Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (U of Chicago Press, 2001) is coming out in paperback in the fall and may be glimpsed at the U of Chicago Press web site: http:\\www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/14117.ctl. I am producing a scholarly edition of Austen's Northanger Abbey for the Cambridge University Press series of Austen's complete opus, and won a fellowship from the Bibliographical Society of America for a month in London this summer to research it. Also, I have forthcoming an essay on "Writers, Readers, Publishers, and the Professionalization of Literature" for the Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740-1830, ed. Tom Keymer and John Mee. In addition, I have forthcoming an edition of vol. 4 "John Wilkes and the Late Eighteenth Century" for Pickering and Chatto's 5-vol series of Eighteenth-century British Erotica, ed. Alex Pettit and Patrick Spedding. I just published "Publishing and Reading" for the Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry, ed. John Sitter (2000, pp) 63-82. I have a long essay on "Jane Austen and the Culture of Circulating Libraries: The Construction of Female Literacy" in Revising Women: Feminist Essays in Eighteenth-Century 'Women's Fiction' and Social Engagement, ed. Paula R. Backscheider (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 63-86, due out in paperback in the this fall. My essay on "Generating Genres: Anthologies and Literary History" for New Literary History, special issue Spring 2003, ed. Ralph Cohen.
Barbara M. Benedict, English, Trinity College, Hartford, CT 06106, tel: 860-297-2470 fax: 860-297-5258

Circulating Libraries in Eighteenth-Century France, and the Diffusion of Forbidden Books. This project is based on catalogues of circulating libraries in Paris, Lyon, Besançon, and on book orders of French booksellers to the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel.

• The diffusion of l'Histoire des deux Indes in America.
• Reading the news in the public sphere in 18th century France.
• Collecting newspapers and writing History in 18th century America.

Paul Benhamou, Foreign Languages and Literatures, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana benhamou@purdue.edu

My book, Forging Rousseau: Print, Commerce, and Cultural Manipulation in the Late Enlightenment, appears in the series "Studies on Voltaire and the 18th Century" (Oxford) in 2001. I currently am working on censorship in France, 1750-1789.
Raymond Birn, History, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon rbirn@oregon.uoregon.edu

Book Availability in Canada, 1750-1820, and the Scottish Contribution. The objectives of this study are threefold: to describe and analyse what reading material was available in Canada; to explain the business methods by which it was made available; and, to delineate by specific criteria the Scottish contribution to such availability. The study is the first to use newspaper advertisements, circulating library catalogues and business records to examine book availability, at the individual title level, in selected colonial Canadian towns. The primary research material is analysed by means of a customized database, the BOOKSCAN file, which includes bibliographic, business and geographic information in a single database. The principal findings question previous assumptions about the role of Scots in the early Canadian book trade. Scottish general merchants were frequently retailers of books in Canada, but Scottish publishers were not proactive in seeking Canadian markets and Scottish printers tended not to emigrate to Canadian towns in this early period, as they did to American centres. This study contributes new information to the book histories of both Scotland and Canada, and provides a methodological model for future comparative research. Recent articles include "Beyond Boundaries: Book Availability in the Canadian Northwest" in Across Boundaries: The Culture and Commerce of the Book, Bill Bell and Philip Bennett, eds. (Winchester: St. Paul Bibliographies, 1999, 91-115) and "Adventurous Merchants and Atlantic Waves: A Preliminary Study of the Scottish Contribution to Book Availability in Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1752-1810" in Myth, Migration and the Making of Memory: Scotia and Nova Scotia l700-1990.
Fiona A. Black, Library and Information Science, Dalhousie University, fiona.black@dal.ca

The Most Disreputable Trade: Publishing the Classics of British Poetry, 1765-1810. I am currently finishing a book on the poetical canon as commodity, which examines a dozen multi-volume poetry collections of a kind and scope never seen before this period. My purpose is to explore why these collections came into being when they did, what material form they took, how they were advertised and marketed by the publishers, and what ramifications they had for the construction of a national literature. Recent publication (a chapter from the book): "Patchwork and Piracy: John Bell's 'Connected System of Biography' and the Use of Johnson's Prefaces," Studies in Bibliography 48 (1995): 193-228.
Thomas Bonnell, English, Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, IN 46556 tbonnell@saintmarys.edu

The Afterlife of Character, 1726-1825, reconstructs "imaginative expansion," an array of eighteenth-century British reading practices devoted to the invention of further adventures for beloved literary characters including Gulliver, Falstaff, and Pamela. Far from being the final word on the subject, originary texts were treated by many readers as merely a starting point-a common point of reference, but one perpetually inviting augmentation through reader-generated sequels. In this book, I trace well over a hundred instances of imaginative expansion, ranging from the anonymous Memoirs Concerning the Life and Manners of Captain Mackheath (which provides a boyhood for the hero of The Beggar's Opera) to William Kenrick's Falstaff's Wedding, with a host of better known examples in between. Throughout, I focus upon the paradoxes inherent in these practices-lack stemming from plenitude, the privately owned being treated as if it were common to all-and show how these paradoxes reveal an entire constellation of more broadly held readerly assumptions about literature, publicity, and property, the traces of which still shape our experience of cultural community. Indeed, I contend that an investigation of imaginative expansion can substantially complicate and revise three of the most pressing issues in literary and historical study today: namely, the emergence of proprietary authorship, the processes by which canonical texts gain their canonicity, and the related practices through which virtual communities are invented.

The common element underpinning all of the reading practices which I group under the rubric of imaginative expansion is a shared fantasy of literary characters as fundamentally inexhaustible and hence available to all. Often they were figured as akin to the traditional village commons or other forms of what Carol Rose terms "inherently public property" in which use, rather than ownership, determines proprietary relationships. And like other forms of public property, characters became both more public and more desirable as they were used by more readers (that is, sent on further adventures invented by those readers). The textual commons-which intriguingly anticipates the literary canon-thus paradoxically stems from the proliferation of private claims upon the same artwork. Yet inventing public property through individual appropriations also involves imagining the individual appropriations of others and so imagining oneself as part of a public, a virtual community interested in the same things as oneself. These practices thus set up a feedback loop in which one practice reinforces another: characters came to seem more canonical and desirable as they came to seem more common and used by all, which in turn enhanced their value and publicity that much more. In tracing this phenomenon, then, I recast the eighteenth-century canon and public as in large part inventions "from below": the collective work of myriad individual readers, rather than the top-down imposition of various institutions. Pace John Guillory's influential analysis in Cultural Capital, these are first and foremost extra-curricular activities. My project also rewrites the stories we tell about the emergence of proprietary authorship in eighteenth-century Britain and shows how the period was not so much the "Age of Authors" (as Samuel Johnson and a host of recent historians would have it) as it was the age of perpetual negotiation between authors and readers over the fate of characters and hence control over the canon-making and community-inventing potential of imaginative expansion. Rather than presuming that the legal establishment of literary property and the increasing professionalization of authorship necessarily meant that authors were gaining ascendancy over readers, I detail the ways in which authors had to solicit and cajole readers into granting them the authority over their own creations that present-day readers tend to regard as self-evident.
David A. Brewer, English, The Ohio State University, brewer.126@osu.edu

Local Attachments: Geography, Gender and Print Culture in England's Provincial Towns, 1660-1788 explores the effects of the English "urban Renaissance" on women's writing in cities and towns throughout the nation, with a particular focus on the town of Bath. Part of this project appeared in the 1999 edition of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (volume 28).
Elizabeth Child, English, Trinity College, 125 Michigan Ave. NE, Washington, DC 20017 childe@trinitydc.edu.

I am currently working on a book project entitled Nation and Notation: Music, Gender, and National Identity in Ireland, 1727-1855. The book will examine the role of music in creating and contesting national identity in Ireland during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, paying particular attention to concerns regarding gender. In the eighteenth century, the attempt to use music as the basis of a distinct Irish national identity emerged as a response to the peculiar colonial situation in Ireland and thus in some sense reinforced colonial dynamics. At the same time, partly as a consequence of its embodiment of political struggle, music served variously to represent the irresolution haunting the inside edge of Britain. This book examines the effects of the growth of eighteenth-century print culture and nineteenth-century consumer capitalism on the production and consumption of Irish music, arguing that the emergence of a mass market for culture reconfigured the ambiguities already inherent in the discourse of Irish music. Nation and Notation also considers how issues of nationalism, colonialism and commodification inflect and are inflected by a politics of gender, in which, in the words of Ashis Nandy "political and socio-economic dominance symbolize[s] the dominance of men and masculinity over women and femininity" (Intimate Enemy, 4).
Leith Davis, English, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C. V5A 1S6

We are collaborating on a critical edition of André Morellet's Mémoires sur le dix-huitième siècle et sur la Révolution, to be published in book form and on the web by the Centre international d'Etude du XVIIIe Siècle at Ferney-Voltaire, France.
Kathleen Doig, French, Georgia State University kdoig@gsu.edu Dorothy Medlin, French, Winthrop University MEDLIND@winthrop.edu

Samuel Richardson: Printer and Novelist. The three volumes of Richardson's published commentary on Clarissa were published in 1998 by Pickering and Chatto. I have an introduction to Volume Three, The Collection of Moral and Instructive Sentiments (1755); Ann Jessie Van Sant has an afterward on sentiment. Currently, I am in the process of writing a book on Richardson's career as printer and relating that career to his surprising emergence as a "novelist." Together with Tom Keymer, Peter Sabor, and Al Rivero, I am working on the first scholarly edition of Richardson's complete correspondence. I have written articles on Samuel Richardson, Thomas Edwards (1699?-1757), and Richard Roderick (1710-56) for the New Dictionary of National Biography and am currently writing the articles for the same dictionary on Oliver Goldsmith and Conyers Middleton.
John A. Dussinger, English, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign dussinge@UIUC.EDU

The Extremity of the Times: Women and Jacobitism in British Literary Culture. This project examines Jacobite writing by women, including Jacobite writers, such as Jane Barker and Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, and women writers who were not Jacobites such as Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood, who occasionally wrote Jacobite pieces or employed Jacobite iconography in their writing. These writers and others produced texts in a wide variety of popular and elite genres and used diverse publication methods to reach their desired audiences. A shared discourse unites many of these texts, shedding light on the roles women played in Jacobitism and eighteenth-century political writing.
Leigh A. Eicke, English, Grand Valley State University Allendale, MI 49401 eickel@gvsu.edu

Printing from Gutenberg to the Present. My current project involves a book-length survey on Western attitudes toward printing from Gutenberg to the late twentieth-century.
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, University of Michigan (Emerita)

Subscription: A Study of the Eighteenth-Century American Book Trade is a book about publishing by subscription during the eighteenth century in what are now the United States.
Donald Farren, Independent researcher, Chevy Chase, Maryland dfarren@concentric.net

My book-in-progress is Rhetoric of Decency: Interrelativity Between Anglican Commemorative Sermons and the Impulse Toward Social Engineering in Mid-Eighteenth Century England and is due for circulation in fall 2002. Book chapter and collected essay, 'My Bold Voice': Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and Muzzeniegun or The Literary Messenger," at the publisher, fall 2001. For the New DNB, Oxford University Press, I have submitted profiles on Eliza K. Matthews and Elizabeth Sophia Tomlins (2002 publication date). Other recent articles include "Samson Occom And/In the Missionary['s] Position: Consideration of the Post Colonial Preacher." Special Issue of the INCS Conference, Yale 2000, The Wordsworth Circle 32.1 (Winter 2001): 14 - 20 and "George Lillo and the Victims of Economic Theory." Special Issue: English Drama, 1650-1760: A Critical Miscellany. Studies in the Literary Imagination. 32.2. (Winter 2000): 77 - 88. Projected fall and winter 2002 article submissions include, respectively, "Identity and Impact: Theological Import of the Lady Moyers Lectures" and "Her Mother's Daughter: Mary Catherine Charke Harmon and the Troupe of Comedians, 1775."
Polly Stevens Fields, English, Lake Superior University, Michigan pfields@gw.lssu.edu

Swift Poems Project. An edition and electronic archive of Jonathan Swift's poems. John Irwin Fischer, English, Louisiana State University
James Woolley, English, Lafayette College WOOLLEYJ@lafvax.lafayette.edu

The English Novel 1770-1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles. Vol. I 1770-79 (Oxford Universtiy Press, 2000). James Raven and Antonia Forster, with the assistance of Stephen Bending.
Antonia Forster, English, University of Akron forster@uakron.edu

The Strange and Dangerous Voyage of Captaine Thomas James: A New Edition and a Publication and Reception History. My doctoral dissertation involves the preparation of a new edition and a publication and reception history of a seventeenth-century exploration narrative, The Strange and Dangerous Voyage of Captaine Thomas James. The Voyage tells a truly marvelous tale: as one of its nineteenth-century readers suggests, there is nothing like it in the whole range of the early literature of the sea. Equally fascinating is the text's history: it has acquired a venerable and complex genealogy. The first edition of 1633 was followed by nine highly idiosyncratic editions. It was an influential document for the practitioners of the new science in the seventeenth century; it was reprinted in abridged form in dozens of works throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and it has been cited as a possible source for John Milton's Paradise Lost and as the main source for Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Most recently, The Voyage has functioned in the service of an emerging Canadian nationalism. Echoing its eighteenth-century history, it has been included in numerous anthologies of discovery and exploration which extol the achievements of early Canadians. My research is focused on demonstrating the impact of James's narrative on subsequent representations of the Canadian north, and thus its importance to post-colonial and Canadian studies. See as well my article,"'Steering Against the Tyde of Satan's Malice': The Strange and Dangerous Voyage of Captaine Thomas James." Northern Review 17 (1996): 85-96.
Colleen Franklin, English, University of Ottawa cmfrank@uottawa.ca

Anonymity and Authorship is a book-length project that investigates the cultural practice of anonymous and pseudonymous publication from the eighteenth century to the present. My general introduction to this topic was published by New Literary History (Autumn 1999). I have completed the editing of a collection of essays, The Faces of Anonymity, (Palgrave, forthcoming 2002); the contributors are Susan Lanser, Vincent Carretta, Margaret Ezell, Douglas Brooks, Leah Price, James Raven, Marcy North, Kristine Haugen, Susan Eilenberg, Holly Grant, and Brian McHale.
Robert J. Griffin, English, Tel Aviv University griffin@post.tau.ac.il

Periodical Literature in Eighteenth-Century America. This project examines the historical and cultural contexts for colonial and early national periodical writing and investigates the material processes which affected authors, editors, publishers, and readers from approximately 1720 to the end of the century. In addition to re-evaluating the intersection of history and literature in periodical writing and enhancing our understanding of the literary marketplace and the relationship between colonial and republican values, the collection seeks to reassess the relationship between canonical and non-canonical texts and to recover those works which have hitherto been neglected for various economic, political, and social reasons. Areas of investigation include the transatlantic contexts and roles of popular, sectarian, and foreign language magazines; readership or consumption and its influence on early editorial practices and magazine production; and lesser-known works of canonical authors as they relate to the changing canon and work by previously marginalized writers.
Sharon M. Harris, English, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE 68588-0333
Mark Kamrath, English, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL 32816-1346

Popular Views of the Body, Health, and Disease in American Almanacs, 1750-1850. My current project (my dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania, where I'm a doctoral candidate in history) examines the role of print in the dissemination of health information in America from 1750 to 1850, and how that role helped fashion popular views of the body, health, and disease. I will be looking at various genres of print, but concentrating primarily on the almanac.
Thomas A. Horrocks, Associate Director for Special Collections & Curator of Rare Books, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard University, thomas_horrocks@hms.harvard.edu

Reproducing the Novel: A Quantitative and Cultural Analysis of the Role of Circulating-Library Proprietors as Publishers of Eighteenth-century British Fiction. Using extant circulating-library catalogues as a representative sample of the books published in eighteenth-century Britain, this on-going project 1) recovers imprints for those fiction titles listed in the catalogues but not in ESTC and 2) compares the works of fiction published by people known to have run circulating libraries with those produced by other publishers according to the following criteria: a) gender and/or anonymity of author b) relative contemporaneity (e.g., how close the publication date of a book is to that of the catalogue in which it is listed). A preliminary report and justification of the project has been published as "Anonymous Signatures: Circulating Libraries, Conventionality, and the Production of Gothic Romances," ELH 62 (1995): 603-29. Further data is available in my Accidental Migrations: An Archaeology of Gothic Discourse (Bucknell UP, 2000).
Edward Jacobs, English, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia ejacobs@odu.edu

The Manufacturers of Literature: Writing and the Literary Marketplace in Eighteenth-Century Britain(Delaware, 2002) and George Justice and Nathan Tinker, eds., Women's Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550-1800 (Cambridge, 2002).
George Justice, English, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI; Visiting Louisiana State University, 2001-2002; (as of Fall 2002, University of Missouri-Columbia), gjusti1@lsu.edu

Swift, the Book, and the Book Trade. This recently completed dissertation examines Jonathan Swift and his works in the context of early eighteenth-century authorship. I focus on how Swift presents himself as an author through his three approved collections and a few of his major works, namely the Tale of a Tub volume (1704) and "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift" (1739). I also consider how others--publishers, editors, biographers, and reviewers--construct Swift as an author through the processes of collecting Swift and reacting to these collections. Recent publications include "Problems and Paratexts in Eighteenth-Century Collections of Swift" in Studies in the Literary Imagination, 32.1 (Spring 1999): 59-80.
Stephen Karian, English, University of Wisconsin-Madison sekarian@facstaff.wisc.edu

The British Music Trade in the Late Eighteenth Century. This project focuses on music publishing from about 1775 until about 1800, about which little has been written except in standard reference books. The study draws from a large body of archival material in the Public Record Office, London and from the Stationers' Company records, the Corporation of London Record Office, the Guildhall Library, and the British Library. In this project, I address several issues that have not been considered extensively. First, what is the relationship between eighteenth-century music- and bookselling? That is, did music-sellers train in the same ways that booksellers did, through apprenticeship under a member of the Stationers' Company, or did they belong to different organizations? Second, what are the copyright issues raised by music in the late eighteenth century, and how do they affect later developments in copyright law? Third, how did music-sellers carry on business? Specifically, what were their relations with composers, with each other, and with other music-sellers on the continent. Finally, what does this information contribute to our understanding of the market forces driving composers and librettists in the eighteenth century? The study will result in a book on the subject, which I will be writing over the next year.
Nancy A. Mace, English, United States Navel Academy mace@nadn.navy.mil

I am currently working on William Smith (1727-1803) and his cultural context. Educated at King's College, Aberdeen, Scotland, Smith was hired by Benjamin Franklin as Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres and the first Provost of the College of Philadelphia. During the 1750s, 60s, and 70s, Smith acted as a nexus between the literary production of his College students, the very active manuscript culture in Philadelphia and the Atlantic world in general, and the market for print publication. Smith was editor of The American Magazine (1757-58), which I will give a paper on at "Places of Exchange: Journals and Newspapers in British and Irish Culture," a conference held by the Department of English Literature at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, in July 2002. I have also spoken about Smith's work at conferences held by SHARP, the Rhetoric Society of America, the Northeast Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the MLA. My long-range plan is to situate Smith's editorial, belletristic, and rhetorical work in the context of his other life-long efforts: higher education, political propaganda, land speculation, and the promotion of Anglicanism.
Rodney Mader, English, West Chester University, rmader@wcupa.edu

Production Values: Writing, Working, and Gender in The English Print Trade, 1660-1760. This work in progress recovers the material contributions of a variety of print workers to the production of texts. Through close readings of narratives by these workers about their trade, I argue that readers of this period understood their texts to be the product of the collaboration of many hands, of which the writer was merely one among many. I then trace the struggle for textual agency that ensued as the discourse of author-as-owner slowly gained currency around the mid-eighteenth century, and evacuated print workers from the imagined scene of textual creation. In my analysis of the representations of the print trade's rights and responsibilities that circulated in this ideological struggle, I am particularly sensitive to the ways in which the terms and categories deployed rely on hierarchical and binary notions of sexuality and gender. Various chapters examine printers' manuals (Joseph Moxon, John Smith), biographies and autobiographies (such as John Dunton's), novels (Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Pamela II), legal documents from seditious libel trials, and descriptions of the role of women workers.
Lisa Maruca, Interdisciplinary Studies Program, Wayne State University Detroit, Michigan

The Publication History of Tobias Smollett's Complete History of England and its Continuation. Although my principal need is to produce a critical edition of these texts for the Georgia State University Press Edition of Smollett, I must necessarily also make sense of the printing history of these multi-volume works. The authoritative editions include some sold in three-sheet weekly or bi-weekly numbers (ten numbers to a volume). I am also working on A Descriptive Bibliography of the Works of Edward Young (1683-1765), published in English before 1776. Young's poetry, drama and prose were often reprinted and involve many publishers and printers, sometimes using false and incomplete imprints. Finally as the Printing and Bibliographic Studies Section editor for The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography, I ask for notice of relevant studies published outside the few major journals in English, and I ask for potential reviewers to send me a note on their areas of expertise.
James E. May, English, Penn State University at DuBois jem4@psu.edu

After 25 years, the Royal Holloway Computer Register of Musical Data in London Newspapers c. 1660 - c. 1750 is just about complete. There is still some proofreading that needs to be done and that has to be done slowly and carefully. The Register has been designed to facilitate interdisciplinary research of 18th-century scholars internationally by collecting and indexing in machine-readable form all references to any kind of musical activities in London newspapers 1660-1750. The database will make accessible a uniquely rich body of source material and will open up many avenues of investigation in the fields of urban, cultural, social and economic history: not least the complex issue of the means by which an urban society's musical taste was cultivated and transformed with time. The Register is intended as a research tool which will enable systematic scrutiny to be made of all the musical references in London newspapers 1660-1750. The accessibility of a large body of objective data taken from this source will generate the sorts of cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary dialogues that will necessarily lead to a more penetrating understanding of an important and unique urban centre. From another perspective, the Register offers to scholars in the humanities the possibility of studying how two linguistic forms, newspapers and music, interacted. The decoding of the signs and symbols of each, and the study of the ways they impacted on one another offer valuable insight into the way 18th-century cultural expression was manipulated to reflect and promote the interests of particular groups in London. And, of course, in covering such a long period, the Register will enable scholars to identify the main forces promoting change and those which made for stability. The Register will eliminate the present duplication of efforts and prevent the errors and omissions resulting from not being able to scrutinise all references over a broad, comprehensive span. It will give impetus to the possibility of studying music in an enlarged context and to alternative approaches, for example, to economic and social appraisals that will complement the more traditional biographical and stylistic studies; to a radical change not only in our knowledge of the position occupied by musical activity within the structure of English society but within the whole of Europe as well; to the provocation of a whole range of new insights which ultimately will lead back to a more precise understanding of the music itself; to the discovery of useful and interesting avenues of investigation, not least in a significant and under-researched area which is crucial to the spectrum of 18th-century culture--the field of publishing—-and at a time when large research effort is being devoted to bringing such research together; to the development of a methodology for analysing similar bodies of empirical data; to a careful scrutiny of the newspapers themselves as sources, their contents, language used and the effects of their interaction with music as a product; to the study of the different groups to whom newspapers appealed, differentiated as to their status, age and gender by examining the language used in the announcements or advertisements of musical events; and to the illumination of the cultural mechanisms by which newspapers promoted and/or reflected 18th-century tastes of music.
Rosamond [Corky] McGuinness, 23 Alma Street London NW5 3 DJ r.mcguinness@rhul.ac.uk or rmcguinnessuk@yahoo.com

Speaking Volumes: Women, Reading, and Speech in the Age of Austen (Stanford UP, 2002) examines (in part) the continuing importance of oral reading in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The book relies on evidence from sources including elocution texts, schoolbooks, diaries, and novels (especially those of Jane Austen). While not discounting the symbolic importance of the silent solitary reader, it explores how the oral performance of literature fostered middle-class domesticity and argues that reading aloud was understood as a way of practicing authoritative speech.
Patricia Howell Michaelson, Literary Studies, University of Texas at Dallas pmichael@utdallas.edu

Maureen E. Mulvihill (Princeton Research Forum, NJ) writes, "Acknowledging the fruits of a long and complex project, the North America and UK offices of the English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC) recently supplemented its five 'Ephelia' records (and its "Ephelia" authority record) to reflect my attribution to Mary Villiers, later Stuart, Duchess of Richmond & Lennox (1622-1685), the most highly-placed woman writer at the Stuart court and one of Van Dyck's most intriguing subjects. Also the forthcoming third edition of the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL 3), volume two, edited by Douglas Sedge (Exeter, UK), will include an updated Ephelia bibliography, reflecting essential work on the case since 1971. My updated "Ephelia" edition, including the newly-found presentation copy of "Ephelia"'s poem to Charles II on the Popish Plot (brs., p.p., 1679, with incipit woodcut device of Lady Mary and Charles), is forthcoming from Scolar/Ashgate, c. 2003. My first book, Poems by Ephelia (1992, 1993) is now in three special collections: The Grolier Club Library, NYC; the Berg Collection, NYPL; and the Chawton House Centre for the Study of Early English Women's Writing (Hampshire, UK). Her illustrated essay, "Sly Stuart Duchess: The Many Masks of Mary Villiers" will run in a 2002 issue of The Female Spectator (Chawton House, as above). Her webpage, BookTalk, for Textual Scholars & Editors, is hosted by Robert C. Evans, on his website, LitPage. Her extended profile of the l8thC Irish patriot printer, James Esdall, a protégé of George Faulkner, will appear in the forthcoming New DNB. She published five profiles in the new second edition of the Schlueters' Encyclopedia of British Women Writers (Rutgers UP, 1998). She also presented conference papers, at the annual meeting of the Society for Textual Scholarship (CUNY Grad. Ctr., NYC, 2001) on her new find in the Ephelia canon, mentioned above, with a table of six contemporary exhibits; and at the EC/ASECS Conference (Cape May, NJ, 2001), on l8thC Irish poet Mary Tighe, with four contemporary exhibits. She contributed to that conference's Natural History "Shells" Exhibition her copy of Horace Walpole's The Duchess of Portland's Museum ([1786]; fine press edition, Grolier Club, NYC, 1936). Margaret Cavendish Holles Harley Bentinck, Duchess of Portland, was a celebrated gentlewoman collector. For a color copy of the decorative exhibit label (a full sheet), contact mulvihill@nyc.rr.com. Mulvihill's recent reviews include "Ephebe: Extreme Beauty & the Seduction of Oscar Wilde" (Morgan Library, "Wilde" show, New York City), Irish Literary Supplement (spring, 2002); "New York City Remembers 'Bloody Sunday' (Derry, 1972)" (multimedia exhibition, International Center for Photography, NYC; and Ireland House panel, NYU), New Hibernia Review (Spring, 2002); "And We Shall Start the Bidding at $" (Robin Myers, ed., Under the Hammer: Book Auctions since the l7thC), SHARP News (autumn, 2002); reviews of Harold Love's Restoration Verse and Carol Barash's English Women's Poetry (Scriblerian, autumn, 2002); and "Dublin's Inky Brotherhood, 1550-1800" (Mary Pollard's Dictionary of the Dublin Book Trade), Irish Literary Supplement (Fall, 2002). Finally, she has signed on with Women's Writing (Triangle Journals Ltd., Oxford) as its Indexer (early English & Irish women writers) for two listservs launched by Kevin Berland: C18-L and Éire 18-L.
Maureen Mulvihill, Princeton Research Forum, NJ, 301 No. Harrison St., Suite 222, Princeton, NJ 08540. Correspondence to Residence, 1 Plaza, Brooklyn, NY 11217 mulvihill@nyc.rr.com

Naming God's Creatures: Women Authors of Language Teaching Texts in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries will contextualize the works of such authors as Ann Fisher, Anna Barbauld, Lady Eleanor Fenn. It is a development from my earlier articles "Paradigms for their sex? Women's grammars in late eighteenth-century England", Histoire, epistemologie, langage 17 (1994) and "Paradigms Lost: Bishop Lowth and the `Poetic dialect'", Neophilologus 81/1 (1997). My second project, Periodical Reviews and the Rise of Prescriptivism, surveys the role of book reviewers in the rise of standard English and of an ideology of standard English. SSHRCC has generously funded the compilation of a very large database now containing records of relevant reviews spanning 1749-1789 from the Monthly Review and the Critical Review. A book-length study is focussing on individual reviewers and their opinions about and attitudes towards the English language and its users, especially such `marginal' groups as women and sailors. This project is a development from my case studies of Captain Cook's language and authorship, in articles in English Studies, English Historical Linguistics 1992, and Pacific Studies.
Carol Percy, English, New College, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, M5S 3J6 cpercy@chass.utoronto.ca

The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge UP, 2000) brings together two traditionally antagonistic fields, book history and narrative theory, to challenge established theories of the "rise of the novel." Price argues that far from leveling class or gender distinctions as has long been claimed, the novel has consistently located them within its own audience. Shedding new light on Richardson and Radcliffe, Scott and George Eliot, this book asks why the epistolary novel disappeared, how the book review emerged, why eighteenth-century abridgers marketed their books to women while Victorian publishers repackaged them for men, and how editors' reproduction of old texts has shaped authors' production of new ones. This provocative book will change the way we think not just about the history of reading, but about the genealogy of the canon wars, the future of intellectual property, and the role that anthologies play in our own classrooms. I am now working on a book about the literary representation (and non-representation) of secretaries from Edgeworth to the present.
Leah Price, English, Harvard University lprice@fas.harvard.edu

Several projects have come to fruition: The English Novel 1770-1832, the two volume bibliography of British fiction for the Romantic period, together with descriptive, introductory essays, was published in 2 volumes by Oxford UniversityPress. The CPBT Conference Print for Free was published by Ashgate Press under the title Free Print: Non-Commercial Publishing Since 1700 with 12 different essays by well-known historians and literary scholars. My work on the transatlantic book trade (first offered in a short chapter in the History of the Book in America, vol. 1, ed, Amory and Hall), is about to be published by the Univ. of South Carolina Press as London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, and, most importantly, the Oxford-based project "Mapping the Print Culture of Eighteenth-Century London" continues apace with its website now set up and the mapping of the central Paternoster Row and St Paul's Churchyard area completed, with much work now continuing on Fleet Street. We revived our Oxford seminar on this year; and associated with this and the CPBT is a series of one-day conferences, the first of which were Publishing and the Law, Sept 2001 in London, and a day's colloquium on the Novel, Jan 12 2002, Cambridge.
James Raven, Mansfield College, Oxford University and Director of the Cambridge Project for the Book Trust jr42@cus.cam.ac.uk

A major revision of the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (CBEL3). The original CBEL appearedin the 1950s, and was then expanded and revised to create the now more familiar NCBEL, published in the 1970s. Of course, literary study has continued to explode the canon and new finding aids have made the selected critical readings of the earlier volumes somewhat redundant. As a result, Cambridge University Press has embarked on the third edition of the CBEL, known affectionately as CBEL3. The nineteenth-century volume was published last year, edited by Joanne Shattock, and volumes for all the other periods are in process. Under the new structure, the eighteenth century will receive its own volume, number 3, and will be separated from the Restoration (to be covered in vol. 2--1500-1700). Shef Rogers has agreed to serve as editor of the volume and would like to invite you to compile an entry for your favourite author, or even consider editing a thematic section, such as 'Literary Studies' or 'Religion'. CBEL3 will eliminate the invidious distinction between major and minor authors, acknowledging the greater openness of the idea of 'literature' at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In order to accommodate the many new authors to be listed, CBEL3 will remove post-1920 criticism (except for studies of the textual history of an author's works) and add to each entry references to contemporary reviews. For more information, visit the introductory web site or email: shef.rogers@stonebow.otago.ac.nz.
Shef Rogers, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand shef.rogers@stonebow.otago.ac.nz

`Building on Public Approbation': Women Novelists in the Mid-Eighteenth Century Literary Marketplace examines the publishing careers of five accomplished mid-eighteenth-century women writers: Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Fielding, Frances Sheridan, Sarah Scott, and Frances Brooke. These writers have been recuperated primarily as novelists, although they published in a wide range of genres; the latter four in particular have been categorized as modest, conservative, and imitative of Richardson. In order to address the limitations of current models for women's literary history of the mid-century which rely on the binary of gendered public and private spheres, this study approaches these writers as a series of case studies for alternative readings of authors and works. These alternatives take into account these writers' long-term publishing strategies, their active engagement in both the literary marketplace and contemporary professional circles,and the factors of status, social connections, geography, and education which arguably interpenetrate with gender to influence authorial positioning and career trajectory. My second project, The Eighteenth-Century Sequel, examines the eighteenth-century sequel as a phenomenon that illustrates the complex forces constituting early English print culture. Appearing immediately and frequently with the rise of this print culture, the sequel stands at the point of intersection of the professionalizing author, an enlarging and heterogeneous consumer audience, and the developing mechanisms of a literary marketplace. The study moves through a series of concentric circles: it begins by mapping the generic location and frequency of sequels in the period;then traces the use of sequel reviews to articulate developing notions of authorship; examines authors' representations of their own sequels; and finally focuses in detail on the stories of several sequels to illustrate the author-text-audience dynamic which produced them.
Betty A. Schellenberg, English, Simon Fraser University

The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and the Book Trade in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America. This book focuses on the relationships of authors and publishers in the Scottish Enlightenment, considered as an international phenomenon. It focuses particularly at the roles of Andrew Millar, William and Andrew Strahan, and Thomas Cadell, Sr., in London, and William Creech in Edinburgh, in publishing the works of David Hume, William Robertson, Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie, Hugh Blair, and many other leading Scottish authors of the second half of the eighteenth century. It also examines the processes by which these and other books were reprinted in Dublin and Philadelphia during the late eighteenth century.
Richard B. Sher, History, NJIT/Rutgers-Newark sher@njit.edu

Novel Entitlements: Titles, Property, Law, and the Making of the English Novel. This project takes as its departure point the title's coming of age in the eighteenth century. During this period the title acquired its modern roles as a legal, a commercial, and an aesthetic agent. Linking the early English novel's thematic fascination with property to developments in titling practices, to the commercialization of the book, and to changes in laws regulating property, this work uses the concept of property to examine the making of the English novel as a genre. Selections of this project appear in several recent articles in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (volume 28), Book History 2 (1999), and Eighteenth-Century Fiction (July 1999).
Eleanor F. Shevlin, English, West Chester University; correspondence: 2006 Columbia Road, NW Apt. 42 Washington, DC 20009 eshevlin@wcupa.edu

Volume One of the History of the Book in America has been published. I am currently writing a book with Fredrika Teute about the republican court (Martha Washington's continental network of salons radiating from her Friday drawing room), which pays attention to the disposition for non-printed forms of publicity among elite women in the early republic. I now edit the journal Early American Literature and welcome submissions on history of the book topics.
David Shields, American Literature, The Citadel, Charleston, South Carolina SHIELDSD@Citadel.edu

A CD-ROM Subject Index to Pre-1800 British Periodicals. The first stage of a "CD-ROM Subject Index to Pre-1800 British Periodicals" is based upon an unpublished 80,000 index-card file compiled by the late James M. Osborn of Yale at the British Library and the Bodleian Library during the mid-1930s. Osborn's index reflects the subject content of full runs of 156 periodical titles published between 1673-1800. Tierney has expanded Osborn's standard seven-field references to over forty fields, including such other data as editors, publishers, printers, sellers, genre, price, days of appearance, translations, reprints, as well as a keywords field to facilitate optimal searching of the data base. At present, indexes for seventy-three periodicals have been entered into the computer data base that is scheduled for publication on CD-ROM. For assistance in research into secondary literature, Professor Tierney would welcome receiving offprints/copies of all publications or talks on any aspect of pre-1800 British periodicals or newspapers.
James E. Tierney, English, University of Missouri-St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri 63121

The Book in the Colonial South. Cal Winton is currently working on a project entitled "The Book in the Colonial South." His essay on this topic is a chapter in the first volume of A History of the Book in America, sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society and recently published by the Cambridge University Press. The book is an expansion of the topic; the focus of both chapter and book project is on the physical production and transmission of the printed word, with emphasis on the history of printing in the region.
Calhoun Winton, English, University of Maryland, College Park cw41@umail.umd.edu

Social Circulation of Historical Knowledge. Current research interests include a book on the social circulation of historical knowledge; recently published, Reading History in Early Modern England, (Cambridge, 2000), a book on the readership of history and the circulation of history books between the early sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries; and a separate project concerned with women's relations to the writing and reading of history from 1500-1800.
Daniel Woolf History and Dean, Faculty of Humanities, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario L8S 4L9 woolfd@mcmaster.ca