We are pleased to announce that LiteracyStudies@OSU will host Piers Brown as part of the program's History of the Book Series at the university's Humanities Institute (104 E. 15th Ave.), on Monday, November 9th, at 4:00 PM. Brown will deliver a lecture titled "Ordering Poetry in Manuscript and Print: England's Hellicon and Davison's Poetical Rhapsodie":
What can book history tell us about how to read the order of poetry collections? It's particularly problematic question, because while we know that compilers of early modern poetic miscellanies cared about the order of their works, we have little or no information about the actual processes of arrangement. As a result, it is easy to confuse intention with accident when interpreting the juxtaposition of poems. In this talk, I revisit Davison's manuscript notes for the poems by A. W. that appear in the Poetical Rhapsodie, and ask what they tells us about his editorial organization of the first edition of 1602, especially when compared to the contemporary miscellany, England's Hellicon (1600), the later print editions of the Rhapsodie (1608, 1611, 1621). I will argue that Davidson's collection offers an opportunity to distinguish between the carefully wrought appearance of disorder and the accidents of print and manuscript compilation.
Piers Brown is an assistant professor of English at Kenyon College. His interests include early modern literature, especially poetics, rhetoric and metaphor; literature and science, astronomy, optics, and visual culture; book history and the history of knowledge.
For more information, visit http://go.osu.edu/BCGV, or contact Alan Farmer at farmer.109@osu.edu.
This event is sponsored by LiteracyStudies@OSU.
