2007 Summer Seminar
Re-Reading the Early Republic: From Crèvecoeur to Cooper
June 18-22, 2007
Seminar Director
~ Wayne Franklin
Visiting Faculty
~ Lance Schachterle
~ Jeffrey Walker
~ David Whitesell
About the Seminar
"Re-reading the Early Republic" will explore the expansion of the press as
an element in American public culture from the end of the Revolution to
1830. This was a period of remarkable growth in both the number and
nature of items published and in the role of the press in public life.
Paying particular attention to the practices of textual production as
these evolved across the five decades, we shall be concerned with three
key issues: 1) authorial practices -- how writers conceived and produced
their texts as both intellectual constructs and material artifacts; 2)
printing and publishing practices -- how texts moved from manuscript to
print
and then to and through the market; and 3) reading practices -- how books
were owned and understood by individual readers, as well as how they were
handled in and by the periodical press. To focus these concerns, we shall
look at a trio of examples from the period. The first is provided by the
French émigré essayist St. Jean de Crèvecoeur: we shall consider how he
wrote and organized Letters from an American Farmer (1782) and its
associated texts (both the so called Sketches of Eighteenth-Century
America and the "Agricola" papers, as well as the two vastly expanded
French "translations" of Letters), and how parts of these texts
were re
circulated in the American periodical press. The second example centers
on how the various texts penned by members of the Lewis and Clark
Expedition in 1803-1806 were edited and altered as they began to make
their way into print, especially how the key contemporary record of
expedition, the 1814 Paul Allen Nicholas Biddle History, shaped
immediate
public understanding of the Louisiana Territory. The third example
centers on the immensely popular fiction of James Fenimore Cooper, whose
authorial practices from 1820 to 1830 were experimental both conceptually
and in terms of how they were produced for Cooper's growing public in the
United States and abroad. This part of the seminar will make special use
of the riches in the Antiquarian Society's Cooper collection, including
manuscripts of various published works, correspondence with his literary
agents and publishers, and other documents. Finally, since all three of
these examples from the period have undergone exhaustive re editing in the
past thirty years, we shall ask how modern editorial treatment of texts
alters the way in which an earlier period is -- and should be -- read and
understood. Our primary reading will be Letters from An American
Farmer
and Sketches of Eighteenth Century America, ed. Albert E. Stone, Gary
E.
Moulton's Definitive Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition
(both
on-line and the one volume abridgement), and the Cooper edition's version
of The Red Rover, ed. by Thomas and Marianne Philbrick.
The deadline for applications has passed. The selection committee
will meet in late March and letters will be mailed by the end of March.
The fee for the seminar is $695, which includes tuition, selected course
materials, two dinners, and five lunches. A limited amount of financial
aid is available. Preference for assistance will be given to first-time
AAS summer seminar attendees.
Housing
A block of rooms, at the reduced rate of $112 per night, are available at
the
Worcester Courtyard by Marriott,
72 Grove Street,
Worcester, MA 01605.
Reservations must be made by June 2, 2007, to receive this rate.
To make a reservation please use the
Courtyard
Worcester's Summer Seminar page or
call
1-508-363-0300 and mention that you are
coming in with the American Antiquarian Society "Summer Seminar" group
(reservation code ASM).
Contact Information
- For more information about the seminar in general and about the
seminar program in particular, contact Joanne Chaison
(jchaison[at]mwa.org;
508-471-2150).
- For questions related to logistics, contact Cheryl
McRell (cmcrell[at]mwa.org; 508-471-2149).
About the Seminar Director
Wayne Franklin, professor of English and American
Studies at the University of Connecticut, is the author of several studies
of early American literature and culture, including Discoverers,
Explorers, Settlers (Chicago, 1979) and The New World of James
Fenimore Cooper (Chicago, 1982). His editorial experience is
extensive; he has edited the pre-1700 section of the Norton Anthology
of American Literature since 1990, and is the founding editor of the 25-volume American Land and
Life series (Iowa, 1990-present). He has been at work since 1993 on a
definitive biography of James Fenimore Cooper, the first volume of which
will be published by Yale University Press early in 2007.
Wayne Franklin will also deliver the 25th annual James Russell Wiggins
Lecture in the History of the Book in American Culture on Thursday, June
21, 2007, at 5:30 p.m. His talk, entitled "Financing America's First
Literary Boom," is based upon his forthcoming book, James Fenimore
Cooper: The Early Years, which will be published by Yale University
Press in May,
2007. Further details about the Wiggins lecture will be available in the
spring.
About the Visiting Faculty
Lance Schachterle is Associate Provost at
Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His work as a Cooper scholar includes
co-editing the
CSE-approved scholarly texts of The Pioneers (1980), The
Deerslayer
(1987), and The Spy (2002), as well as several articles on textual
issues
in all three books. In 2002, Schachterle succeeded Kay Seymour House as
Editor-in-Chief of "The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper," in which role
he created a Web site (www.wjfc.org) and is arranging for publication of
several more volumes. He is currently working with James Sappenfield and
Barbara Bordalejo on a digitial edition of The Bravo. Recent
publications
include "Prospects for the Study of James Fenimore Cooper," RALS 30 (2006)
and "A Long False Start: The Rejected Chapters of Cooper's 'The Bravo'
(1831," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 115
(2006).
Jeffrey Walker, Associate Professor of English at Oklahoma State University, teaches
courses in American literature, textual editing, and film. He has
published a critical study of the Revolutionary War poet and traitor
Benjamin Church (1982); authored essays on undergraduate literary culture
in eighteenth-century America; co-edited (with Lance Schachterle and James
Elliott) the CSE edition of The Spy (2002); edited a collection of
nineteen essays Reading Cooper, Teaching Cooper (2007). He is
completing
an edition of Cooper's unpublished letters and preparing a collection of
new essays on the Leather-Stocking Tales. With Matthew Sivils, he has
started a new journal for the period, Literature in the Early American
Republic, whose inaugural issue is scheduled to appear in 2008. A
senior
Fulbright lecturer in Norway and Belgium, he has won awards for
outstanding graduate teaching and graduate student mentoring.
David Whitesell joined AAS last summer as
Curator of Books, before which
he was Rare Book Cataloger at Harvard University's Houghton Library.
Since 1998 he has taught descriptive bibliography at the University of
Virginia's Rare Book School, and he is presently Secretary of the
Bibliographical Society of America. His wide-ranging publications in
bibliography, book history, and textual studies include First
Supplement
to James E. Walsh's Catalogue of the Fifteenth-Century Printed Books in
the Harvard University Library, "Thomas Jefferson and the Book Arts,"
"Fredson Bowers and the Editing of Spanish Golden-Age Drama," and
"Quixotic Typography: Special Letterpress Fonts for Setting Maps and
Illustrations." At present he is completing a catalog of the early
Harvard College Library volumes which survived the 1764 fire.
|
~ Cost
~ Application
~ Housing
~ Contact Information
~ Directions to AAS
~ About the seminar director
~ About the visiting faculty
~ 2007 Syllabus
~ Previous summer seminars
The deadline for applications has passed. The selection committee
will meet in late March and letters will be mailed by the end of March.
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