Serendipities

Stuart Clark’s Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford University Press, 2007) had been waiting for me on my bookshelf for a while, and this week I finally got round to it. It was a great read. Vanities of the Eye is a wonderfully erudite book, teeming with information and original ideas about the changing perception of the sense of vision in early modern culture.

The book argues that contrary to what theories of the rationalization of sight and the invention of perspective suggests, vision came to be characterized by unreliability and uncertainty in the early modern period. As Stuart Clark puts it with a pun: “It is as though European intellectuals lost their optical nerve.” Read the rest of this entry »

The online library catalogue at Utrecht University not only has a design homepage to go with their cool design building. It has also just integrated Library Thing into their catalogue. When you look up a book, the search results come with a set of tags from Library Thing users, as well as a list of related books based on the Library Thing data:

Read the rest of this entry »

This is what’s waiting for me on my desk:

• William Germano, From Dissertation to Book (Chicago University Press, 2005)
• William Germano, Getting It Published (Chicago University Press, 2001)
• Beth Luey, Handbook for Academic Authors (fourth edition, Cambridge UP, 2002)
• Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunato, Thinking Like Your Editor (W. W. Norton, 2002)
• William Zinsser, On Writing Well (Collins, 2006)
• Richard A. Lanham, The Longman Guide to Revising Prose (Longman, 2006)

You guessed it — it’s time to revise my dissertation for publication. People at the ESSHC conference in Lissabon kept asking me where my thesis was published. Their interest really motivated me to take some action in that department.

I read Germano’s From Dissertation to Book while I was waiting for my delayed plane on the Lisbon airport, and I decided that I need to do what he calls a “deep revision” to turn my dissertation into a publishable book. I need to make my chapters more lucid, strengthen my line of argument, speak more in my own voice instead of that of other critics, and get rid of excess block quotes.

Germano’s book suggests that I don’t contact a publishing house quite yet. He recommends revising the book first, so that I am ready to send it out if a publisher reacts positively to my book proposal. So that is my plan of action now: revise first, then write a brilliant book proposal to sell my Wild Justice: The Dynamics of Gender and Revenge in Early Modern English Drama to a publisher in England or the United States. Ah yes, I probably need a snappier subtitle too.

All practical advice on how to go about turning a dissertation into a published book is greatly welcome!

I just came across a great website on early modern culture — Appositions: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture. It just hosted the ‘first-ever, fully electronic conference in the field of Renaissance and early modern literary and cultural studies.’ As far as I understand, this electronic conference will result in an online journal later this year. The editor is W. Scott Howard, the editorial advisor is Matthew Steggle, of EMLS fame.

The papers of the conference are online now, and among them I found one on early modern translations of classical literary texts about vindictive women (a subject I also looked at in my PhD thesis): Katherine Heavey’s “Translating Medea into the Sixteenth Century“(scroll down the page for the article).

Heavey shows that the figure of Medea attracted and inspired many early modern authors, but their fascination holds a paradox. As a woman, a witch and a pagan with little regard for partriarchal institutions, Medea evoked anxieties. In a lucid analysis, Heavey demonstrates how the sixteenth-century translators Richard Robinson, Arthur Studley [that should be John], George Whetstone, Arthur Golding and George Turberville all attempt to contain the subversive powers of this powerful female figure:

Male authors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries deal with her threat by undermining her autonomy, making her more personally vulnerable, penitent or subject to the consequences of her actions. In doing so, they highlight, intentionally or unintentionally, the frictions and conflicts that the Renaissance Medea engenders frictions between male and female, society and the ‘other’, and between classical rendering and Renaissance rewriting.

Also interesting in Appositions (besides many more papers) is Event B: a wiki of “Renaissance /early modern keywords that undergo significant shifts in meaning during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” I think this is an interesting idea — especially if the entries became less OED-based than they are now, and more like short articles.

On a different note: Inkhorn read all of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and lived to tell the tale. Congratulations!