SCRIBBLING WOMEN

Frontispiece of Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals, by Louisa May Alcott, edited by Ednah D. Cheney. Boston: Robert Brothers, 1890. Via the Internet Archive / public domain. Link. Louisa May Alcott was a prolific writer in her day, best known for her work Little Women.  This novel, published in 1868, is hardly … Continue reading Preservation vs. Accessibility in the Digital Life of Louisa May Alcott’s “The Brothers”

With the recent adaptation of her novel Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s work has grown in popularity during the past few months. However, this popularity is not novel as Alcott’s work has had a consistent readership for many years, as is evidenced by this digital surrogate of her poem “Thoreau’s Flute”. Title page of 1950 … Continue reading Between Public and Private: The Publications of Louisa May Alcott’s poem “Thoreau’s Flute”

When we read “The Indian Wife” by Lydia Maria Child on the Google Books digital surrogate, it was still early in the semester and I had not fully grasped the implications of reading archival texts online versus in a physical form, let alone comparing different online formats of these writings. Screenshot of "The Indian Wife" … Continue reading Through Crinkles and Splotches: the Experience of Reading an Excellent Digital Surrogate

In an increasingly virtual world, especially with Coronavirus spreading all over the globe, a reader is able to search a text with a few keystrokes. From e-texts to digital surrogates, the internet is a library at your fingertips. Edith Wharton’s collection of stories Xingu is an example of this library at work. A digital surrogate … Continue reading A Library at Your Fingertips

Portrait of Sojourner Truth by Randall Studio, Restored by Coffeeandcrumbs via Wikimedia I’ve always just assumed that Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I A Woman” speech was a direct call out of the hypocrisy of the primarily white feminist movement at the Seneca Falls Convention. The phrase “ain’t I a woman” is juxtaposed with a section of … Continue reading The Truth about Sojourner Truth

Characterizing the collection of an author’s works is often more complicated than assembling a bibliography of their publications in periodicals and different editions of their books. For one thing, the context in which the author wrote the first editions (and in which subsequent editions were published) must be considered when a text is studied. Documents … Continue reading In which I argue that all texts about Emily Dickinson are about Emily Dickinson

Google Books, 'Hospital Sketches and Camp and Fireside Stories,' https://www.google.com/books/edition/Hospital_Sketches/velHAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0. Accessed 14 May 2020. ***** When I was younger, I used to take out stacks upon stacks of books from my public library. I loved the feel of a book in my hands, and I would leave my own little physical mark on it by dog-earring the pages … Continue reading Using a digital surrogate of Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Hospital Sketches’ as a micro survey of its readership and history

Zitkála-Šá, also known as Gertude Simmons Bonnin, was a Native American writer and political activist who was one of the first authors to bring traditional Native American stories to a widespread English-speaking readership. She is widely noted as one of the most influential Native American activists of the 20th century and is highly regarded for her … Continue reading Debating Accessibility: Digital Surrogate versus E-Text of “American Indian Stories” by Zitkála-Šá

Hathitrust Digital Library, digitized copy of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” from The New England Magazine 1891-92, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924080769783&view=1up&seq=655. Accessed 12 May 2020. First published in The New England Magazine in 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” is considered a seminal work of American feminist literature. The semi-autobiographical story is narrated by an unnamed woman whose physician husband has prescribed … Continue reading Mirror, Mirror on the Wall-Paper: Reflecting on a Digital Surrogate of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Seminal Story