I. The Tools of the Trade

1. How many works are currently ascribed to John Lydgate? How many of these are in prose?

2. On p. 242 above [in Altick], a quotation is given from Gamaliel Bradford's journal. Who was Bradford, and what was his peculiar literary specialty?

3. Volume 1 of the MLA International Bibliography arranges its contents by major national or regional area--British Isles, British Commonwealth, English Caribbean, American Literatures--and then by subregion--Australian, Welsh, Canadian, and so forth. Where exactly will one find Margaret Atwood, Derek Walcott, Patrick White, and Raymond Williams?

4. Identify the bibliography published in 1979 about which the following claim has been made: "This book will now be the starting point for every critic, scholar, and student who sets out to write on a work of Old English literature or on the Anglo-Saxon period in general, and for every teacher preparing a course in Old English literature."

5. What important books were published and what noteworthy public events occurred in the year of Aphra Behn's birth?

6. After it appeared in 1928, Herbert R. Mayes's Alger: A Biography Without a Hero was relied upon--by subsequent biographers as well as by such standard authorities as the Dictionary of American Biography--as a source of authentic information on the life of that popular nineteenth-century American author of rags-to-riches stories. It is now totally discredited. What, according to the author when he admitted his "fraud" in the early 1970s, was his purpose in writing it?

7. Look up synopses of a novel you know well in three standard reference sources. Are they inaccurate in any significant respect? How do they differ in emphasis? Is there any evidence of derivativeness?

8. At what point in the poem's publication history were the marginal glosses added to Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"?

9. In 1847-50 a series of sensational murders in England provoked much public discussion. Make a list of at least a half-dozen periodical articles published at that time which dealt with the supposed crime wave and its social implications.

10. What is the name of a series of fifty-one reprinted autobiographies of American women? Who published it? What is its announced scope?

11. Where is the nearest complete file of The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine (1852-79)?

12. Much attention is now focusing upon the novelist Susan Warner (1819-85), one major critic referring to her first novel, The Wide, Wide World (1850), as the "Ur-text of nineteenth-century America." List at least five articles assessing her work. What exactly is the case being advanced for her importance?

13. Make a reasonably full list of scientific books published in 1693 that would have been of interest to a member of the Royal Society.

14. Quote the entry for Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity in The Stationers' Register, find its STC number, and, without reference to the NUC, locate a copy of the first edition (1593) in America.

15. In what important ways does the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary differ from the first edition?

16. Locate three or four articles that discuss rhetorical features characteristic of the critical essay. Be certain to include recent developments in feminist criticism as they bear upon this subject.

17. In the winter of 1849-50, Margaret Fuller (Ossoli), the New England critic and feminist, was working on a history of the Roman revolution, which had occurred the preceding year. What happened to it?

18. Prepare a checklist of articles discussing the significant similarities among and differences between women "local colorists" and "domestic sentimentalists" in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century America.

19. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970 but for political reasons was unable to receive it. In what year did he take possession of the prize?

20. Where on the East coast of the United States is a good collection of Henry James's first editions and manuscripts?

21. After reading four or five articles on the subject, summarize the most important issues in the debate about the existence of a "black women's literary tradition."

22. Describe, from a secondary source, the contents of Thomas Foxcroft's Lessons of Caution of Young Sinners (Boston, 1733). What is the library closest to your campus that possesses a copy of this book?

23. In England between 1700 and 1710 only two women published collections of their own verse. Who were they?

24. What is the current state of the argument over the dating of Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor? Is 1597 still generally accepted?

25. How many editions of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse were published in England down to 1990?

26. Mark Twain's Roughing It contains the popular long-winded anecdote "The Story of the Old Ram." What version of this story did Twain use on his lecture tours, and why?

27. In how many European countries were editions or translations of Byron's Childe Harold published down to 1850?

28. How many dissertations on Phillis Wheatley (perhaps in conjunction with other figures) have been accepted at American universities in the past five years?

29. Using at least three sources, compile a list of all books and articles published on Blake in 1990. Why is it necessary to refer to more than one source?

30. Name the more important texts and the standard modern works dealing with rogues and vagabonds in the Elizabethan era.

31. Locate at least three articles that discuss the parallels between the notorious marital difficulties of Lady Caroline Norton and her fictional counterpart, Diana Warwick in Meredith's Diana of the Crossways.

32. Compile a preliminary bibliography of recent theoretical books and articles that examine the ways readers apprehend and respond to literary works.

(no 33)

34. In a letter written by a young Victorian girl you find a reference to a mechanical chamber organ called the Apollonicon. Write a footnote explaining what it was and where she probably saw and heard it.

35. Godey's Ladies Book appeared under seven different titles over its sixty- eight-year history (1830-98). For forty years (1837-77), the journal had a single "editress," who is credited with wielding a major influence over the "reading, learning, and even the political consciousness of women across the America continent." Who was this person and what have recent scholars said of the place of Godey's Ladies Book in nineteenth-century American literature and culture?

36. Approximately how many versions are known of the medieval "Debate Between the Body and the Soul"? How many manuscripts are there of what is said to be "the best-known Middle English piece," "Als I lay in a winteris nyt/in a droukening bifore the day?" Where are they, and have they all been printed?

37. After more than fifty years in a cottage attic, the G.K. Chesterton archive of some thirty thousand items, including two hundred unpublished poems, plays, and short stories, found a permanent home in 1990. Where is this archive housed and what is its history?

38. Your study of the popular reception of the novels of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett necessitates consideration of motion picture adaptations of their stories. How can you identify these films and find sufficient details about them for your needs?

39. Copy, from an authoritative modern source, the exact wording on the title page of Every Man in His Humour (1601).

40. Make a list of the explications so far offered of specific passages in Marvell's "The Garden."

41. At what London theaters and on what dates were Wilkie Collins's dramatizations of his novels No Name, Armadale, The Woman in White, and The Moonstone first performed?

42. Using more than one reliable source, identify to whom Gertrude Stein was speaking in her famous remark "You are all a lost generation." What were the circumstances?

43. How man pre-1700 editions of Bunyan's Grace Abounding are known to exist?

44. How many stories by the science fiction writer Robert Silverberg have been anthologized in English-language publications?

45. What are the present retail prices of the complete NCBEL, Baugh's Literary History of England, the Concise DNB, and the compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary?

46. You have found a hitherto unknown letter by Thoreau that internal evidence proves was written between 1849 and 1856. It is dated simply "Friday, May 5." What was the year?

47. Compile a list, including publishers and prices, of Robertson Davies's works published in Canada and still in print.

48. What bibliographical aids exist for a study of the English poet laureate Ted Hughes?

49. What is the distinction between the heresy of Molinism (Miguel de Molinos, 1627-96) and the Molinism associated with Luis de Molina (1535-1600)?

50. In what year and under what circumstances was Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer permitted to be published in the United States for the first time?

51. Twelve presentation copies of Mrs. Henry Wood's Victorian best-seller, East Lynn, were specially bound. What was the color of that binding? How was Michael Sadleir's imaginative reconstruction of the circumstances behind the choice of binding proved to be a mistake?

52. What is the relative value, for research, of the several twentieth-century editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and which current encyclopedias have the best reputation for accuracy?

53. Is the manuscript of James Jones's From Here to Eternity available for scholarly scrutiny?

54. Sometime in the 1960s a book was published in England under the title of Search Your Soul, Eustace. What was its American title, and what was it about?

55. You are examining a rare book that you have reason to believe was part of the library of Richard Heber (1773-1833). What identifying mark should you look for?

56. In recent years, the appearance of previously unpublished fiction, autobiography, and letters by Bloomsbury figures has increased interest in that group. Cite at least ten recent book-length biographical and critical studies relating to the Bloomsbury group.

57. Songes and Sonettes, by Sir Thomas Wyatt, the Earl of Surrey, and others (1557), is familiarly known as "Tottel's Miscellany" because it was printed by Richard Tottel. Name four other books he printed in the same year. What was his London address?

58. What was the first full-length critical study of Langston Hughes?

59. You have written a paper on Elizabeth Gaskell's novel North and South that your instructor thinks may well be publishable. Your citations, however, are to the Penguin edition, which the class used, and scholarly practice requires that, whenever possible, a published paper cite the most reliable text. What text of the novel is best?

60. Where is the manuscript of Thomas Shadwell's play The Humorists? What company first performed it? When?

61. What was the association between T.S. Eliot and the Boston Daily Evening Transcript?

62. Books with the following titles have been written about a major English poet: Some Graver Subject, From Shadowy Types to Truth, The Celestial Cycle, The Club of Hercules, The Harmonious Vision, Heroic Knowledge. Who is the poet? What is the source of each title?

63. What were the nineteenth-century British and American antecedents of the modern paperback?

64. Joseph Conrad embellished his actual achievements when he referred to his career as a ship's captain. Identify two or three authoritative discussions of Conrad's demonstrated competence in that role. What is the truth about his seagoing career?

65. In 1770 there was printed at New York a broadside entitled The Dying Speech of the Effigy of a Wretched Importer. Whom did the effigy represent, and what was the occasion of its being burned? Where can one find a copy of the broadside?

66. Make a list of the materials published in the past three years on the mythic and folklore elements in Beowulf.

67. How were the opening scenes of Hamlet altered for the 1990 Zeffirelli film?

68. What is the collation of the first edition of the first edition of Jack London's The Call of the Wild? What is the evidence for its date of publication?

69. After examining the six or eight latest issues of the TLS, make a list of a half-dozen distinct and important services its various editorial features supply to literary scholars.

70. You are studying the significance of metaphors relating to time in the work of a modern novelist and need to broaden your philosophical orientation. Find a source that discusses the various conceptions of time entertained by modern philosophers as well as by such figures as St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Bergson, Proust, and Sartre.

71. How many different productions of Dryden's All for Love appeared in London theaters in the eighteenth century?

72. Where would one find information about the imprint "Clarendon Press," first used by Oxford University Press in 1713?

73. English travelers to America in the 1840s, including Dickens, praised the working and living conditions in the textile factories at Lowell, Massachusetts. Among the amenities was a magazine, the Lowell Offering written, edited, and published by the factory girls. Has any book been published about this periodical?

74. In what kind of literary work, and from what period, might an allusion to each of the following be found? the Gorham case, the Quoin, Robert the Devil, Mohocks, Grace Darling, Anarcharsis Clootz, Babu, Martin Marprelate?

75. What public figures made statements to the English press on the occasion of the death of Graham Greene in 1991?

76. On May 15 (25), 1696, in a letter preserved among the manuscripts at Longleat, seat of the Marquis of Bath, Sir William Trumbull paid a handsome compliment to his correspondent, the poet Matthew Prior. What was it? (And why, incidentally, is the double date given?)

77. How many of the novels of Edna Ferber are currently in print?

78. Limiting yourself to one source, identify the single work in which all of the following words appear: inaccessibleness, decays (noun), misappear, miswrite, divineness, dwarfishly.

79. You need to refresh your memory concerning the essential nature of Freud's theories of sexuality, the unconscious, repression, and regression. Where can you find succinct summaries of these topics, along with a selected bibliography?

80. What single source provides a complete list of the publications of the Cambridge University Press 1700-1750?

81. Establish a checklist of materials for a paper on the history of copyright, centering upon but not limited to the first Berne Convention in 1885.

82. The novelist Walker Percy died in 1990. In what university library are his manuscripts and other papers?

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83. It is well known that Longfellow derived some of the materials for Hiawatha from the ethnological writings of Henry R. Schoolcraft. Why is it highly unlikely, however, that he used Schoolcraft's Cyclopedia Indianensis of a General Description of the Indian Tribes of North and South America (New York, 1984)?

84. What was Samuel Johnson's involvement in The Harleian Miscellany (8 vol., 1744-46)?

86. In reviews that compare Stanley Kubrick's film of Barry Lyndon with Thackeray's novel, are any of the differences between the versions regarded merely as necessary results of the differences between print and film?

87. Would the Franklin J. Meine collection of material on various aspects of American social history housed at the University of Illinois-Chicago Circle library be of any value to a student of nineteenth-century American humor?

88. Compile a list of at least five articles in the past decade discussing the place of science fiction in American literature.

89. Identify: le Diable Boiteau, Julius Caesar Scaliger, Gongorism, Skibladner, epicedium, Jean Crapaud, Dismas, Flavius Josephus.

90. The British Museum acquired the first autograph draft of Carlyle's Past and Present in 1928. Of how many leaves does it consist, who presented it, and what is its number among the Additional Manuscripts?

91. What clues led investigators to discover a dozen early stories by George Gissing buried in the files of Chicago newspapers? Where were two additional ones found in 1980, and what was the clue this time?

92. Of how many printed items does the canon of Cotton Mather consist?

93. In some anthologized versions of Joel Chandler Harris's "The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story" only half of the complete episode involving Br'er Rabbit and his sticky adversary is printed. What are the title and content of the second part of the tale? Where were both parts first published? Why, do you think, have anthology editors often ignored this second part?

94. In his important introduction to the Portable Faulkner, written in 1945, Malcolm Cowley helped initiate serious consideration of Faulkner's fiction. How many of the novelist's works were then in print?

95. Identify five articles detailing Thomas Pynchon's use in Gravity's Rainbow of popular movies, songs, comic book characters, and radio melodramas from the 1930s and 1940s.

96. Where would one find a list of successive editors of the Quarterly Review from 1851 to the death of Thomas Carlyle in 1881?

97. A study you are making of the English popular novel in the 1830s and 1840s requires that you focus particular attention on the publishing house of Richard Bentley & Son. Where are the firm's archives, and how can you gain access to them?

98. With the aid of the appropriate reference tools, explain the biblical allusions in this passage (Paradise Lost 6: 750-59):

forth rush'd with whirl-wind sound
The Chariot of Paternal Deity,
Flashing thick flames, Wheel within Wheel, undrawn,
Itself instinct with Spirit, but convoy'd
By four Cherubic shapes, four Faces each
Had wondrous, as with Stars their bodies all
And Wings were set with eyes, with eyes the Wheels
Of Beryl, and careering Fires between;
Over thir heads a crystal Firmament,
Whereon a Sapphire Throne, inlaid with pure
Amber, and colors of the show'ry Arch.

99. Here is a list of words, found in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poems, whose meanings in those context are no longer current. Assuming that each suggested synonym fits the context, what reason is there to believe that it represents a current meaning of the italicized word at the date shown?

disease (Howard, 1557): "discomfort"
read (Spenser, 1589): "advised"
freakes (Spenser, 1590): "unpredictable tricks"
inward touch (Sidney, 1591): "True imagination"
engaged (Shakespeare, 1598): "held as hostage"
triumphs (Marlowe, 1604): "parades"
adulteries (Jonson, 1609): "adulterations"
determinate (Shakespeare, 1609): "expired"
tells (Jonson, 1616): "backward"
sped (Herbert, 1633): "supplied, satisfied"
approve (Donne, 1633): "put to proof, find by experience"
bestead (Milton, 1645): "help, avail"
pale (Milton, 1645): "enclosure"
quaintest (Vaughan, 1655): "most elaborate"
perspective (Vaughan, 1655): "telescope"
close (Marvell, 1681): "unite"
dishonest (Dryden, 1681): "disgraceful"

100. What does each of the following words, used by American writers, mean, and when and where was it apparently first used?

smallage (Hawthorne, 1835)
a face of country (Emerson, 1836)
unhandselled (Emerson, 1837)
a Norway mile (Poe, 1847)
socriac (Poe, 1847)
Bose (Thoreau, 1854)
crook-necks (Lowell, 1867)
pungle (Twain, 1884)
Jonah's toss (Melville, 1888)
crawfished (Twain, 1895)
Vega-cura (Dreiser, 1900)
Snow Bird (Fitzgerald, 1931)

II. Bibliographical Listing and Identification

101. Two older guides to the printed works of English Renaissance authors are Lowndes's Bibliographer's Manual of English Literature (new ed., 1857-64) and the various volumes of "collections and notes" by W. Carew Hazlitt (1867-1903); most of these are conveniently indexed by G. J. Gray, 1893). Choose a relatively minor sixteenth- or seventeenth-century author and using the most authoritative modern bibliographical tools, including the STC and Wing, establish how trustworthy and complete Lowndes's and Hazlitt's information is.

102. A similar older guide is Allibone's Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (1958-71, 1891). Select a nineteenth-century English or American author in whom you are interested, and as in the preceding exercise, determine what value, if any, Allibone has to a scholar wishing to do intensive work on that author.

103. How up to date, thorough, and accurate are the existing bibliographical guides to the writings by and about the following authors?

Sean O'Faolain Doris Lessing
Philip Roth Jean Toomer
Gwendolyn Brooks Leroi Jones
Tom Stoppard Robert Lowell
Lillian Hellman Maya Angelou
Anthony Burgess Alice Walker
John Cheever Aldous Huxley
Jerry Berryman Iris Murdoch
Toni Morrison Denise Levertov
John Osborne Carson McCullers
Joyce Carol Oates Robert Penn Warren

104. Describe the means by which one can compile a full bibliography of the publications of a present-day literary scholar.


108. Compile a secondary bibliography of works about Celia Thaxter, "probably the best known female poet in late nineteenth century America." What is this poet's principal subject?