A SYMPOSIUM TO CELEBRATE THE CAREER OF
PAUL EGGERT
17 JULY 2015
UNSW CANBERRA, BUILDING 32 SRO3
9.30AM - 5.00PM
After thirty years at UNSW Canberra at the Australian Defence Force
Academy, Professor Paul Eggert has taken up the Martin J. Svaglic
Endowed Chair in Textual Studies at Loyola University in Chicago.
This symposium celebrates his contribution to the fields of nineteenth-century Australian literary studies, editorial theories of the
text and scholarly editing, digital textuality and the digital humanities, museology and history of the book, and studies on D.H. Lawrence and Joseph Conrad.
This will be a day of scholarship and reminiscence, lively debate and long memories, to reflect Paul’s expansive interests, productive networks and collegial
collaboration across the decades.
Speakers will address topics congruent with Paul’s broad interests and bring
highlights of working with Paul to share with an appreciative audience, in formal and informal ways.
Speakers: Wenche Ommundsen, David Carter, Elizabeth Webby, Christine
Alexander, Craig Munro, Katherine Bode, Mark Byron, Nathan Garvey, Roger
Osbourne, Chris Tiffin, Meredith Sherlock
Please RSVP Patsy Sheather ASAP:
[email protected]
PROGRAM
TEA AND COFFEE ON ARRIVAL SESSION 1 9.00 - 9.30am
9.30 – 11am
‘Welcome’ John Arnold, Deputy Rector, UNSW Canberra
Nathan Garvey, ‘“The Ironed Gang”: A ripping yarn of somewhat complicated provenance’
Meredith Sherlock, ‘Charles Harpur: A Family History’
David Carter [Read by Roger Osborne], ‘Rolf Boldrewood in America’
MORNING TEA SESSION 2 11.00-11.30am
11.30- 1.00pm
Chris Tiffin, ‘Louis Becke’s Naive Complexity’
Wenche Ommundsen, ‘Literary Writing and Community Development: Chinese
Australian newspapers 1900-1920’
Mark Byron, ‘Work-Genesis and Modern Literary Manuscripts’
LUNCH 1.00-2.00pm
SESSION 3 2.00 – 3.00pm
Roger Osborne, ‘Wrestling with Furphy and Conrad: Scholarly Editing for Page and
Screen’
Katherine Bode, ‘Back to the Future of Literary History: Mass-digitisation meets
scholarly editing’
AFTERNOON TEA SESSION 4 3.00-3.30pm
3.30-5.30pm
Christine Alexander, ‘Reminiscences and Reflections on Editing’
Craig Munro, ‘A Novel Apprenticeship: Editing Peter Carey’s early fiction’
Elizabeth Webby, ‘Editing the Academy Editions of Australian Literature’
DRINKS 6.30pm Ottoman Restaurant, Barton
DINNER
ABSTRACTS
Nathan Garvey, ‘“The Ironed Gang”: A ripping yarn of somewhat complicated provenance’
The Mitchell Library, Sydney holds a small collection of manuscript autobiographical narratives written by serving convicts on Norfolk Island in the early 1840s,
during the administration of the penal reformer Alexander Maconochie. The
collection is accompanied by a typescript, unpublished book, “The Ironed Gang,”
which glosses the autobiographies in what was apparently intended as a popular
history of convict life. This brief paper will outline the facts about the writing of
the narratives, speculate on their purpose, and introduce new evidence about the
provenance of the manuscript autobiographies and of “The Ironed Gang.” The
paper will highlight how the changing values of twentieth-century scholarship
regarded—or disregarded—Australian convict history.
David Carter [Read by Roger Osborne], ‘Rolf Boldrewood in America’
From the release of Robbery Under Arms in America in 1889 until his death
in 1915, ‘Rolf Boldrewood’ built a reputation in the American book world as a
vigorous author of colonial romances and an expert in matters of colonial lore.
His transatlantic career was a product of his longstanding publishing relationship
with Macmillan in London, which translated into editions of his works published
and/or distributed by Macmillan’s New York office. This paper will explore the
structures and trajectories of Boldrewood’s American publishing career and the
reception of his works in the American marketplace. If much of the substance of
Boldrewood’s fiction traded on colonial nostalgia, the author himself was a sharp
observer of changes in the contemporary publishing world, not least the potential
for authors created by the introduction of the US International Copyright Act in
1891.
Wenche Ommundsen, ‘Literary Writing and Community Development: Chinese Australian
newspapers 1900-1920’
The first Chinese language newspapers in Australia were established in Sydney
and Melbourne in the final decade of the colonial era, providing a lively forum
for debate and community building at a time of considerable pressure both in the
home country, leading up to the republican revolution of 1911, and in Australia, with the introduction of the White Australia policy. The Tung Wah Times in
Sydney and the Chinese Times in Melbourne embarked on an ambitious program
of community education, which included using literary writing to foster pride in
Chinese culture but also to warn against practices which were seen to damage the
reputation of the community in the eyes of mainstream Australia (opium smok-
ing, gambling, polygamy). My paper offers examples of writing enforcing
Confucian values, and of cautionary tales aimed at changing the habits of the
lower classes.
Mark Byron, ‘Work-Genesis and Modern Literary Manuscripts’
Debate over the theoretical and practical relations between the terms document, work and text has taken on renewed energy in recent years, not least
in the continuing discussion between Paul Eggert, Peter Shillingsburg, Peter
Robinson, and Hans Walter Gabler as well as other leading figures in textual
scholarship. These terms take on new significance in the age of digital texts
and editions, and deserve careful explication in order to be deployed effectively in the production of scholarly editions and in the understanding of digital
textuality. This paper seeks to explore how these terms critically inflect an
understanding of Modernist manuscripts, and particularly their realisation in
models of digital scholarly editions. Specifically, Eggert’s notion of work-genesis provides a powerful notion of textual emergence in manuscript as well
as in publication, and offers an elegant combination of critical model and
practical description of Modernist manuscripts, even those that have escaped
currently prevailing editorial models such as textual genetics. The paper will
discuss examples of digital editions of Modernist manuscripts as instances
of work-genesis, continuing beyond the scene of authorial composition, into
evolving digital representations and outwardly to readers’ potential strategies
of reception.
Roger Osborne, ‘Wrestling with Furphy and Conrad: Scholarly Editing for Page and
Screen’
I have served a long apprenticeship under the guidance of Paul Eggert, completing a PhD on Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes in 2000, and working
as a human collator and research assistant on a number of the volumes in the
Academy Editions of Australian Literature. I have since worked closely with
Paul on the Cambridge Edition of Under Western Eyes, and on a number of
technology projects, most recently the Australian Electronic Scholarly Editing Project. My current editorial projects, a digital edition of Joseph Furphy’s
Such is Life and the Cambridge edition of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, inevitably proceed under the influence of Paul’s editorial theory and practice. In this
paper, I reflect on my own deployment of theory and practice in preparing
the work of these two novelists for publication in print and on screen. I will
discuss ideas of document, text, and work, and assert the importance of maintaining a space for the scholarly editor in the latter.
Katherine Bode, ‘Back to the Future of Literary History: Mass-digitisation meets
scholarly editing’
Mass-digitization projects have the potential to enable new approaches to
and forms of literary history. At present, however, research based on these
projects tends to reify digitized records as complete, objective, and transparent presentations of the documentary past, while approaching them in ways
that reinforce existing conceptions of literary history. My current research
seeks to identify and analyze serial fiction – by Australian and non-Australian
authors – in the almost 17 million pages of historical newspapers digitized by
the National Library of Australia’s Trove database. Drawing on this example,
I show how key principles and practices in scholarly editing provide a critical
framework for re-imagining our approach to large digitized collections, and
reinvigorating our exploration of literary history.
Craig Munro, ‘A Novel Apprenticeship: Editing Peter Carey’s early fiction’
This talk will be based on one of the chapters from Munro’s forthcoming
memoir Under Cover: Adventures in the art of editing (to be published by
Scribe in September). It focusses on his role in editing and publishing Peter
Carey’s early fiction, when Munro was a pioneering publisher at the University of Queensland Press in the 1970s and 1980s.
Elizabeth Webby, ‘Editing the Academy Editions of Australian Literature’
I will be discussing Paul Eggert’s contribution to the editing of Australian
literature, with a special emphasis on his work with the Academy Editions
of Australian Literature, both as chair of the editorial board, and as editor of
individual works.