http://duke.usask.ca/~vargo/barbauld
I confess that it was only a few months ago that I numbered myself among those colleagues whose "brows grow dark and troubled," as Jerome McGann suggests in "The Rationale of HyperText," at the mere mention of information networks and electronic publishing. And I must add that my brow grew darker still at the thought of doing collaborative work. So I apologize if I write with the enthusiastic ignorance of the recent convert. But I have much longer shared with McGann a belief that "Critical and other scholarly editions of our cultural inheritance are among the most distinguished achievements of our profession," though I wouldn't put it quite so pompously. With a hope that I might aspire towards such forms of achievement, I contributed a volume to Broadview Press's literary texts series, an edition of Mary Shelley's 1835 novel Lodore. If you know the series, you will be aware that not only does the editor contribute an introduction and the usual apparatus of notes, bibliography, and the like, but a series of documents drawn from a number of disciplines is added to the text. In my case that meant works that demonstrate the text's relation to matters of literary influence, the literary market, politics, travel literature, conduct literature for women, and reviews of the work itself. Lodore is a work for which a contextual approach seems crucial; it is deeply embedded in its culture, and I think deeply misunderstood. I was presenting a text that is not in the canon, which was published in a decade whose early years are commonly dismissed by critics as a fallow period for the novel, and a work for which there was almost no critical literature. The experience taught me that editing is both an exacting and creative endeavour, but I became increasingly aware of the limitations of a printed text to situate a work within the culture in which it was produced, as well as recognizing the linear nature of the critical edition, which must present its parts in discrete and hierarchically organized sections. The origins of these conventions and how they shape reading is obvious to Medievalists, and that is but one thing your work helps me recognize (see Appendix 1).
It was only a matter of time before my brow unfurrowed and my mind opened sufficiently to recognize the benefits of hypertext, particularly with respect to the project of reinstating romantic women writers to literary studies. The particular catalyst was a case study I undertook of the anthologization of a poem by the late eighteenth-century poet Anna Barbauld addressed to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (see Appendix 2). Barbauld is the woman disparagingly mentioned in the footnotes of just about every edition of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" as the obtuse reader who objected that the "Rime" didn't have enough of a moral. It seems ironic that her poem to Coleridge is so often used as a means for anthologists' reinstatement of Barbauld to the canon. The poem came to represent for me how moving a woman writer from the footnotes to the page of an anthology does not necessarily confer textual authority on that writer. A less theoretically fraught matter is that access to Barbauld's work is limited to the half dozen or so poems an editor sees fit to include in an anthology; the wonderful scholarly edition of Barbauld's poetry that Elizabeth Kraft and William McCarthy produced for University of Georgia Press several years ago cost me $90. University of Georgia Press has no plans for a paperback edition of the poems, though Broadview Press has asked Bill and Elizabeth to do an edition, which will appear a couple of years.
But I want to write about and to teach Barbauld now, and in a way that will push me to rethink the nature of research as something that is collaborative and that might bring thought about editing and the condition of the text to facilitate the writing of a critical monograph on Barbauld's poetry. Hence the aims of the Anna Barbauld Web Page. It is a modest project, which is a collaborative venture between an academic interested in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century British women writers and a graduate student with much expertise in web design. The purpose of the project is to take a small number of Barbauld's poems to investigate how the medium of hypertext might be used to place a work within its literary, historical, cultural, and political contexts. We wish to transcend the limitations of the printed page and explore a different sort of editing. Our aim has been to follow McGann's suggestion that "To function in a 'hyper' mode, an editing project must use computerization as a means to secure freedom from the analytic limits of the hardcopy text."
It seems to me that it is important to consider what that notion of freedom from the analytic limits of the hardcopy text has to offer with respect to the recovery of writers long disenfranchised from literary study as well as to a more general cultural studies approach. In creating a project focussed on a single writer we hope to be able to consider in larger terms why the reading and teaching of romantic women's poetry might be aided by hypertext. In his "Rationale of HyperText" McGann reminds us that "'hyper' editions need not organize their texts in relation to a central document, or some ideal reconstruction generated from different documents," and that a hypertext is "a decentred, nonhierarchical structure" that resembles a library. This is a crucial matter for the recovery of women writers. For the problem with recent romantic anthologies is that no matter how noble their intentions, they do not (or perhaps cannot) sufficiently decentre what is still a very hierarchical canon. Perhaps the very nature of the concept of a canon (in whose conception in English literature John Guillory points out Barbauld and her brother played a significant part [100]) and the materiality of the anthology make this impossible. And this I am convinced is where hypertext is more than a new toy, is a significant tool that could decentre and dehierarchize our thinking about and our reading of texts.
By way of illustrating what I mean, I will return to my example of Barbauld's poem to Coleridge. Its inclusion in any number of anthologies whose editors' prefaces contain statements about the need to recognize the importance of texts that concern race, class, and gender invites the reader to locate the poem as a site of gender politics. I don't dispute that it is, and until I did some research, I thought that that was the primary significance of the poem. But above all,"To Mr. S.T. Coleridge" reflects a discussion by the two writers situated in the culture of unitarianism. And this context goes unrecognized by merely placing the poem on a page (no matter what the typeface), perhaps with a footnote about how apt a reader Barbauld is of Coleridge. But something has to be left out in the hardcopy text. The romantics anthology I currently use, British Literature: 1780-1830, edited by Anne K. Mellor and Richard Matlak, has contexts sections, and includes the poem to Coleridge, but has no context section on religion and the dissenting tradition (which seems to me to set the race, class and gender matters rather askew, to say the least, if not misrepresent the nature of their origins and their ideological underpinnings). Our hypertext version of the poem will reproduce a network of texts and contexts in the dissenting culture of the late eighteenth century: the poems by Coleridge that inspired its writing, an essay by Barbauld which is echoed in the poem, literary precedents in John Milton and John Bunyan, writings by the dissenting scientist Joseph Priestley, and Coleridge's later commentary on Barbauld, including his "fabrication" of her comment on the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." In so doing I hope that we will create a more inclusive means to read the poem, one that is intended to give Barbauld her place as a writer and thinker, and that we might challenge notions of the canonical that recent anthologies, in spite of their efforts to be more inclusive, tend merely to reinscribe.
I am cheered by the thought that our project might be networked with a number of other such ventures (examples are discussed by Marlene Manoff of MIT). In a recent essay on hypertext and teaching romantic women poets, Joel Haefner quotes from Barbauld's poem to Coleridge to initiate his discussion of "how hypertext might affect the study of romantic literature" (46). He argues that "hypertext tends to undermine the hegemony of the canon" and "replaces the paradigm of the writer-who-writes alone with a collaborative interaction among a writer, other writers, and readers. The cross-fertilization that was truly characteristic of the romantic era may be better illustrated with hypertextual links among authors, across texts, genres, and geography" (47). For Haefner hypertext is accessible to students, helps to contextualize works culturally, reinforces associationism and fragmentation, and creates a new learning community in the classroom (48). He concludes, "it may be liberating and invigorating to find ourselves confronted with the digital text, in tangled mazes caught" (50). I can certainly vouch for the tangled mazes aspect. In the few months that we have worked on the project I have come to recognize how time consuming it is to create a hypertext. I can only dream that some day we will be able to do justice to Barbauld's six-line poem "On a Lady's Writing," let alone any of her longer works. Problems with copyright for our tiny project, from which no financial profit is to be made, are complex. I do not yet have an answer as to how to achieve that breakthrough in which we will create a new way of editing, let alone reading. But we have hardly yet begun. What I am certain of, though, is that collaborative work is a joy, particularly with Allison Muri.
Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: U. of Chicago P, 1993.
Haefner, Joel. "'In Tangled Mazes Wrought': Hypertext and Teaching Romantic Women Poets," Approaches to Teaching British Women Poets of the Romantic Period. Ed. Stephen C. Behrendt and Harriet Kramer Linkin. (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1997), 45-50.
McCarthy, William and Elizabeth Kraft eds. The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld. Athens and London: U of Georgia P, 1994.
McGann, Jerome. "The Rationale of Hypertext." http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/public/jjm2/rationale.html
Manoff, Marlene. "Cyberhope or Cyperhype? Computers and Scholarly Research." http://libraries.mit.edu/humanties/manoff.html