The new edition of Rilla of Ingleside has been chosen as “Favourite YA Fiction from 2010” by Melanie Fishbane:
Perhaps by saying that this is a new book, we can begin to see it in a new way. Even as possibly one of the first YA novels in Canada?
Read the full post. Visit the book’s official website. Visit the book’s official Facebook page.
There is now additional content related to The Blythes Are Quoted and Rilla of Ingleside on the L.M. Montgomery Research Group website: check it out here! More will be added in early 2011.
I’d like to congratulate my friend Kelly Norah Drukker on her two most recent publications: “Searching for Conor,” a piece of creative non-fiction published in the latest issue of Room, and “The Winter Garden,” a poem appearing in the December 2010 issue of Literary Review of Canada. Both are available at bookstores now!
It seems as though every time you turn around on the Internet these days, print materials from past and present pop up on new platforms. For the last several years I’ve been gathering materials related to L.M. Montgomery – her short stories, poems, and essays, as well as reviews of her books in magazines and newspapers. Since starting graduate school in 1999, I have spent countless hours nerding it up at various libraries across the continent, consulting endless lists while sitting hunched over a microfilm reader, benefiting enormously from researchers who had already identified items that I now wanted to read for myself. But now, thanks to the good people at Gale, ProQuest, Google, and Archive.org, I can now search for key terms in a number of search engines and find all sorts of things that had hitherto fallen through the cracks.
A similar move is happening now with the dissemination of scholarship online. In an attempt to make scholarly research more widely available, a number of journals are now appearing simultaneously in print and in electronic form, through a number of aggregators such as ProjectMuse. Because most academic journals and university presses require that authors transfer copyright to the periodical or publisher (either explicitly in the form of a contract or agreement or implicitly just by taking control of your work), what this often means is that, when new opportunities for online dissemination of academic work come along, the authors are often the last to know. This doesn’t technically matter much, since academic work doesn’t actually pay anything to authors anyway.
On that note, I recently discovered that three of my publications are now available for free on BNet – I’m not sure what this is, except that it’s owned by the CBS Interactive Business Network:
In a way, this move to digitize everything in sight raises really complicated questions about ownership and value, since in this context authors simply don’t own their own work. Journals benefit financially every time someone downloads an item published in their pages, and they need that revenue to survive. And, too, while it seems unfair that authors of all these research get no compensation for their work being “republished,” the assumption is that if you’re publishing in an academic journal it’s because you’re being paid either by a job or by a graduate fellowship. Besides, it’s not all bad: while searching a database that specialized in graduate dissertations I came across my father’s Ph.D. thesis – in physics, from 1967 – that I was able to download as a PDF. I don’t understand any of it, but I’m so glad I have it.
Issue 2, no. 2 (Winter 2010) of Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures (which happens to be my first issue as copy editor) is now available! I also received a print copy in the mail today. To view the issue online, visit their website (with a paid subscription you can access the full run of Canadian Children’s Literature / Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse). The full run of the journal is also available via Project Muse to subscribing libraries.
The new edition of Rilla of Ingleside is also mentioned in today’s Kitchener–Waterloo Record as well as in today’s Guelph Mercury as a suggested gift book for the holiday season.
This is a new “gift edition” of a novel first published in 1921. It’s the novel that Lucy Maude Montgomery then expected would be the final sequel to Anne of Green Gables. The story concerns Rilla Blythe, the youngest daughter of Anne Shirley, and is set during the First World War. Editions of this novel published in 1976 and 1985 removed about four per cent of the original text, which has now been restored in this volume. Editors of the book are Benjamin Lefebvre, a Waterloo literary scholar, and Andrea McKenzie, a University of Waterloo graduate who is now a director of writing at New York University.
Join the discussion on Facebook and order your copy today!
The new edition of Rilla of Ingleside is mentioned in Deirdre Baker’s article “Holiday Reads: Gift Books for Kids” in yesterday’s Toronto Star:
For a tried and-true wartime novel, especially for L. M. Montgomery fans old or young, look for the new gift edition, restored and unabridged, of Rilla of Ingleside (Viking, 390 pages, $26, ages 10+). This 1921 story of rural Canadian women during World War I is still poignant, funny, sentimental, ironic, suspenseful and heartbreaking. Rilla, the youngst daughter of Anne of Green Gables, develops fortitude, humour and depth as she helps out in war work, adopts an abandoned baby and suffers through her brothers’ sacrifices at the Front.
My essay “The Plaid Shirts in My Closet” appears as part of a forum on Academic Fashion in the latest issue of English Studies in Canada, available now.
Read Vanessa’s blog post “Why Rilla Is Important” on her blog, Bluebeard’s Chamber.
I’ll be signing copies of Rilla of Ingleside and The Blythes Are Quoted as part of the Lucy Maud Montgomery Christmas in Norval, at Crawford’s Bakery, from 1:30 to 3:00 on Saturday, November 27, 2010. Hope to see you there!
