Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research

Combining traditional scholarly skills with modern technological methodologies in order to investigate the history of the book and material cultures.

The Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research (CEIR) was established in October 1997 as an interdisciplinary unit aiming to combine traditional scholarly skills with modern technological methodologies in order to investigate various aspects of the history of the book and material cultures.

Postgraduate support

We support advanced graduate training in editing, book history, illustration studies and material cultures as part of the MA and PhD in English Literature.

Doctoral projects based in or drawing upon the research opportunities offered by CEIR have, in recent years, included:

Dewi Evans, ‘The Idea of the Book at the Fin de Siècle’ (completed 2013)
Katie Garner, ‘Avalon Recovered: The Arthurian Legend in British Women’s Writing, 1775–1845’ (completed 2013)
Marianne Fisher, ‘Insular Romance: Genre, Literature and Society’ (completed 2014)
Nicola Lloyd, ‘Sentimentalism and the British Novel, 1800–1836’ (completed 2014)
Shayne Husbands, ‘Literary Significance of the Early Roxburghe Club’ (due for submission 2015)
Michael Goodman, ‘Illustrating Shakespeare: Text, Image and the Digital Archive’ (due for submission 2016)
Alice Wilkinson, ‘The Pharmakon and Addiction in Nineteenth-Century Periodical Culture’ (due for submission 2016)
Harriet Gordon, ‘ “At Home in the World”: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Global Literary Networks’ (due for submission 2018)
Amber Jenkins, ‘From Pen to Print: Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and the Art of Literary Composition’ (due for submission 2018)
Karita Kuusisto, ‘Storytelling with Images: Illustrations of Short Stories in Late Victorian Periodicals’ (due for submission 2019)

Research

We offer expertise in fields such as Medieval studies, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Victorian studies, the early twentieth century and postmodernism.

We have developed a number of online resources focusing principally on nineteenth-century literature, including a database of fiction 1800-29, a bibliography of the novel 1830-36, and the electronic collection of variant editions.

Our Database of Mid-Victorian Illustration (www.dmvi.cardiff.ac.uk) combines research and technological innovation to bring illustrations of Victorian culture to wide audiences, including designers, publishers, broadcasters, film-makers and heritage organisations worldwide.

The scope of our research is expanding in innovative ways with the University’s acquisition of the Cardiff Rare Books Collection. This collection of 14,000 items, ranging from fifteenth-century incunabula to twentieth-century private press books, offers unparalleled opportunities for scholarly research.

We host two online journals: Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840 and the Journal of Illustration Studies (JOIS).

Resources

We work closely with Cardiff’s Special Collections and Archives (SCOLAR) service in targeting acquisitions in order to develop our rich and vibrant research base, particularly focused in the long nineteenth century.

Key resources include:

the Corvey Microfiche Edition (CME), consisting of 3290 titles comprising 2 million printed pages by 1280 different writers (approximately 80% of fiction published 1796–1834 is held in this collection)
an extensive collection of periodicals, including the All the Year Round,Annual Register, Art Journal, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine,Cornhill, the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, Gentleman's Magazine,Illustrated London News, Longman's Magazine, Macmillan's Magazine,Strand, The Yellow Book
the Salisbury Library, comprising about 50,000 books, pamphlets and periodicals relating to Wales
the Carmarthen Collection, consisting of around 5000 volumes on theology, science and philosophy from the 17th and 18th centuries
the Reece Collection, which holds about 3000 volumes spanning the 16th to the 20th centuries
Archives of the House of Longman on microfilm
Archives of the Literary Fund on microfilm
Women Advising Women: advice books, almanacs, manuals and journals, 1625–1837
Walter Scott manuscripts on microfilm
Maria Edgeworth papers on microfilm
Tennyson Collection, comprising 500 volumes from the 19th century
History of medicine: 2000 volumes from the 17th to the 20th centuries
access to online resources such as Early English Books Online (EEBO),Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO), Literature Online (LION)

We also have an abundant collection of reference works and nineteenth-century holdings, which are available for consultation, among them reproductions of around 3000 reviews of fiction from 1800–30, approximately 60 circulating library catalogues, as well as publishing papers and anecdotal records of reading from the first half of the century.