Category Archives: Featured Resources

University Library expands its holdings of Early American Imprints Online

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The University Library now has 2 supplements to Early American Imprints, Series I. Evans

Early American Imprints, Series I. Evans, Supplement from Library Company of Philadelphia, 1670-1819

Early American Imprints, Evans and Shaw-Shoemaker—the definitive resource for researching every aspect of 17th-, 18th-, and early 19th-century America—have been dramatically expanded. From the acclaimed holdings of the Library Company of Philadelphia comes a broad range of recently uncovered books, pamphlets and broadsides, most of which were not included in Charles Evans’ monumental work, Roger Bristol’s supplement, or “American Bibliography,… Learn more.

Early American Imprints, Series I. Evans, Supplement from American Antiquarian Society, 1652-1819

This dramatic expansion of the venerable Evans and Shaw-Shoemaker digital collections of Early American Imprints makes available more than 5,350 rare and unique early American printed documents, all catalogued by the American Antiquarian Society. For today’s students and scholars of early American history, literature and culture, no other collections offer the opportunity to view and search newly available publications spanning the Colonial… Learn more.

 

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Fear and Loathing of the English Passive

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A new study on the English passive has been published. The author is Geoffrey K. Pullum, who has been Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh since 2009. He has written:

“Writing advisers have been condemning the English passive since the early 20th century. I provide an informal but comprehensive syntactic description of passive clauses in English, and then exhibit numerous published examples of incompetent criticism in which critics reveal that they cannot tell passives from actives. Some seem to confuse the grammatical concept with a rhetorical one involving inadequate attribution of agency or responsibility, but not all examples are thus explained. The specific stylistic charges leveled against the passive are entirely baseless. The evidence demonstrates an extraordinary level of grammatical ignorance among educated English language critics.”

The article has been made available online here: “Fear and Loathing of the English Passive,” Geoffrey K. Pullum, epub January 10, 2014, to appear in Language and Communication, 2014.

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April Exhibits Up at the LitLang Library

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For April, the Literatures and Languages Library has installed two new exhibits on display in the Periodicals area on the South end of the Main Library Reading Room.

Cyberpunk is the focus of the first exhibit. Cyberpunk, a postmodern brand of science fiction that flourished in the 1980s and 1990s, often focuses on detritus-strewn dystopian landscapes where corporate interests dominate, leaving rogue hackers and outsiders to find ways of infiltrating and upending these new, technologically oppressive establishments. The grungy underworld in which these fictions often take place are contrasted with the use of incredible technology in ways unanticipated by its creators, blurring the line between actual and virtual reality. These tropes are especially intriguing to think about today as the Internet increasingly influences the lives of humans. Elements of Cyberpunk continue to influence literature and media in the genre of science fiction and beyond.

Since April is when the Major League Baseball season begins each year, we focus on The Literature of Baseball for our second exhibit. Known as “America’s pastime” for over a century, the exhibit focuses on fictional and non-fictional renderings of the sport and how it has played an important part in the myth of America. Widely known texts such as Bernard Malamud’s 1953 novel The Natural and Roger Kahn’s non-fictional account of the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers, The Boys of Summer (1972), sit alongside a book about Toni Stone, the first female to play baseball in the Negro Leagues when she debuted with the San Francisco Sea Lions in 1949, and a lesser known Philip Roth book, with the tongue-in-cheek title The Great American Novel (1973), about a home-less team that must play all their games on the road.

Both exhibits will be on display until the end of the month.

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February Exhibits at the LitLang Library

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The Literatures and Languages Library has two exciting new exhibits up in the Literatures and Languages Periodicals area, on the south end of Main Library Reading Room, for the month of February.

The first exhibit, Black Science Fiction Writers, celebrates Black History Month by examining the contributions of African American authors to the science fiction genre. Works by writers throughout the 20th and 21st century–including Octavia Butler, George Schuyler, Walter Mosley, and Nisi Shawl–are on display.

To celebrate Presidents Day, The Presidency and American Literature is the focus of our other exhibit. It focuses on texts by notable literary figures–such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Adams, and Carl Sandburg–who wrote about the American presidency in one form or another.

These exhibits will be on display until the end of the month.

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Celebrate Native American Heritage Month

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November is Native American Heritage Month. To celebrate, U. of I.’s Native American House is putting on events all month. Here is a link to their schedule.

Four of our faculty in the English Department have published work on Native American literature. Associate Professor Jodi A. Byrd‘s chapter “(Post)Colonial Plainsongs: Toward Native Literary Worldings” appears in the Four Arrows (Don Trent Jacobs) collection Unlearning the Language of Conquest (2006). Professor LeAnne Howe‘s chapter “Ohoyo Chishba Osh: Woman Who Stretches Way Back” appears in Greg O’Brien’s collection Pre-Removal Choctaw History (2008). Professor Robert Dale Parker has published several scholarly works on Native American literature, including The Invention of Native American Literature (2003) and the edited collections The Sound the Stars Make Rushing through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (2007) and Changing in Not Vanishing: A Collection of Early American Indian Poetry to 1930 (2011). Professor Robert Warrior has penned Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (1994) and The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (2005) and co-authored Like an Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (1996, with Paul Chaat Smith).

The Literatures and Languages Library has numerous works by and about Native American authors. Our collection includes writings by such notable figures as N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, Gerald Vizenor, and many others. We also have an extensive collection of critical texts and anthologies relating to Native American literature.

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New Resource: SUR, 1931-1991

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The UIUC Library now has full-text access to the complete run of SUR, 1931-1991. SUR, one of the most important and influential literary magazines published in Latin America in the twentieth century, is now available as a full-text searchable, digital archive. SUR, 1931-1991 contains images of the complete run of the magazine — including covers, photographs and advertisements — with an interface in both Spanish and English. Founded in 1931 by Argentine intellectual Victoria Ocampa, SUR is well known throughout the Americas and Europe for featuring writings from some of the best known figures in literature, philosophy, history and the arts. The magazine contained contributions from Virginia Woolf, Jean-Paul Satre, Jorge Luis Borges and many others as well as Ocampo’s own social commentary on political, governmental and economic affairs.This important literary title featuring the century’s principal authors and intellectuals is vital for historical research on all aspects of 20th century life.
To access the database, go to the Library Catalog record at http://vufind.carli.illinois.edu/vf-uiu/Record/uiu_6688164 and enter through the link “Online Access”.

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New resource: Nineteenth Century Collections Online

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The UIUC Library now has access to Gale’s Nineteenth-Century Collections Online (NCCO), which at present includes four modules relating to European literature and culture: British Politics and Society; British Theatre; Music, and Literature: High and Popular Culture; and European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection, a collection particularly rich in British, French and German literature. For more information, please visit http://gdc.gale.com/nineteenth-century-collections-online/.

To access NCCO, search the Library’s Online Journals and Databases index for “Nineteenth Century Collections Online NCCO” or access the database through the Library catalog.  For help in using NCCO, contact the Literatures and Languages Library at litlan@library.illinois.edu.

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Open Access Film E-Books

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We recently came across a list of open access film e-books at the website Film Studies for Free – books on this list deal with a wide range of topics, time periods, and national cinemas. Included are several classic titles (such as Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari To Hitler: a Psychological History of the German Film and Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema) as well as more recent titles.

Film Studies for Free, the blog where this list is hosted, also points to fascinating free resources around the web for learning more about a diverse range of topics in cinema studies – including open-access journals and articles, podcasts, video lectures and essays, and much more. The site is maintained by Catherine Grant of the University of Sussex.

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Computers and Composition Digital Press

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Utah State University Press has undertaken an exciting open-access publishing initiative: the imprint Computers and Composition Digital Press. Founded in 2007, CCDP is “interested in digital projects that cannot be printed on paper, but that have the same intellectual heft as a book,” and has published five open-access, peer-reviewed titles up to this point.

UIUC Professor Emeritus Gail Hawisher is one of CCDP’s co-founders and serves as one of its editors, and was one of the co-authors of the recent Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times. Other titles in the series are:

CCDP’s homepage includes more information on this publishing initiative, including editorial content discussing the press’s background, directions for submitting proposals for new projects, and further resources on creating accessible digital content.

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New Digital Publication for Spanish Art and Cultural History

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The Spanish Ministry of Culture, in collaboration with the National Research Council (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas – CSIC) has announced a project that may be of interest as a source for art and cultural history research, but also for the historiography of Spanish art and cultural history.

CSIC has completed the digital publication of the Catálogo Monumental de España (1900-1961):

http://biblioteca.cchs.csic.es/digitalizacion_tnt/index.html

Organized by regions, this survey of Spain’s artistic heritage consists of texts and photographs on a range of media including paintings, sculpture, furniture, textiles, books, architecture. It includes all the published volumes with their black and white photographs, as well as the manuscripts of unpublished volumes, in come cases with photographs.

In addition to the original texts it is accompanied by recent studies on the value of this archive for identifying works of art and architecture destroyed during the 20thC as well as the histories of medieval art and decorative arts amongst other themes.

It can be read on-line and downloaded in PDF format.

See also this announcement in the Spanish digital arts newspaper Hoyesarte: http://www.hoyesarte.com/politica/nacional/11451-cultura-presenta-el-catalogo-monumental-de-espana-1900-1961-.html

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