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Prof part of NYC ’Birth of the Bestseller’ conference
3:09 p.m., March 21, 2007--Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women Studies, is one of five invited speakers at the Bibliographical Society of America conference, “Birth of the Bestseller: The 19th-Century Book in Britain, France and Beyond,” March 29-31, in New York City. Stetz will speak on “The Victorian Book Goes to Hollywood,” at 4:30 p.m., Saturday, March 31. The conference also connects to three major exhibitions in New York and a series of other events as part of a "Festival of the 19th-Century Illustrated Book" funded in part by the New York State Council for the Humanities, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Mark Samuels Lasner, senior research fellow at UD's Morris Library and chairperson of the program committee, said items from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection in the UD Library's Special Collections department are in one of the related exhibitions, "Illustrating the Good Life: Lucien and Esther Pissarro's Eragny Press, 1894-1914," at the Grolier Club in New York. The three-day “Birth of the Bestseller" conference gathers participants from around the world and from a wide range of disciplines, including art history, literary history and cultural studies to explore the terrain of 19th-century bestsellers and to study how they came to dominate the public imagination. Participants will offer a number of short papers and lectures on the enormous changes in the world of books in the 19th century.
As the final speaker at the conference, Stetz said she will bring the subject of book history forward in time to unite the past to the present, examining the changing images and roles of Victorian books in 20th- and 21st-century films. “My talk is called 'The Victorian Book Goes to Hollywood,' because I'll be looking chiefly at American cinema, although I will make some allusions to British films that also employ book imagery,” Stetz said. “I will consider how and why filmmakers have translated representations of the Victorian book to another medium, from the early sound era to the present.” Stetz said she also will examine if certain kinds of Victorian books shown on film become associated with gender difference, especially with notions of femininity, and if there are other meanings attached to the sight of a Victorian book on film. Stetz said the conference is about the development of the 19th-century book as a physical object and will focus on everything about books except the actual contents, including the work of publishing houses in producing books, the formats, design, illustrations and bindings of books. “Thanks to advances in technology that made the components of the book increasingly affordable, the 19th century was able to create the concept of the 'bestseller' that we still know today,” she said. “This was the first century in which books were mass-produced and in which very large numbers of consumers could afford to purchase them. As it invented publishing as an industry, along with the marketing and advertising of books on a grand scale, the 19th-century was the first 'modern' century of the book. It was also the first to make printed texts widely available to anyone beyond the wealthy classes and thus to encourage mass literacy.”
For more information, visit [www.bibsocamer.org/default.htm]. Article by Julia Parmley, AS '07
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