![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Random Thursday: A book-buying spree
I was thinking of doing a Random Thursday post about the semantic nuances of irrealis statements in discrepancy investigation reports, and how sharpening one's talents on them can improve fiction writing. But then I was up late because I spent the evening at the UC Berkeley library pulling articles for the Lesbian Historic Motif Project, and came home to find a couple of books in my mailbox from my recent buying spree, and despite setting my daylight alarm clock for 6am rather than 5am (to balance out the up-late) I was wide awake at five…and I'm not sure I have the brain for linguistic analysis today. (All my brain is being saved for the fact that the pair of investigations that have hijacked my time for the last five weeks Absolutely Must Close Today, and I'm still waiting on three deliverables from other parties. Ones I've been saying I needed for at least the last three weeks.)
In any event, I thought that instead I'd squee over what my recent haul (both book-buying and library) is bringing in.
The leading edge of the incoming books isn't actually for the LHMP, it's deep-background research for a future Alpennia book, from which one may make guesses about possible new characters. (Maybe my next Alpennia blog should be about how each of my central characters is on some way dis-invested in the status quo, thus leading them to question their commitment to leading a normative life. It isn't that I'm running down some checklist of marginalizations, simply that I'm looking for new and different contexts of dis-investment. Oh, and by the way, Mistress of Shadows spends a certain amount of time in Paris.)
Coller, Ian. 2010. Arab France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798-1831. University of California Press, Berkeley.
For the next set, I was going through my current "to look for" list for the LHMP (this is a list of books and articles cited in publications I've already covered that look like they might be useful), and out of idle curiosity I started plugging titles of some of the older books into Amazon. (For currently-in-print books, I'd rather order direct from the publisher or through my local bookstore, but for used, it's hard to beat their aggregation system.) The following items turned up with reasonable second-hand prices/conditions and looked valuable enough to add to my personal library.
Moore, Lisa L. 1997. Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel. Duke University Press.
Babayan, Kathryn Babayan, Afsaneh Najmabadi & Brad Epps eds. 2008. Islamicate Sexualities: Translations across Temporal Geographies of Desire. Harvard University Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
Encyclopedia of Lesbian Histories and Cultures: Volume 1. 1999. Routledge. [For a moment I freaked out when I just noticed this is "volume 1" then I double-checked and "volume 2" covers gay male history/culture, so I didn't buy an incomplete set after all.]
Wheelwright, Julie. 1990. Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness. Pandora Press.
Fradenburg, Louise & Carla Freccero. 1996. Premodern Sexualities. Routledge. [Likely to be theory-heavy and with minimal lesbian coverage, but the price was right.]
Foster, Jeannette H. 1985. Sex Variant Women in Literature. Naiad Press. [I think I once saw a first edition of the original 1956 version of this study, in all its mimeographed glory. OK, the mimeo thing may be my imagination embroidering it. The study has been updated at least twice at various reprintings. Coverage is primarily more modern than my era of interest, but it's a classic reference.]
Licata, by Salvatore J. & Robert P. Petersen eds. 1986. The Gay Past. Routledge. [When I saw that I had about three articles on my list cited from this volume, I figured it was probably worth shelling out for.]
Jay, Karla, Renee Vivien & Allen Young eds. 1990. Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions (Feminist Crosscurrents). NYU Press. [Probably going to be theory-heavy rather than full of the sort of chewy data I like, but what the heck.]
And based on browsing it in the library, I've also gone ahead and ordered:
Hubbard, Thomas K. (ed). 2003. Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents. University of California Press. [I wouldn't have ordered it sight-unseen due to doubts about how much coverage of women it would have.]
And then there was last evening's library haul. I do not have any nostalgia for the days when pulling articles in the library meant wrestling books on a photocopier (only to have your photocopy card zero its balance in the middle of a job), trying to judge the tradeoff between size-reduction and readability, worrying about what you were doing to the binding integrity, etc. Now I use the same phone/iPad app that I use for recording receipts. It automatically turns photos into pdfs and you can concatenate multiple photos into a single document. Then it saves them to Dropbox so I don't find myself filling up my phone memory in the middle of a job… I haven't quite yet found the perfect solution to holding the page flat while snapping the picture. Yes, I can manage the phone one-handed, but by about the third article I'm starting to get a little tremor from the strain of holding it in place. Fortunately the app is fairly good at tremor-correction (and excellent at auto-focus). Truly we live in an age of miracles!
Lansing, Carol. 2005. “Donna con Donna? A 1295 Inquest into Female Sodomy” in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 3rd Ser, 2: 109-22 [I think this may be the earliest European legal case I've yet found that addresses lesbian relationships.]
Brown, Judith C. “Lesbian Sexuality in Renaissance Italy: The Case of Sister Benedetta Carlini” in Signs 9 (1984): 751-58. [This is an early, brief summary of the material she turned into a book, which I'll also cover. What can I say, I'm a bit of a completist.]
Dover, Kenneth. 1978. Greek Homosexuality. New York: Vintage. [Only the chapter on women, which includes both female homosexuality and female responses to male homosexuality. It's a short chapter.]
Durling, Nancy Vine. “Rewriting Gender: Yde et Olive and Ovidian Myth” in Romance Languages Annual 1 (1989): 256-62. [Yet one more study of my favorite medieval romance]
Jelinek, Estelle. “Disguise Autobiographies: ‘Women Masquerading as Men’” in Women’s Studies Intrnational Forum, 10 (1987), pp.53-62. [More case studies of women passing for a wide variety of reasons.]
Lyons, Clare A. 2007. “Mapping an Atlantic Sexual Culture: Homoeroticism in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia” in Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America. Ed. Thomas A. Foster. New York University Press, New York. pp.164-203 [Not very much on women, though the one well-documented example is interesting in how little penalty the women saw.]
Newton, Esther. “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman” in Signs 9 (1984): 557-575. [A look at a broad variety of women of Hall's era and the much wider diversity of lives than the one that became so iconic through her writing.]
Friedli, Lynne. “Passing Women: A Study of Gender Boundaries in the Eighteenth Century” pp.234-60 in Rousseau, G. S. and Roy Porter (eds). 1987. Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment. Manchester University Press, Manchester. [Haven't really had a chance to look at this yet.]
Hobby, Elaine. “Katherine Philips: Seventeenth-Century Lesbian Poet” in Hobby, Elaine & Chris White (eds). 1991. What Lesbians do in Books. Women’s Press, London. pp.183-204 [A detailed biographical sketch, along with that favorite question, "Do we get to claim Philips as a lesbian?" to which my increasing response is "this is not the right question."]
Lanser, Susan. 2003. “Queer to Queer: Sapphic Bodies as Transgressive Texts” in Kittredge, ed. Lewd and Notorious: Female Transgression in the Eighteenth Century. [Also another article from this collection that wasn't originally on my list, so I don't have the title convenient to cite.]
Lardinois, André. “Lesbian Sappho and Sappho of Lesbos” in Bremmer, Jan. 1989. From Sappho to de Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality. London: Routledge.
So that's 20 new items (and some of the books contain multiple entries worth of contents). That should keep me busy for a while.
In any event, I thought that instead I'd squee over what my recent haul (both book-buying and library) is bringing in.
The leading edge of the incoming books isn't actually for the LHMP, it's deep-background research for a future Alpennia book, from which one may make guesses about possible new characters. (Maybe my next Alpennia blog should be about how each of my central characters is on some way dis-invested in the status quo, thus leading them to question their commitment to leading a normative life. It isn't that I'm running down some checklist of marginalizations, simply that I'm looking for new and different contexts of dis-investment. Oh, and by the way, Mistress of Shadows spends a certain amount of time in Paris.)
Coller, Ian. 2010. Arab France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798-1831. University of California Press, Berkeley.
For the next set, I was going through my current "to look for" list for the LHMP (this is a list of books and articles cited in publications I've already covered that look like they might be useful), and out of idle curiosity I started plugging titles of some of the older books into Amazon. (For currently-in-print books, I'd rather order direct from the publisher or through my local bookstore, but for used, it's hard to beat their aggregation system.) The following items turned up with reasonable second-hand prices/conditions and looked valuable enough to add to my personal library.
Moore, Lisa L. 1997. Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel. Duke University Press.
Babayan, Kathryn Babayan, Afsaneh Najmabadi & Brad Epps eds. 2008. Islamicate Sexualities: Translations across Temporal Geographies of Desire. Harvard University Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
Encyclopedia of Lesbian Histories and Cultures: Volume 1. 1999. Routledge. [For a moment I freaked out when I just noticed this is "volume 1" then I double-checked and "volume 2" covers gay male history/culture, so I didn't buy an incomplete set after all.]
Wheelwright, Julie. 1990. Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness. Pandora Press.
Fradenburg, Louise & Carla Freccero. 1996. Premodern Sexualities. Routledge. [Likely to be theory-heavy and with minimal lesbian coverage, but the price was right.]
Foster, Jeannette H. 1985. Sex Variant Women in Literature. Naiad Press. [I think I once saw a first edition of the original 1956 version of this study, in all its mimeographed glory. OK, the mimeo thing may be my imagination embroidering it. The study has been updated at least twice at various reprintings. Coverage is primarily more modern than my era of interest, but it's a classic reference.]
Licata, by Salvatore J. & Robert P. Petersen eds. 1986. The Gay Past. Routledge. [When I saw that I had about three articles on my list cited from this volume, I figured it was probably worth shelling out for.]
Jay, Karla, Renee Vivien & Allen Young eds. 1990. Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions (Feminist Crosscurrents). NYU Press. [Probably going to be theory-heavy rather than full of the sort of chewy data I like, but what the heck.]
And based on browsing it in the library, I've also gone ahead and ordered:
Hubbard, Thomas K. (ed). 2003. Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents. University of California Press. [I wouldn't have ordered it sight-unseen due to doubts about how much coverage of women it would have.]
And then there was last evening's library haul. I do not have any nostalgia for the days when pulling articles in the library meant wrestling books on a photocopier (only to have your photocopy card zero its balance in the middle of a job), trying to judge the tradeoff between size-reduction and readability, worrying about what you were doing to the binding integrity, etc. Now I use the same phone/iPad app that I use for recording receipts. It automatically turns photos into pdfs and you can concatenate multiple photos into a single document. Then it saves them to Dropbox so I don't find myself filling up my phone memory in the middle of a job… I haven't quite yet found the perfect solution to holding the page flat while snapping the picture. Yes, I can manage the phone one-handed, but by about the third article I'm starting to get a little tremor from the strain of holding it in place. Fortunately the app is fairly good at tremor-correction (and excellent at auto-focus). Truly we live in an age of miracles!
Lansing, Carol. 2005. “Donna con Donna? A 1295 Inquest into Female Sodomy” in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 3rd Ser, 2: 109-22 [I think this may be the earliest European legal case I've yet found that addresses lesbian relationships.]
Brown, Judith C. “Lesbian Sexuality in Renaissance Italy: The Case of Sister Benedetta Carlini” in Signs 9 (1984): 751-58. [This is an early, brief summary of the material she turned into a book, which I'll also cover. What can I say, I'm a bit of a completist.]
Dover, Kenneth. 1978. Greek Homosexuality. New York: Vintage. [Only the chapter on women, which includes both female homosexuality and female responses to male homosexuality. It's a short chapter.]
Durling, Nancy Vine. “Rewriting Gender: Yde et Olive and Ovidian Myth” in Romance Languages Annual 1 (1989): 256-62. [Yet one more study of my favorite medieval romance]
Jelinek, Estelle. “Disguise Autobiographies: ‘Women Masquerading as Men’” in Women’s Studies Intrnational Forum, 10 (1987), pp.53-62. [More case studies of women passing for a wide variety of reasons.]
Lyons, Clare A. 2007. “Mapping an Atlantic Sexual Culture: Homoeroticism in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia” in Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America. Ed. Thomas A. Foster. New York University Press, New York. pp.164-203 [Not very much on women, though the one well-documented example is interesting in how little penalty the women saw.]
Newton, Esther. “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman” in Signs 9 (1984): 557-575. [A look at a broad variety of women of Hall's era and the much wider diversity of lives than the one that became so iconic through her writing.]
Friedli, Lynne. “Passing Women: A Study of Gender Boundaries in the Eighteenth Century” pp.234-60 in Rousseau, G. S. and Roy Porter (eds). 1987. Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment. Manchester University Press, Manchester. [Haven't really had a chance to look at this yet.]
Hobby, Elaine. “Katherine Philips: Seventeenth-Century Lesbian Poet” in Hobby, Elaine & Chris White (eds). 1991. What Lesbians do in Books. Women’s Press, London. pp.183-204 [A detailed biographical sketch, along with that favorite question, "Do we get to claim Philips as a lesbian?" to which my increasing response is "this is not the right question."]
Lanser, Susan. 2003. “Queer to Queer: Sapphic Bodies as Transgressive Texts” in Kittredge, ed. Lewd and Notorious: Female Transgression in the Eighteenth Century. [Also another article from this collection that wasn't originally on my list, so I don't have the title convenient to cite.]
Lardinois, André. “Lesbian Sappho and Sappho of Lesbos” in Bremmer, Jan. 1989. From Sappho to de Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality. London: Routledge.
So that's 20 new items (and some of the books contain multiple entries worth of contents). That should keep me busy for a while.