Conference Review
Collections and Compilations
18-19 March 2008
Summary Abstract
This conference fosters Anglo-French interest in collection and compilation as literary and linguistic activities and in the end-products of these activities. From the codex to the computer print-out, we can make sense of texts as the products of collection and compilation. With the advent of printing, publishers come to define themselves by their ‘collections’. Looking at the ‘collection’ in publishing involves a consideration of how continuity or totality is established in part or all of a particular publisher's output, and what the effects of this are. This concern runs from the beginnings of printers' specialisations in particular genres or themes, to the first publications of individual authors' complete works (collected works denoting collective esteem), to series that were themed in particular ways (generic, thematic) or on particular grounds (erudite, commercial). Our comparative interest encompasses the printing and publishing of French collections in Great Britain, and similarly the translations into French of English texts.
Event Report
The conference sprang from, and successfully strengthened, an international research network spanning the University of Cambridge and the ENS-LSH at Lyon. It aimed to bring the current interests of researchers in these two institutions into productive contact. In particular, it built upon their congruent expertise in the area of the history of the book. It looked both to use and to re-examine, from these Anglo-French perspectives, the way that the history of the book has transformed our perception of the material text.
There was a very wide range of papers, offering a number of interpretations of the theme ‘Collections and Compilations’. A majority of speakers were from Cambridge and from Lyon, but there were also speakers from Duke University, University of Indiana, University of Leeds and Paris I. There were discussions of collections of saint’s lives in the medieval and early modern period, of grammatical compilations, and of the roles of publishers and printers in the Renaissance. An excellent paper on the role of diplomats in book collecting in the late seventeenth century moved the temporal perspective forwards. There was a cluster of papers on eighteenth-century topics, on the complete (or incomplete) works of Montesquieu, on Raynal as compiler or collector, on French exile publishing, and on the use of the false imprint ‘London’ in the period. Papers on collecting and travel writing, and on collection as represented activity in nineteenth-century fiction, bridged the gap between the early modern and the modern. Papers on more recent decades focused on private presses and éditions de luxe, on works in translation, both literary and linguistic, on dialogues between literature and the visual arts within the history of the book, and on the archive as collection or compilation. Various papers retained a perspective on both French and English-language material, and on Anglo-French relations. There were two keynote speakers, Philip Stewart, who looked at the role of illustration in collections of works within the eighteenth century, and Anne Moeglin Delcroix who, memorably, looked at blank artists’ books.
Plans for publishing the collected papers as a volume of conference
proceedings are underway. Peter Lang contacted us about publishing the
volume. We will also explore the possibility of a French publisher. The
conference was conceived as the first in a series of international
colloquia. It is hoped that the second will be held at the ENS-LSH in
Lyon in 2009 or 2010 and that there will be further emphasis on the
History of the Book in the modern and contemporary period. Ideas
discussed so far have included ‘L’auteur et son éditeur’ and the
manuscripts of Proust.
