Along with seemingly containing the entire life’s work of the Irish-born wit, The Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde includes photos of the author and his family, and a chronology of his life. This particular edition is Collin’s fifth of this title, which was published in 2003. And incidentally, as the text notes on its back cover, Harper Collins has published iterations of Oscar Wilde’s complete works since 1948. Interestingly, this edition also contains introductions each by Vyvyan and Merlin Holland—who are, respectively, the son and grandson of Wilde. For scholars, these paternally-proximate preludes may proffer personal insights into the oeuvre of the anthologized author.
The Collins text also includes a partial Wilde bibliography, which features major works, like De Profundis and The Importance of Being Earnest, along with their initial publication dates, houses of publication, and the number of copies first printed—often with ancillary details concerning the context of publication. What’s more, this text includes a seemingly comprehensive bibliography of scholarly articles and books written about Wilde and his works, which might prove useful to scholars of literature, who are seeking secondary sources. Along with the works mentioned in this bibliography, like E.H. Mikhail’s Oscar Wilde: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, the Collins edition includes editorial descriptions. Intriguingly, this often includes qualifications on the validity of the sources included. For example, under the entry for Thomas A. Mikolyzk’s Oscar Wilde: An Annotated Bibliography, the Collins editors conclude that the source is “More comprehensive than Mikhail but packed with errors,” (1262).
This resource is available for students of English at Tennessee Tech, from the front desk of the Volpe Library, under “Two-Hour Course Reserves” whenever they take English 3820—a currently-required course for all English majors at this institution.
Work Cited
Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Fifth Edition. Harper Collins, 2003.
Open Source Shakespeare is a digital, web-based resource that could seemingly be utilized in unquantifiable ways—and yet it maintains some clear—and often explicitly disclosed—shortcomings. Developed by a graduate student from George Mason University, the OSS is not necessarily an especially “scholarly” resource, however, scholars may indeed find crucial utilitarian value in its capabilities. And yet, OSS is merely a website curating William Shakespeare’s complete works, which feature a number of sophisticated search engines that use a variety of linguistic algorithms to analyze the texts. And yet, that makes apparent another characteristic of this resource to scrutinize: the particular text of Shakespeare’s complete works utilized by this website is the Moby Shakespeare. As its developer, Eric M. Johnson, describes in a paper available from the OSS titled “Open Source Shakespeare: An Experiment of Literary Technology”: “The collection is an electronic reproduction of another set of texts which the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia identifies the source as the Globe Shakespeare, a mid-nineteenth-century popular edition of the Cambridge Shakespeare” (Johnson).
Whatever its limitations, OSS has many obvious uses. Although it uses a particular text—rather than daring to incorporate the many hundreds of existing critical editions of the preeminent and arcane Shakespearean quarto and folios—scholars, thespians, and casual readers may use OSS in a variety of ways. They can utilize the phonetic search engines, to find both existing uses of any exact search term, as well as any instances of etymologically-related words appearing anywhere in the Shakespearean canon. The OSS also allows users to search through stage directions, and the personae dramatis of each play. It has no apparent advertising feature on any of its web pages, no does it divulge any institutional sponsorship. Interestingly, Johnson produced the website as an active Marine stationed in Kuwait in 2001, and mentions in his paper that the OSS maintains an annual budget of $110 dollars, for “webhosting” (Johnson).
Work Cited
Johnson, Eric, M. “Open Source Shakespeare: An Experiment of Literary Technology,” Open Source Shakespeare: Search Shakespeare’s Works, Read the Texts, http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/.
Comparative Drama is an academic journal boasting a quarterly publication frequency, which has been administered by the Western Michigan University Department of English since 1967. Its editorial board is constituted of academics from a wide range of disparate institutions, from Stanford, Duke, and Emory, to Freie Universität in Berlin. The journal is edited by Elizabeth A. Bradburn—Associate Professor of English at WMU. As of this writing, over twenty years of Comparative Drama can be accessed by Tennessee Tech students and faculty via the Angelo and Jeanette Volpe Library online database directory. From the directory, scholars may select the “Arts and Humanities Database” by ProQuest. It may interest students of Literature and Drama that, according to the MLA “Directory of Periodicals”, this publication concerns itself with “drama studies which are international in spirit and interdisciplinary in scope. While medieval drama is a special interest, articles may focus on drama of any period from antiquity to the present” (MLA International Bibliography Directory of Periodicals). This journal has a modest circulation of about three hundred, to various institutions and individuals.
While Comparative Drama does not accept unsolicited book reviews, reviews make up a majority of this publication’s content, with an average of forty submitted and published annually. Scholarly articles, meanwhile, only make up about twenty to twenty-five of Comparative Drama’s annual titles. These are chosen from a pool of submissions averaging eighty to one hundred per year. Submissions are published according to the Chicago Manual of Style, and authors can expect to wait up to two months after submission for notice of the journal’s publication decision.
Comparative Drama invites authors who have been previously published by the journal to submit again, however they adhere to a policy that limits authors to one publication per three years. Authors are given a suggested length for submissions of twenty-five to thirty typed, double-spaced pages—or 7,500 to 10,000 words—and they are asked to avoid jargon. Interestingly, while two-hundred fifty-word abstracts are requested with each submission, and while abstracts are included on the ProQuest “Arts and Humanities Database”, they are not published along with the articles in the journal, itself. Conveniently for authors, the Comparative Drama’s homepage at the WMU website includes an electronic “style sheet”, which can be found under the “Submissions Guidelines” section.
Students and scholars of drama can expect to find a vast and meandering range of topics discussed within Comparative Drama’s contents, and throughout its half-century of volumes; however, the works of William Shakespeare seem to occupy a disproportionate amount of space upon its pages. And yet, this may simply reflect that particular author’s disproportionate influence upon this field of study. For example, in the Winter 1999/2000 volume of Comparative Drama, Cynthia Marshall reviews Gillian Murray Kendall’s Shakespearean Power and Punishment: A Volume of Essays, wherein the reviewer analyses the complier’s uses of the theorical lens of “New Historicism”.
This journal’s consideration of the “New Historicism” mode of critical theory is likewise apparent in the article “O’Neill and Jaime: A Survivor’s Tale” by Michael Hinden, published in the Winter 2001-2002 volume. Therein, Hinden shows how the tumultuous life of Eugene O’Neill’s brother Jamie had influenced the playwright’s works—from Desire Under the Elms, to the more obvious Long Day’s Journey into Night.
But, for students and scholars looking for more international and diverse fare, the journal does not fall short of its stated, broad scope of interest. In “Staging Queer Marxism in the Age of State Feminism: Gender, Sexuality, and the Nation in Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpinar’s Kadin Erkekleşince (When Woman Becomes Masculine)” author Rüstem Ertuğ Altinay explores how the eponymous play represents how certain socio-sexual particularities that were characteristic of the late Ottoman Empire engender “the conditions of (im)possibility of a queer Marxist feminism.” With titles ranging broadly in focus, and by engaging texts from all different eras and regions using widely disparate lenses of critical theory, Comparative Drama lends itself to the eclectic dramatic scholar seeking to peruse through a sea of disparate topics.
English Research Sources 