LYDIA WEVERS (Victoria University - Wellington) will speak at Rutgers:

Thursday, 9 December, 4:30 p.m. (Pane Room, Alexander Library)

Tattered favorites: Reading America in the New Zealand bush

Imagine a glass bookcase. You expect tooled leather, gilt lettered spines,
burnished with age and careful handling, clean and crisp. Instead the 2000
books of the Brancepeth Station Library conform to Amy Cruse's description
of the Victorian family's 'tattered favourites', passed from hand to hand,
torn, stained and filled with reader debris-annotations, crumbs, dripped
wax, spilled tea, pressed flowers, sketches, lists, mud, insects and,
once, a half smoked cigarette. What Robert Darnton has called the 'where'
of reading, often overlooked by book historians, is vividly present in
these Victorian novels used by the working population of a New Zealand
sheep station in the 1890s. Reading, as many schloars have noted, is an
elusive history. Damaged books are thrown away, readers move to the next
book leaving only anonymous traces of their present. But the Brancepeth
library, used in a particular place by particular group of people, has
never been dispersed, and the books remain as tattered testimony of the
tastes, behaviors and opinions of their long-dead readers. H.J.Jackson's
analysis of marginalia as a shared system of codes of communication
applies to these books that circulated within a bounded readership, and to
some extent they refute Jonathan Rose's recent claim that the only pattern
in marginalia is no pattern, showing not only the dialogic relationship
between reader and text, but also the social world in which readers lived.
One of the readers had what Greg Dening has called 'performance
consciousness', leaving tracks of his reading through the collection and
also enacting his complex social identity. 88 % of the Brancepeth library
is fiction and most of it is colonial editions of Victorian novels, but
the largest non-British component (just under a tenth) is American. What
American fiction did New Zealand working men like to read and how do their
reading choices illuminate their social colonial world?


This talk is co-sponsored by the School of Communication and Information
and RUTGERS SEMINAR IN THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK 2010-2011

More about this talk and RUTGERS SEMINAR IN THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK
2010-2011 events and directions at:
http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/book_history/RSHOB_2010-2011.html


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Marija Dalbello
Associate Professor
School of Communication and Information
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