Sunday, January 30, 2005

Credentials

A question came in today from a student wanting to know something about the site and my credentials. Her question was part of an assignment to check the credibility of web sites. For those who might not have seen it, this information is available from a link that should be on the bottom of each page: "About this site", and on the "About this site" page is an "About me" link listing my publications, courses taught, etc. There's either an "About this page" link or a contact link at the bottom of each page, and eventually the format will be entirely consistent as the pages are updated.

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Freeman, Jewett, local color

I've been making a number of small changes, mostly links and bibliographic entries, to the local color, Jewett, and Freeman, and the associated bibliographies. There are also some new Freeman stories at Jeff Kaylin's site on Freeman.

Saturday, January 22, 2005

Local color page

Updates to the Local Color page; I'm also working on a page for Harriet Prescott Spofford. There's a beautiful e-text of Celia Thaxter's An Island Garden complete with reproductions of the color illustrations at the Celebration of Women Writers page.

Thursday, January 20, 2005

Bernal Diaz del Castillo

Updated links and metatags on the Bernal Díaz Del Castillo page after learning from Picosearch that this turned up as a search with no result for the people who used the search feature.

Melville essay at Common-place.org

Common-place, an Interactive Journal of Early American Life has a new issue on Pacific Routes; among other interesting articles, it includes an essay by Christopher Benfey on Melville and Manjiro Nakahama, a link I've added to the Melville page.

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Kate Chopin

Updated link on the Kate Chopin page, thanks to the kindness of someone who wrote to point out the erroneous link.

Vandover at last!

At last an e-text of Frank Norris's Vandover and the Brute is available online, thanks to Project Gutenberg. The Frank Norris page now reflects this new text.

Monday, January 17, 2005

Bibliography updates

Updates to the Regionalism bibliography and the current scholarship on Howells bibliography; also the Sarah Orne Jewett bibliography, for which there are surprisingly few 2004 entries listed in MLA.

Rebecca Harding Davis

Updates to the Rebecca Harding Davis page, although not much has changed in regard to the availablility of her works. I removed the link to the bibliography at the SSAWW site, since it's no longer valid.

Money for nothing?

Updates to the Rose Terry Cooke page. In searching for Cooke editions through abebooks.com, I was shocked to see photocopies of some of Cooke's stories from unbound editions of 19c. magazines selling for nearly $60 in some cases. These are the same stories that are available free on the Making of America site or elsewhere.

The rule must be that if you can get someone to pay upwards of $50 for a public domain text available for free elsewhere, then you're a smart business person and the buyer is. . . well, less so. It's not illegal: there's a product being offered for sale, and buyers are free to pay those prices if they want to do so. But is it ethical? I'm sure the sellers would argue that it is.

A slightly different case arises in the offering for sale of public domain e-texts available through amazon.com and other booksellers; it *must * be just a coincidence that the only ones available are those already made available through Project Gutenberg, for to repackage and sell what PG volunteers have made available for free is violation of the PG terms of service. Would it be too cynical to assume that some "enterprising" people are doing just that? The situation of compiling texts and burning them to a CD-ROM for those who don't have Internet access may be a different situation; that's for the PG administrators to decide.