; preservation, 238–39; primary sources, 236–37; repositories, 237–38, 248 MARC (MAchine-Readable Cataloging) records, 10–12, 52, 60, 220–21 Mark My Words, 47, 48 Marks, Patricia, 155, 159–60, 160 The Mark Twain Annual, 123, 127 Mark Twain A to Z, 47, 48 Mark Twain Circular, 124, 127
311
Mark Twain Forum, 273 Mark Twain In His Times, 270, 271–72 Mark Twain Journal, 124, 127–28 A Mark Twain Lexicon, 47, 48 Mark Twain Project Online, 270, 272 markup code, 217–18 Marshall, Alice Kahler, 34, 36 Martell, Helvetia, 202 Massa, William R., Jr., 236, 240 Mathews, Mitford M., 42, 44–45 Matthews, Geraldine O., 90, 94 McBride, Bill, 148, 152 McColgan, Kristin Pruitt, 87, 89 Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), 56 Melvyl, 65 MeSH (Medical Subject Headings), 56 Messent, Peter, 46, 48 meta-search engines, 12, 61–62 The Microbook Library of American Civilization, 230, 231 microform collections: access to, 219–21; extra-literary titles, 229–33; literary titles, 224–29; overview, 215, 233; preservation of, 215–17; reference guides/dictionaries, 221–24 MLA Directory of Periodicals, 99–100 MLA International Bibliography, 3, 8, 9, 10, 97–100 Modern Language Quarterly, 129, 132 Modern Language Studies, 129, 130 Morgan, Ann Lee, 292 Morris, Jeffery B., 293 Morris, Richard B., 293 Mott, Frank Luther, 179, 180, 198, 199 muckraking example, 281–84, 282 The Music Index Online, 294 music resources, 294 Nagel, Gwen L., 90, 91–92, 150, 242 Nagel, James, 90, 91–92, 150, 242 The National Archives, 245, 246 National Digital Newspaper Program, 260, 265 National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States, 242, 244
312
Index
The National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints, 66–67 National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, 66, 67, 242, 243 The Nation Digital Archive: Since 1865, 196 Native American Folklore, 1879–1979, 90, 94–95 Native American Literatures, 34 Native American resources: bibliographies, 94–95; biographical sources, 33–34; periodicals, 183, 184–85; scholarly articles, 120–21 Native North American Literature, 33, 34 Nelson, Emmanuel S., 32–33 nesting keywords, 6 network organizations, 253 The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 294 Newlin, Keith, 46, 47 Newsboy, 124, 127–28 newspaper industry, 118, 197–98 newspapers: article reprints, 201–2; digitized collections of, 265; directories/bibliographies, 199–201; guides to, 202–3; histories of, 198–99; indexes to, 203–6; literature in, 170–74 Newspapers in Microform, 222 newspaper syndicates, 197 Newton, Keith, 96 The New Walford Guide to Reference Resources, 290 New York Times Index, 204, 206 Nilon, Charles H., 104–5 NINES: A Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship, 260, 266–67 The 1900s, 292 The 1910s, 292 Nineteenth-Century American Drama, 90, 92, 225, 227 Nineteenth Century American Literature and History, 225, 227–28
Nineteenth-Century American Poetry, 90, 95 Nineteenth Century American Women Writers, 32, 33 The Nineteenth Century Index, 78, 79 The Nineteenth Century in Print, 260, 266 The Nineteenth Century in Print project, 73–74 Nineteenth-Century Literature, 110, 112 Nineteenth Century Literature in English, 113 19th Century Masterfile, 187, 190–92 Nineteenth-Century Prose, 113 Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, 78–81 Nineteenth Century Studies, 110, 112–13 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, 117, 122 Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers, 204, 205 North, S.N.D. (Simon Newton Dexter), 179, 180, 198, 199 North American Women’s Drama, 225 North American Women’s Letters and Diaries, 230, 232 Norton Critical Editions series, 158 Norton’s Literary Gazette and Publishers’ Circular, 146, 147 not operators, 6–7, 13 Nourie, Alan, 183, 184 Nourie, Barbara, 183, 184 novellas, 173 Numbers, Ronald L., 294 N.W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual and Directory, 199–200 Ockerbloom, John Mark, 264–65 OCR (optical-character-recognition) scanning software, 217 OED Online, 43, 43–44 100 Milestone Documents, 245, 246 One Look Dictionary Search, 268, 269 The Online Books Page, 260, 264–65
Index
online databases, 53–54, 161–62, 243–45 Online Index to Publisher Names in PTLA, 140, 144 online public access catalog (OPAC). See library catalogs online searches: advanced, 60; by author, 55–56; of database indexes, 2–3; federated, 61–62; field choices, 9–10; The Jungle example, 279–80, 285–86; of periodical indexes, 189, 189–90, 190; structure of query, 3–9; by subject, 56–60; by title, 51–55; for websites, 2, 12–14. See also library catalogs online tutorials, 240 OPAC (online public access catalog). See library catalogs Open WorldCat, 70–71 optical-character-recognition (OCR) scanning software, 217 optical scanners, 218–19 or operators, 6, 7, 13 Our Documents.Gov, 245, 246 The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, 21, 22–23, 37 Oxford Companion to American Literature, 19, 20–21, 37 The Oxford Companion to American Theatre, 22, 24–25 The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain, 46, 48 The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States, 22, 23–24 The Oxford Dictionary of American Art and Artists, 292 The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, 19, 20–21 The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, 296 The Oxford English Dictionary, 42–44 PACSCL, 65, 66 Paddock, Lisa, 19–20
313
Parini, Jay, 19, 20–21 Parins, James W., 183, 184–85 Parsons, Henry S., 90, 92–93 Paul Laurence Dunbar Digital Collection, 270, 271 Pearce-Moses, Richard, 241 The Pen Is Ours, 90, 94 pen names. See pseudonyms Pen Names of Women Writers, 34, 36 Periodicals Archive Online, 187, 192–93 Periodicals Index Online, 187, 192–93 periodicals of the period: browsing in catalog, 53–54; current events in, 170–71; guides to, 183–87; histories of, 179–80; journalism bibliographies, 206–8; literary criticism in, 178; literature in, 170–75; locating collections, 208–10; online indexes to, 187–94; overview, 170–71, 210; print indexes to, 194–96; types, 175–79. See also magazines of the period; newspapers; scholarly journals period-specific journals, 110–13 Personal Name Index to “The New York Times Index,” 1851–1974, 204, 206 Personal Writings by Women to 1900, 293 Peter Parley to Penrod, 148, 153, 154 Peters, Jean, 135, 137–1378 Phillips, Le Roy, 87, 88 photocopies, 248–49 phrases in search queries, 4–5 Pickett, Calder M., 201–2 Piekarski, Vicki, 37, 39 pixels, 218–19 Pizer, Donald, 22, 24, 31, 32 plays. See drama Pocket Guide to the Identification of First Editions, 148, 152 poetry resources, 93, 95, 174 political periodicals, 178–79, 183, 186–87 Poole, William Frederick, 187, 190–92, 194, 195
314
Index
Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature, 187, 190–92, 194, 195 portals, 257 Porter, Joy, 32, 34 The Portrait of a Lady, 154, 158 Potter, Vilma Raskin, 202, 203 preservation, 215–19, 238–39 Price, Warren C., 206, 207 Pries, Nancy, 293 Primary Source Microfilm, 221, 225 Primary Source Research Guide, 236, 240 primary sources, 81–86, 236–37 printed resources, importance of, 48–49 printing/publishing bibliographies, 105 The Progressive Era: Primary Documents on Events from 1890 to 1914, 201 Project Gutenberg, 260, 261–62 Project MUSE, 98, 100–101 ProQuest Civil War Era, 204, 206 ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, 291 ProQuest Historical Newspapers, 204, 205–6 proximity operators, 4 pseudonyms: benefits of, 172–73; catalog searches for, 56; dictionaries, 27, 34–36 Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 129, 130, 131 public domain, 249 The Public Domain, 248, 249 The Published Diaries and Letters of American Women, 293 Publishers for Mass Entertainment in Nineteenth Century America, 163 Publishers & Stationers Trade Directory, 1867–1869, 139–40, 142 The Publishers’ Trade List Annual, 140, 143–44 The Publishers’ Uniform Trade List Directory, 142 Publishers Weekly, 146–47
publishing history resources: archives/directories, 162–66; bibliographies, 105; book trade magazines, 146–48; first edition identification, 148–54; guides to literary reviews, 154–62; The Jungle example, 279–87; overview, 134–35, 166; trade catalogs, 139–46; vocabulary aids, 135–39 Quirk, Tom, 40–41, 179–80 The Quotable Mark Twain, 47, 48 Ramsay, Robert L., 47, 48 Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, 42, 45 Rasmussen, R. Kent, 47, 48 The Reader’s Companion to American History, 268 ready reference websites, 268–70 Realism, Naturalism, and Local Color, 1865–1917, 31, 32 The Reconstruction Era: Primary Documents on Events from 1865 to 1877, 201 Reed, Marcia, 293 A Reference Guide to Afro-American Publications and Editors, 1827–1946, 202, 203 Reference Guide to American Literature, 26, 31 reference source searches, 16–19 Reference Works in British and American Literature, 17, 18–19 regional bias, 155–56 regional publications, 36–39, 183, 184, 185 Reitz, Joan M., 222 repositories, 237–38, 241, 244–45, 248 Repositories of Primary Sources, 241, 244–45 reprints of articles, 201–2 Research Libraries Group, 68 Resources for American Literary Study, 114, 115–16
Index
Ricks, Beatrice, 87, 88 Riggs, Thomas, 26, 31 Riley, Sam G., 183, 184, 185 RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 294 Risley, Ford., 201 Robbins, J. Albert, 242, 245 Roberts, Matt, 135, 138–39 Robinson, Forrest G., 47, 48 Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, 129–31 Roden, Robert F., 90, 92 Roemer, Kenneth M., 32, 34 Room, Adrian, 34, 36 Roorbach, Orville A., 141 Rowell’s American Newspaper Directory, 200 Sader, Marion, 194, 195–96 Sadie, Stanley, 294 Salzman, Jack, 40, 41 Sattelmeyer, Robert, 40–41, 179–80 Saur, K. G., 222–23 scanning software, 217 Scharnhorst, Gary, 40–41, 87, 89 Schmidt, Mary Morris, 292 scholarly journals: author-specific, 123–29; general, 113–16, 129–32; genre-specific, 116–23; overview, 108–10, 132; period-specific, 110–13 Schultz, David E., 87, 89 Science Citation Index Expanded, 295 science resources, 294–95, 295–96 Scura, Dorothy McInnis, 87, 89 search engines. See Web search engines search interfaces, 73 search strategies. See online searches Sears List of Subject Headings, 56 Sebastian, Anton, 294 Selective Bibliography for the Study of English and American Literature., 104, 106 Serafin, Steven R., 20, 21 serial novels, 172–73 series, critical review, 158–59 series title searches, 55
315
short, short stories, 174 short stories, 174 short-story serials, 173 single-word search queries, 3–4 Sloan, William David, 207 Sloane, David E.E., 184, 185 Smith, David Lionel, 40, 41 Smith, Geoffrey, 149–50 Smith, Geoffrey D., 82, 86 Snodgrass, Mary Ellen, 36–37, 38–39 Social Sciences Citation Index, 295 Sociological Abstracts, 295–96 Sources on the History of Women’s Magazines, 1792–1960, 184, 186 Southern Writers, 36, 38 Spiller, Robert, 293 Stalker, Laura, 236, 239 Stallman, R. W., 87, 89 Statistical Abstract of the United States, 290 statistical sources, 289–90 Steiger, Ernst, 207–8 Stephen Crane, 87, 89 Stephen Crane, The Critical Heritage, 155, 158 The Stephen Crane Society, 271, 272 Stephen Crane Studies, 124, 126 Stern, Madeleine B., 163 Stokes, Roy Bishop, 135, 137 storiettes, 174 story papers, 177 Street and Smith’s Preservation and Access Project, 260, 268 Strickland, Michael R., 32, 33 Studies in American Fiction, 117, 121 Studies in American Humor, 117, 121 Studies in American Indian Literatures, 117, 120–21 Studies in American Naturalism, 109, 111–12 Studies in the Novel, 117, 122–23 subject searching, 56–60, 57, 58 Suggs, Henry Lewis, 202, 203 Summit, 65–66 symbols in searches, 8
316
Index
tags (in coding), 217–18 Tanselle, G. Thomas, 104, 105 Taylor, Linda J., 87, 89 Tebbel, John, 163 technology difficulties, 61–62 Text Encoding Initiative, 218 Thalia, 117, 122 theatre resources. See drama resources A Theodore Dreiser Encyclopedia, 46, 47 title catalog searches, 51–55 Titus, Edna Brown, 209 trade catalogs, 139–46 The Trade Circular and Publishers’ Bulletin, 146 The Trade Circular Annual for 1871, 143 Tripod, 65 truncation, 8–9 Turner, Jane, 292 Tuska, Jon, 37, 39 Twain, Mark, 46, 47, 48, 270, 271–72, 273 The Twainian, 124, 127 Twentieth Century Literature, 111, 113 Tyrrell, John, 294 Ulrich, Carolyn, 181, 182–83 Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory, 291 The Undergraduate’s Companion to American Writers and Their Web Sites, 275 The Undergraduate’s Companion to Women Writers and Their Web Sites, 275 Uniform Resource Locator (URL), 253 uniform titles, 54–55 The Uniform Trade List Circular, 142 union catalogs: individual compared to, 62; international, 67–72; local libraries, 65–66; national, 66–67. See also WorldCat Union List of Serials in the Libraries of the United States and Canada, 209 The United States Catalog, 140, 145–46
URL (Uniform Resource Locator), 253 Using Manuscripts & Archives, 236, 240 Verkler, Linda A., 148–49, 152 vocabulary resources, 41–46, 135–39 Vogel, Amber, 36, 38 Voice of the Shuttle, 254, 257 Voices of the Past, 201–2 Wagner-Martin, Linda, 22, 23–24 Walford’s Guide to Reference Resources, 290 Walter, Frank Keller, 136, 139 Walt Whitman, 154, 159 The Walt Whitman Archive, 271, 272 Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 124, 128 Ward, Carlton, 296 WATCH: Writers, Artists, and Their Copyright Holders, 248, 249 Weatherford, Richard M., 155, 158 Web browsers, 48–49 Web crawlers, 2 Web resources: advantages, 252; author sites, 270–72; books/periodicals for researching, 275–76; current awareness sources, 272–74; digital collections, 259–68; directories, 12, 254–59; discussion lists, 273–74; evaluating, 252–54; The Jungle example, 281–82, 284–85; ready reference, 268–70; relevance, 13 Web search engines, 2, 12–14 Websites for the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 254, 259 Web versus print resources, 48–49 Wells, Daniel A., 195 West, Cornel, 40, 41 Wharton, Edith, 270, 272 Whitman, Walt, 271, 272 Whitson, Kathy J., 34 Widget, Andrew, 33 Wikipedia, 268, 269
Index
wildcards, 8–9 The Willa Cather Archive, 271, 272 The Willa Cather Newsletter and Review, 124, 128–29 The William Dean Howells Society, 271, 272 Williams, Peter W., 293 Wilmeth, Don B., 22, 25 Wilson, H. W., 140, 145–46, 154, 161 Winship, Michael, 82, 83, 83–84 Witalec, Janet, 33, 34 Women’s Periodicals in the United States, 183, 186 women writers: bibliographies, 94; biographical sources, 32–33; encylopedias, 21–22, 23–24; magazines, 183, 184, 186; scholarly journals, 119–20; websites, 193–94, 197 The World Almanac and Encyclopedia, 290 World Biographical Index, 28–29 World Biographical Information System, 26, 28–29
317
WorldCat, 67–70, 209–10, 219, 221, 242, 243 WorldCat Local, 70–71 WorldCat.org, 67, 70, 71 World Wide Web Virtual Library History Central Catalogue, 254, 258 Worters, Garrance, 26, 28–30 Wright, John D., 42 Wright, Lyle, 149–50 Wright, Lyle H., 82, 85–86 Wright, Sarah Bird, 47, 48 Wright American Fiction, 220, 226–27 Wright American Fiction 1851–1875, 260, 263–64 WWW.History, 254, 258 Yahoo! Directory Search, 254, 255 The Year’s Work in English Studies, 103 Yellin, Jean Fagan, 90, 94 yellow journalism, 198 Young, Heartsill, 222 Zempel, Edward N., 148–49, 152 Zuckerman, Mary Ellen, 184, 186
About the Authors
Linda Stein is an associate librarian in the Reference Department of the University of Delaware Library. She is the selector for material related to theatre and English and American literature, and has published articles on library issues and collections. Peter Lehu earned his master’s degree in English at the University of Delaware and is now a reference librarian at the Parkway Central Library of the Free Library of Philadelphia.
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