Published in PBSA 108.4. Began as the annual address to the Bibliographical Society of America in 2014; also given as the Mann Lecture at Penn State and at RBS in Charlottesville. Inspired, of course, by D. F. McKenzie’s great paper, “Printers of the Mind.”

This article gives a brief biographical sketch of Iseult Gonne, daughter of Irish activist Maud Gonne and wife of the Irish author Francis Stuart. It also describes and analyzes her relationship with the poet W.B. Yeats, who once proposed to her, and discusses her role in several of Yeats’s poems, including “To a Child Dancing in the Wind.” The…[Read more]

Poets and scholars are all wrong about the villanelle. While most reference texts teach that the villanelle’s nineteen-line alternating-refrain form was codified in the Renaissance, the scholar Julie Kane has conclusively shown that Jean Passerat’s “Villanelle” (“J’ay perdu ma Tourterelle”), written in 1574 and first published in 1606, is the only…[Read more]

This chapter explores an early instance of the use of a course blog in an upper-level undergraduate literature course, including the challenges faced by both students and instructor.

This chapter explores the Infinite Summer reading project, in which a group of bloggers read and discussed David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in dialogue with one another and with a wide readership, arguing that such social reading projects present the potential for developing crucial kinds of ethical human connection (of which the novel depicts…[Read more]