Forget Me Not! The Popular Phenomenon of Literary Annuals.
A literary and cultural history of literary annuals

My first order of business has been to revise my dissertation into a publishable manuscript, which is no easy feat.  My ongoing research surrounding the literary annuals encompasses several areas of inquiry, including fiction (short stories), non-fiction, representations of war / travel / transcontinental influences, women's poetry, masculine / feminine poetic voices, poetic subjectivity, emblems, conduct manuals, landscape art, reproduction of wood cut / intaglio / steel-plate engravings, nineteenth-century publishing history, history of the book, bibliographical development, subjectivity of the text (textual theory / textual condition), digital literature, archives and hypertextuality.  Once popular in England, the publishing phenomenon was mimicked through Europe and North America to great success.

In my dissertation, I argue for and re-present a genre's importance to nineteenth-century British literary studies. The genre, literary annuals (also identified as gift books), is generally criticized as a benign form of popular culture from the early nineteenth century. With its seasonal dissemination of popular poetry, prose and engravings, nineteenth-century critics accused the three-inch by five-inch moderately-priced and decoratively-bound annual of usurping the public's attention away from valid poetic genius as well as continuing the insipid distribution of fiction. I argue that both nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics evaluate the genre based on a normative literary aesthetic that is not valid. With the premise that the book is a body and is part of the textual condition, much of this dissertation deals with the creation and evolution of the annual as a literary genre, popular phenomenon in print culture, powerful feminine form and cultural marker of early nineteenth-century England.

After establishing the socio-cultural context of the annual, I examine it as a Foucauldian archive and compare it to my digitization of the first British-published annual, the Forget Me Not <http://www.orgs.muohio.edu/anthologies/FMN/>. Because the genre's form has been emulated, mimicked and re-presented during the late nineteenth century through the early twenty-first century, I also explore the relationship between annuals, as nineteenth-century archives, and our contemporary digital archives, including inquiries about textuality, hypertextuality and digital representations of self.

A digital rendering of textual, contextual and (select) content from several volumes of the first British-published literary annual, Forget Me Not. This annual, published by Rudolf Ackermann & Co. 1823-1847, began the literary phenomenon and was published annually for twenty-four consecutive years. Its longevity was rivaled by only a few other British titles; however, many scholars overlook it (and Ackermann's) significance to popular culture, publishing trends and literary production. This Archive provides access to both the bibliographic elements and content of this particular annual. Full text of all volumes will be added over the next five years.

Using postcolonial theory, an article or chapter focusing on Imoinda’s heroism as the `Inappropriate Other’ (Trinh T. Min-Ha) in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and the stage adaptations that "whitewash" Imoinda's savage self (written and published 1688 and adapted for stage throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century). 

Dr. Katherine D. Harris
Last updated: 07/03/2009 03:07 PM