Dr Milan Terlunen presents PromPrint’s early findings in Canada and the U.S.
Having joined the PromPrint team in September, I gave my first presentations on our research in November and January.
November took me to Washington DC for the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) conference. The conference theme was "Aftermaths", and I gave a presentation titled "The Poetry the Victorians Rejected: Archival Data, Non-Preservation and the Anti-Canon" as part of a panel on "Canonical Aftermaths". We'd just produced our very first dataset on missing books a week earlier - thanks, Nic! - so it felt like a big milestone to share these preliminary results. Curiously, it seems like canonical poets like Coleridge and Browning were preserved *less* often in the archives than lesser-known poets publishing their first collections. Perhaps librarians felt they already had those canonical poets covered in earlier editions? This data only covered the National Library of Scotland in 1863, so I'm curious if this pattern will hold for other libraries and other years.
The panel also included fascinating presentations by Natalie Houston, Casie LeGette and Veronica Alfano, who examined various ways that anthologies can make, preserve and sometimes drastically reshape the canon of Victorian poetry. The audience's questions about PromPrint focused on the rising volumes of print across the 19th century and the circulation of books in British colonies.
Among the presentations I attended, a particular highlight was Priyanka Jacob's "Book-Cemeteries, Kitchen-Middens, and the Dream of Long-term Storage". Did you know that Prime Minister William Gladstone fantasised about creating an underground "cemetery" where books would be buried for future generations to unearth? That didn't happen, but like the legal deposit libraries we're studying for PromPrint it speaks to anxieties about preserving - and losing - books.
Highlights of the food I ate included a Louisiana-style crawfish boil that stained my fingers orange but was absolutely worth it.
Then, in early January, I headed to Toronto for the Modern Language Association (MLA) conference. I gave a presentation titled "Ghost Books: Digital Methods for Studying Absences in Legal Deposit Libraries", covering some newer results we'd generated in December, for a panel on "Literature and the Archive". Helpful responses from the audience touched on the potential multilingual dimensions of the research as well as the working conditions of legal deposit librarians.
Also on the panel were Amber Bal, who explored the mix of fact and fiction in letters written about Senegal by French colonial powers in the 19th century, and Cristina Vatulescu, who examined fragments of literary works that appeared in the Romanian secret police records. The panel was expertly organised and run by Julia Elsky on behalf of the European Regions forum.
Later in the conference, I also gave a second presentation titled "Plot Twist! Surprising Bodies, Surprised Minds in Nineteenth-Century French Fiction" on research I did before joining PromPrint.
Among the sessions I attended at MLA, the standout was one on "Public Canons". The scholars Alexander Manshel, Laura McGrath, Melanie Walsh and Tess McNulty discussed a range of canons that exist far beyond university literature departments, from high-school classrooms and the world of non-fiction publishing to alt-right communities and mainstream social media platforms. Since one of PromPrint's aims is to understand how canons form and persist within institutions and communities, I found all these talks especially inspiring.
Culinary highlights: I was staying near the historic St. Lawrence food market, so I stopped by several times for sweet treats and snacks, including the "peameal bacon" sandwich. The other big discovery was a Canadian delicacy called butter tart - I sampled several, and the best was one my friend Justin brought me from Bà Nội. Recommended for anyone visiting Toronto!