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Williams, Dr Abigail
Job Title: CUF Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow
College: St Peter's
Period/ Subject: 18th Century
Email address: abigail.williams@ell.ox.ac.uk
Research Interests:
Jonathan Swift CUP edition of Journal to Stella
I have just completed an edition of Jonathan Swift’s Journal to Stella for Cambridge University Press’s multi-volume Collected Works of Jonathan Swift. It will come out in early 2013, along with four additional articles relating to the edition. As part of my detective work on the edition, I have become increasingly interested in Swift’s obliterations on his letters, and in the longer term, I would like to work on a more general study of literary obliteration.
Digital Miscellanies Index
The other major research project that I have been working on is the Digital Miscellanies Index, a 3 year Leverhulme-funded research project which will create a database of the contents of the 1000 or so poetic miscellanies published during the course of the eighteenth century. See http://digitalmiscellaniesindex.org. The database will be completed and launched by September 2013.
Bringing Books Home
Whilst working on the miscellany material, I have become increasingly intrigued by the ways in which eighteenth-century readers used them. Their prefaces and title pages suggest they were commonly read out aloud, in the home. In 2012 I have a fellowship from the British Academy, which will enable me to explore this aspect of domestic performance, and the books designed for that market. My next monograph, aimed at a crossover readership, will investigate this social history of reading. I will also be using the year to develop some public-facing activities around this theme: this includes a collaboration with the Geffrye museum, schools work, radio and a series of public talks and music performances. The social function of literature seems increasingly significant to me, and together with Dr Kate Rumbold, at the University of Birmingham, I have begun a research network on ‘The Uses of Poetry’, working with psychologists, literacy specialists and teachers on in an ongoing discussion about the historical and future uses of poetry in society.
Teaching Areas:
At St Peter's I teach undergraduate courses in the period 1640-1832, and the Shakespeare paper. In the Faculty, I lecture on Restoration comedy, High and Low Culture, Pope, Swift, Montagu, Behn and Rochester. Along with Ros Ballaster, Christine Gerrard, and David Womersley, I also teach a third year syndicated option on 'Grub Street', which explores the ephemeral productions of the early eighteenth century alongside more canonical texts. I have offered and taught MSt options on Poetry and Politics, and the literature of Grub Street, and am currently co-convening the Mst 1500-1780. Topics for doctoral supervision have included: celebrity and female actors in the eighteenth century; Defoe and historiography; quotation of Shakespeare in the eighteenth-century novel, and the correspondence of Jacob Tonson.
Recent Publications:
Books
Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture: 1680-1714. Published in hardback by OUP, April 2005 (paperback March 2009)
ed., Jonathan Swift, 'The Journal to Stella': Letters to Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley, 1710-1713 (forthcoming, CUP, 2012)
Selected Articles
Essay on ‘Whig Literary Patronage' in Cultures of Whiggism: New Essays on Literature and History in the Long Eighteenth Century ed. David Womersley (University of Delaware Press, published October 2005).
‘The poetry of the un-enlightened: politics and literary enthusiasm in the early eighteenth century', History of European Ideas, 31 (2005), 299-311.
‘Whig and Tory Poetics': essays on political aesthetics for the new Blackwell's Companion to Eighteenth Century Poetry, ed. Christine Gerrard (Blackwell's, 2006.)
‘Literary and Intellectual History': essay on the relationship between literary criticism and the History of Ideas tradition in New Approaches in Intellectual History , eds. Brian Young and Richard Whatmore (Palgrave 2006).
‘The Politics of Providence in Dryden's Fables ', Translation and Literature, 17 ( 2008).
'I hope to write as bad as ever': Swift's Journal to Stella and the intimacy of correspondence', Eighteenth-Century Life, 35 (2011), 102-118.
'The difficulties of Swift's Journal to Stella', (Review of English Studies, advance access, 2011.
'Jonathan Swift and Epistolary Forms', in Jonathan Swift and the Nature of the Book, ed. James McLaverty and Paddy Bullard (CUP, 2012).
'The Literary Afterlives of Swift's Journal to Stella', in Reading Swift: Papers from the Sixth Munster Symposium, ed. Hermann Real (forthcoming 2012/13)
Other Information:
I have just completed an edition of Jonathan Swift's Journal to Stella for the new Cambridge Complete Works of Jonathan Swift. You can watch me talking about my research on Swift in a short YouTube lecture on 'Swirls and Secrets'. I am also the Principal Investigator of a Leverhulme Research Project Grant, which will enable the creation and completion of the Digital Miscellanies Index. This three-year externally funded project will create a freely available database enabling researchers to track the changing fortunes of individual poems and authors across the thousand or so miscellanies (popular poetic anthologies) published during the eighteenth century. The Index is currently hosted at the Bodleian Centre for the History of the Book, and the contents of the Index are based on the Bodleian's Harding Collection of Printed Music, left to the library in 1974 by Walter N.H. Harding, a British-born Chicagoan ragtime pianist. Harding had never seen the Bodleian, but he left the library a comprehensive collection of miscellanies, songbooks, song sheets, folk and instrumental music and music hall ballads. The creation of the Index has generated a public concert, radio 3 programme and exhibition based on material from the miscellanies. There is also a blog for the project. Early findings from the project have been widely reported in the national and international press, in the form of a story about a 'discovery' of a bawdy poem by Milton - there are links to these articles on our website.
The Digital Miscellanies Index project is run in collaboration with Professor Michael Suarez, of the Rare Books School, University of Virginia, and Dr Adam Rounce, of Manchester Metropolitan University.
One of the genres of poetic collection I am particularly interested in is recital books, volumes of excerpted verse, drama and prose designed for domestic performance. I am working with the musicians on the DMI project on a series of concerts and recordings of popular music from eighteenth-century miscellanies. For details of our talks and performance, see http://digitalmiscellaniesindex.org. I also speak in schools about the history of reading, and in particular, the history of reading out aloud in the home, and am part of Robert Peston's Speakers for Schools programme. For more information on this, see Speakers for Schools, or email me.
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