Forget Me Not! The Popular Phenomenon of Literary Annuals.
A literary and cultural history of British 19th-century literary annuals; see full proposal with sample chapter and Table of Contents (pdf)

           In my book project, “Forget Me Not! The ‘Unmasculine & UnBawdy Age’ of British Literary Annuals,” I assess the phenomenal rise of this popular genre, its bibliographic genesis from other English, German and French literary forms, its attempted social control of women, its re-definition of “feminine” and its impact on nineteenth- and twentieth-century print culture. Drawing on textual critics such as Jerome McGann, David Greetham and Don McKenzie, and literary critics such as Meredith McGill and Anne Mellor, my work adopts an interdisciplinary approach that invokes textual and social contexts to explore a site of subversive femininity, where warfare and the masculine hero were not celebrated. The annuals survived, even thrived from the attention offered by its readers despite – or as I argue, because of – its “feminine” writing and over-saturated, beautiful form. Critics working in British nineteenth-century literature and gender have typically made mention of literary annuals, even studied individual authors including Mary Shelley, Felicia Hemans, William Wordsworth, John Ruskin, Charles Dickens and Lord Tennyson. Textual scholars, such as William St. Clair, have attempted to qualify the reading audiences during the Romantic period but essentially ignore the annuals. Studies in Victorian periodicals have accumulated accounts of the serial’s impact on literary reception and authors’ successes but also have not addressed literary annuals, or more likely have assumed that the literary annual was part of the periodical press. My literary history contextualizes the annual’s influence alongside these variant genres in a moment when the literary world was revising itself away from the solitary poet-hero. I argue that the literary annual in its textual production is best seen as a female body, its male producers struggling to make it both proper and sexually alluring, its female authors and readers attempting to render it their own feminine ideal.

An edition of 19^th-century gothic short stories; includes a critical introduction on the impact of 1820s British literary annual and gothicism. Under contract with Zittaw Press/Franz Potter. Proposed publication 2011.

The “Forget Me Not: A Hypertextual Archive of Ackermann’s Nineteenth-Century Annual,” hereafter Forget Me Not Archive (www.orgs.muohio.edu/anthologies/FMN/), contains several components of the 1824 through 1830 Forget Me Not literary annual volumes. Literary annuals are early nineteenth-century British texts published yearly from 1822 to 1860, primarily intended for a middle class audience due to its moderate retail cost (12s.-£3). Initially published in duodecimo or octavo, the decoratively bound volumes – filled with steel plate engravings of nationally recognized artwork and sentimental poetry and prose – exuded a feminine delicacy that attracted a primarily female readership. The engravings were copied from various artwork, varied in theme and were verbally illustrated with a poem. They were published in November and sold for the following year, which made the annual an ideal Christmas gift, lover’s present or token of friendship. Produced as a small, portable volume with paper or leather boards and gilt edges, the annual was marketed as an extravagant object because of its rigid boards and material stability and as an object to be desired, re-read, memorized, memorialized, and treasured for its internal and external beauty. Collections of literary annuals are sporadic throughout the United States. For this reason, I created a digital archive of the Forget Me Not from my personal collection so that other scholars could also see the importance of the genre.

The present Archive is undergoing some major transformations as it becomes part of other projects. However, it will still contain the basic elements that made the website so popular among scholars: Transcripts accompany low-resolution images of the Table of Contents, List of Plates and Title pages. Within each Table of Contents transcript, every author’s name has been hyperlinked to all of his/her literary annual contributions. The annual’s physical appearance has been incorporated by providing images of each board (cover) and hyperlinking each annual to its bibliographic description. To highlight the annual's rise and fall, the Forget Me Not Archive includes a chronological index of the various British and American annuals published 1823 to 1856. To contextualize the popularity of the literary annual, Harris’ Archive includes a list of Prominent Contributors (and their writings in annuals), a list of editors and publishers, contemporary periodical reviews and general reflections about the annuals. Lists of engravers, engraving titles, original artists, and poem and prose titles provide various types of scholars with information about the 1823-1830 volumes.

Dr. Katherine D. Harris
Last updated: 01/12/2012 10:46 AM