Involving Students in Scholarly Research:
Compiling and Integrating “Undiscovered Public Knowledge”
Robert C. Evans and David V. Witkosky
AuburnUniversityMontgomery
PART ONE: OVERVIEW OF RESEARCH (David V. Witkosky)
Readers of the National Social Science Journal may be puzzled when they see the title of this paper. The term “public knowledge” can be ambiguous and even misleading. Searching through Google will yield, for example, references to political scandals, commonly known facts in encyclopedias, and other non-specialized information. Although the term “public knowledge” can be (and has been) defined in various ways, we use the term, for the purposes of this paper, to refer to isolated data that are already available in print or online, that are clearly relevant to one another, but that have never before been assembled in coherent and easily accessible ways. In general, these data are termed “undiscovered public knowledge” in specialized literature on the topic (e.g., Davies, 1989; Spasser, 1997; Swanson, 1986, 2001).
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we live in an information age in which data proliferate everywhere but in which meaningful connections between them are not always made. This lack of connectedness renders these data far less useful than they would be if the links between them were drawn; facts in isolation are almost as useless as no facts at all (Reeves, 2006; Smith, 2000). Fortunately, however, the absence of connections provides a wonderful opportunity to involve students in real scholarly research and in legitimate academic publication. Students—especially those who are intelligent, dedicated, and serious about making enduring contributions to scholarship—are well-equipped to work on compiling and assembling “undiscovered public knowledge.” In this paper, we will examine the call for—and value of—collective academic work of this nature, define public knowledge in more detail, discuss the logic behind the strategy of compiling and integrating this pool of information, and provide examples of methods appropriate to promoting this kind of student research in a twenty-first century college or university academic environment.
Even a casual reading of journals reveals a general discontentment with the state of academia and academic research. In his article “The New Intellectuals,” Richard Reeves (2006) writes that academia copes with the ever increasing mass of research by dividing broad topic areas into specialized fields of study. Although this action might make the life of a scholar less taxing, it defeats the purpose of intellectual activity, i.e., to contribute significantly to humanity’s knowledge base and to promote the general well-being of the public. He laments that scholars have often taken the easy way out, sacrificing dedication to intellectual endeavors in order to gain career enhancement. Reeves states that scholars “are under pressure to publish in peer-reviewed journals and so have little incentive to reach out to a broader audience” (2006, The dangers of departmentalizing, para. 1). Academics have repeatedly let their own self-interest and desire for simplicity take precedent over their commitment to a general quest for knowledge. In his concern, Reeves echoes Donald R. Swanson, who wrote earlier:
Of particular interest to me is the possibility that information in one specialty might be of value in another without anyone becoming aware of the fact. Specialized literatures, or other “units” of knowledge, that do not intercommunicate by citing one another may nonetheless have many implicit textual interconnections based on meaning. Indeed the number of unintended or implicit text-based connections within the literature of science may greatly exceed the number that are explicit, because there are far more possible combinations of units (that potentially could be related) than there are units. The connection explosion may be more portentous than the information explosion. (2001, p. 13)
Reeves stresses that the answer to this dilemma can be found through re-examining and redefining the nature of intellectual activity. He writes: “Public intellectual work must be seen as a collective, rather than merely individual, activity. This is partly because there are vast reservoirs of knowledge in one field of work that are entirely untapped by another” (2006, The importance of collaboration, para. 1). Reeves believes that collective work should involve extensive interaction between scholars in different fields and that through this process, unanticipated yet welcome benefits will appear. One form of collective work that Reeves advocates is the mining of what is often termed “undiscovered public knowledge.”
Important for any paper on the topic of undiscovered public knowledge are several groundbreaking works by Roy Davies, Neil R. Smalheiser, Linda C. Smith, Mark A. Spasser, and Donald R. Swanson. Published primarily between 1986 and 2000, articles by these authors focus on defining undiscovered public knowledge (e.g., Davies, 1989; Smith, 2000; Spasser, 1997; Swanson, 1986, 1987). Other academics, often writing more recently, address the issue of how the proposed links between masses of information can be determined and how the linking of various fields can be facilitated (e.g., Davies, 1990; Foskett, 1995, Hiebert, Gallimore, & Stigler, 2002; Swanson & Smalheiser, 1997, 1999; Weed, 2006; Willinsky, 2000a, 2000b). These scholars are especially interested in studying how computers and information technology can be used to discover connections or degrees of relatedness between already existing written sources of information. It should be noted that many of the authors who support the idea of linking undiscovered public knowledge have advanced degrees in the natural sciences and extensive training in information technology and computer software development (Baptista, Rodrigues, & Machado, 1999; Smith, 2000; Spasser, 1997). According to Steve Fuller (2005) in his book The Intellectual, these fields have shown the greatest desire to develop a comprehensive, better organized, more transparent, user-friendly system of knowledge classification, storage, and retrieval. As a result of his observations, Fuller issues a type of challenge to scholars in the social sciences and humanities to take part in the effort to gain insights through exposure to various academic specialties.
In an attempt to explain why the accumulation of human knowledge remains fragmented and why faculty members at institutions of higher education prefer specialization, Swanson (1993) points out that modern-day academics are being overwhelmed by new articles, reports, and summaries of laboratory findings. As a result, these scholars are forced to pick and choose—often haphazardly—between available materials. Even some of the work that is read attentively cannot be digested properly. In order to resolve this issue or at least to create some relief, researchers choose more and more limited specialties. Scholars in one field are often ignorant of important contributions in another field. Writing on the same topic—fragmentation and specialization— eight years later, Swanson sees no improvement:
In response to the information explosion, specialties are somehow spontaneously created, then grow too large and split further into subspecialties without even a declaration of independence. One unintended result is the fragmentation of knowledge owing to inadequate cross-specialty communication. And as knowledge continues to grow, fragmentation will inevitably get worse because it is driven by the human imperative to escape inundation. (2001, p. 12)
The driving force behind the efforts of Swanson and other like-minded individuals in their work with undiscovered public knowledge is the belief that many intellectually sound but underappreciated publications will gain in worth and importance when considered in light of one another, that their interconnectedness can be discovered and highlighted through the use of computers and appropriate software, and that society will benefit as a result of these endeavors.
Writers on the topic of undiscovered public knowledge suggest that when two or more articles, monographs, or reports are related in subject matter or content, they can frequently be linked or connected via a bibliographic path. At first glance, the path might not be obvious. In fact, one challenge of finding the connection and interpreting the material within a broader context is that the texts often come from fields that have historically little or no contact. Scholars within one area might not pay attention to the work of scholars in another area, and venues for publication might be widely different. In this climate of non-interaction, researchers from library science and information systems have joined forces to create bibliographic methods of tracking down links, hidden ties, and promising relationships between publications (e.g., Roberts, 1990; Van de Sompel & Hochstenbach, 1999). D. J. Foskett (1995) advocates what he calls “the maximum exploitation of all new media and new technology” (para. 5) for the sake of increased knowledge, and he sees “a fruitful partnership” (from the title of his article) between librarians and computer programmers as a means to achieve this goal. Foskett envisions these two groups devising methods to compare lists of cited works in texts, to identify similar uses of title words, to examine similarities in tables of contents or indexes, and to detect commonalities in research techniques. Even with such a hopeful outlook, Foskett realizes that scholars face a daunting challenge. Although investigators might have the best of intentions and sufficient resources, certain connections will remain invisible. Problems or hindrances include the language(s) of texts, human error, false associations, differing research methodologies and practices, and limitations on computing power and technology accessibility (Harris, 1995; Krechmer, 1996; Swanson, 1993). Nevertheless, giving up in the face of obstacles can lead to an enormous intellectual and societal loss, and proponents of mining undiscovered public knowledge underline the importance of perseverance (Hiebert, Gallimore, & Stigler, 2002; Reeves, 2006; Swanson, 1990). Most recently, articles have appeared, expressing the view that the national security of the United States can be strengthened and improved by mining undiscovered public knowledge (e.g., Banerjee, Hu, & Yoo, 2005; Swanson, Smalheiser, & Bookstein, 2001).
Initially, advocates of this new approach to bibliographic studies focused their attention on the field of medicine and sought connections between articles in various medical journals, conference proceedings, and published findings from fields such as biology and physiology. Many people were quite enthusiastic about this type of project because they saw a possibility of sudden, dramatic advancements in medicine and patient care. Davies (1989, 1990), Harris (1995), Swanson (1986, 1987, 1990), and Swanson and Smalheiser (1997, 1999) characterize the field of scholarly literature as a large, complicated network of published resources. A reader can navigate the network and find publications related in topic and complementary in content by finding and choosing the right bibliographic roads such as similar words or phrases within the title or text, similar keywords, and similar citation sources. Davies, Harris, Smalheiser, and Swanson admit that it is possible that two related publications might not be able to be found by means of a direct bibliographic link. In those instances, researchers would need to follow a less direct route, one involving several types of links or intermediary stages.
There have been significant efforts on the part of scholars with a background in information technology or library science to find practical applications for the theoretical discussions conducted by Davies, Smalheiser, Smith, Spasser, and Swanson. For example, John Willinsky, in “Proposing a Knowledge Exchange Model for Scholarly Publishing,” writes about the so-called Knowledge Exchange Model (KEM) in Canada. Willinsky describes the undertaking as a compilation of “borrowed and duly cited . . . ideas drawn from those [individuals] rethinking information systems and scholarly publishing” (2000b, Introduction, para. 8). The project features “a series of experimental websites that have sought to demonstrate the public value of research by directly linking a body of scholarship to, in one case, a series of newspaper articles on an education topic; in another, to the review of a provincial educational policy; and in a third, to an online professional development program for teachers” (2000b, Introduction, para. 8). Another Canadian initiative, The Public Knowledge Project, “is dedicated to improving the scholarly and public quality of research” (PKP, n.d., What is the public knowledge project?, para. 1) and seeks to introduce members of the general public to the work of scholars by focusing attention on the practical applications of academic research. Currently three groups have joined together to run this project: the Simon Fraser University Library, the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University, and the faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia. The official web site states:
The partnership brings together faculty members, librarians, and graduate students dedicated to exploring whether and how new technologies can be used to improve the professional and public value of scholarly research. Its research program is investigating the social, economic, and technical issues entailed in the use of online infrastructure and knowledge management strategies to improve both the scholarly quality and public accessibility and coherence of this body of knowledge in a sustainable and globally accessible form. It continues to be an active player in the open access movement, as it provides the leading open source software for journal and conference management and publishing. (PKP, n.d., What is the public knowledge project?, para. 1)
In general, the ideas discussed above find favor in environments in which researchers elect to use information technology to speed the process of finding complementary literatures. One should not, however, underestimate the importance of the human factor in a truly successful method of mining undiscovered public knowledge. Writers such as Baptista, Rodrigues, and Machado (1999), Foskett (1995), and Swanson and Smalheiser (1997, 1999) stress that researchers—not machines—are required to evaluate preliminary computer-generated results and eliminate search terms that appear to be irrelevant; in addition, these scholars must decide which documents to analyze. Moreover, researchers must agree on whichissues or questions to investigate and be able to set up the parameters of early computer investigations. A computer cannot have the inspiration for a project, determine its goals and objectives, interpret results, and predict the value of a particular scholarly undertaking to society in general. Technology facilitates research, but human beings develop the methodology and make the final decision concerning the use of any findings.
In the next section of our paper, Bob sketches a process in which students and faculty work together to compile, assemble, and organize data that have already been produced by others. In essence, he and his students are navigating the tricky network of bibliographic roadways. His description of student-faculty projects reveals aspects in which automation tools could play a supporting role, but it is refreshing to find an approach where they are not absolutely necessary.
PART TWO: PERSONAL NARRATIVE (Robert C. Evans)
I first was attracted to the idea of organizing “undiscovered public knowledge” as I searched for ways to involve my students in research. I had long ago realized that their ability to conduct serious literary analysis would be somewhat limited until they had had more exposure to the subject matter. Professors might be expected to produce knowledge by developing original thoughts, exploring new approaches, or engaging in innovative, pioneering analysis, but undergraduate and beginning graduate students do not yet have the training or expertise to allow most of them to engage in such activities. Many such students can, however, compile, assemble, and organize data that have already been produced by others. Tasks that might seem too “low-level” for professors to undertake can seem challenging and rewarding to students, especially when such projects result in publications of lasting value to scholars at all levels.
At this point, I wish to describe a few such projects undertaken by students at my university. Since much of my own scholarly research has focused on the seventeenth-century English poet Ben Jonson, many of the projects that I will describe have a distinctly Jonsonian focus, but I hope it will be obvious that the same kinds of procedures could easily be adapted to the study of any author, any literary topic, and indeed almost any kind of topic in almost any kind of field. There is, in fact, a practically limitless supply of potential projects for students to work on, if only because there is a practically endless supply of useful new data in all fields to be compiled and published.
The first of the “public knowledge” projects I supervised was titled “Ben Jonson in Recent General Scholarship, 1972-1996.” Prepared by John Burdett and Jonathan Wright, two graduate students at my university, it was published in volume 4 of the Ben Jonson Journal, which has been an outlet for most of these projects. The willingness of the BJJ to publish so many of these projects illustrates an important general point: the projects most likely to be published are the ones tailored to a specific audience. If the work done by students is of real value to specialists, the specialists will not care that the work has been done by students; instead, they will welcome it no matter what its source, because they will recognize its genuine value and its usefulness to their own work. The article by Burdett and Wright “focuses on more than three hundred books published since 1972 – books in which Jonson is discussed but in which he is not the primary focus” (151). Burdett and Wright first made a list of every one of Jonson’s works, including his dramas, his poems, his dramatic “masques,” and his prose works. They then searched for references to those works in the several hundred books they surveyed, so that in the end they had compiled a comprehensive index of all the discussions of all of Jonson’s works in more than three hundred titles not specifically devoted to Jonson. The value of their work (at least to Jonson scholars) should be obvious: thanks to their efforts, it is now possible for Jonsonians to trace in a few seconds information that otherwise would take hours (to say the least) of tedious and monotonous labor in a library. This project by Burdett and Wright, then, illustrates perfectly the value of “public knowledge” projects: two students did the difficult spadework that will now save all future “advanced” researchers enormous time and effort. They produced a work whose value will endure for as long as anyone is seriously interested in scholarship on Ben Jonson. In other words, they have made a permanently useful contribution to knowledge – one that may in fact outlast the usefulness of the more specialized work of many “advanced” professors. And, of course, Burdett and Wright have benefited as well: each of them now has a substantial publication to his credit. Each of them has contributed not simply to a paper read once by one professor and then put aside but to a project of permanent value to anyone seriously interested in Ben Jonson.
Another example of a “public knowledge” project was an article on Ben Jonson by Katie Magaw, who at the time she produced it was an advanced undergraduate English major at my school. Titled “Modern Books on Ben Jonson: A General Topical Index,” it sought “to survey the topical contents of more than a hundred modern books on Jonson,” beginning with one published in 1886 and “ending with a book published in the second half of 1998" (201). Magaw essentially compiled and coordinated the indexes of the scores of books she surveyed, but she did not stop there: when indexes were brief or underdeveloped, she included key words from the tables of contents, and she provided extensive cross-referencing. Thus, anyone interested in published commentary on (say) Jonson and poetry has only to consult Magaw’s index to discover references to that topic in more than twenty specific books. As with the article by Burdett and Wright, the one by Magaw will obviously save researchers at all levels – from beginning students to advanced scholars – an enormous amount of time and labor. And, because her work is of such obvious “objective” value, it will not be affected by the changing fads of scholarly fashion. Her article, in other words, will be permanently useful.
The same is true of the many similar articles that have been inspired by, and modeled on, the work of Burdett, Wright, and Magaw. In 1999, for instance, Clint Darby (an undergraduate education major at my school) published a supplement to Magaw’s work, covering books her article did not discuss. In 2000, Deborah Hill published a kind of “prequel” to the article by Burdett and Wright: whereas they had discussed references to Jonson in general scholarship from 1972 to 1996, she surveyed references from 1900 to 1972. More recently, in 2005 Eric W. Atkins, who started as an undergraduate English major at my school before receiving his master’s degree in English at another university, produced an article titled “References to Jonson in Scholarship on Shakespeare,” which surveys approximately 150 books, combing them for any reference to Jonson. Atkins, of course, has explored just the tip of an enormous iceberg; there are literally thousands of monographs on Shakespeare in which his Jonson (his great friend and rival) is mentioned, and it goes without saying that the kinds of work that Atkins and these other students have done on Jonson could easily be replicated in work dealing with Shakespeare himself and with practically any other important author or topic, whether in literary studies or in any other field.
We hope that the examples briefly mentioned here will suggest the kinds of ways in which students can be involved in scholarly projects that are substantive, solid, and of enduring academic value. Since we began to engage students in our research, we have reaped personal and professional benefits. We are more satisfied with our careers, and we feel energized as a result of student enthusiasm in the classroom. From comments received from reviewers of published projects, we know that these works fill a gap in the body of existing research.
References
Baptista, A. A., Rodrigues, E., & Machado, A. B. (1999). Online publishing as a support for scholarly
communication in dynamic knowledge communities. In J. W. T. Smith, A. Ardö, & P. Linde (Eds.),
Redefining the information chain—new ways and voices: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP conference
held at the University of Karlskrona/Ronneby, Sweden, 10-12 May 1999 (pp. 236-249). Washington,
D. C.: ICCC Press.
Banerjee, P., Hu, X., & Yoo, I. (2005). Discovering the wealth of public knowledge: An approach to early
threat detection. AIS SIGSEMIS Bulletin, 2(3,4), 77-85.
Davies, R. (1989). The creation of new knowledge by information retrieval and classification.
Journal of Documentation, 45(4), 273-301.
Davies, R. (1990). Documentation note: Generating new knowledge by retrieving information.
Journal of Documentation, 46(4), 368-372.
Foskett, D. J. (1995). Libraries and information systems: A fruitful partnership. Paper presented at the 1995
Conference of the Canadian Association for Information Science at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
Retrieved December 1, 2006, from http://www.cais-acsi.ca/proceedings/ 1995/foskett_1995.pdf
Fuller, S. (2005). The intellectual: The positive power of negative thinking. Cambridge, UK: Icon Books.
Harris, J. (1995). Educational telecomputing projects: Information collections. The Computing Teacher, 22(7), 44-48.
Hiebert, J., Gallimore, R., & Stigler, J. W. (2002). A knowledge base for the teaching profession:
What would it look like and how can we get one? Educational Researcher, 31(5), 3-15.
Krechmer, K. (1996). Recommendations for the global information highway: A matter of standards.
Information Standards Quarterly, 8 (1), 1-5.
PKP: Public Knowledge Project. (n.d.). Retrieved October 8, 2006, from http://pkp.sfu.ca/
Reeves, R. (2006, June). The new intellectuals. RSA Journal: e-JOURNAL, 6, Article 759.
Retrieved October 8, 2006, from http://www.rsa.org.uk/journal/article_load.asp?articleID=759
Roberts, D. (1990). Documentation note: Knowledge creation by information retrieval.
Journal of Documentation, 46(4), 365-367.
Smith, L. C. (2000). Knowledge Discovery, Capture and Creation. Bulletin of the American Society
for Information Science, 26(2). Retrieved October 8, 2006, from http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Jan-00/track_1.html
Spasser, M. A. (1997). The enacted fate of undiscovered public knowledge. Journal of the American
Society for Information Science, 48(8), 707-717.
Swanson, D. R. (1986). Undiscovered public knowledge. The Library Quarterly, 56(2), 103-118.
Swanson, D. R. (1987). Two medical literatures that are logically but not bibliographically connected.
Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 38(4), 228-233.
Swanson, D. R. (1990). Medical literature as a potential source of new knowledge.
Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, 78(1), 29-37.
Swanson, D. R. (1993). Intervening in the life cycles of scientific knowledge. Library Trends, 41, 606-631.
Swanson, D. R. (2001). On the fragmentation of knowledge, the connection explosion, and assembling
other people’s ideas. Bulletin of the American Society for information Science and Technology,
27(3), 12-14.
Swanson, D. R., & Smalheiser, N. R. (1997). An interactive system for finding complementary literatures:
A stimulus to scientific discovery. Artificial Intelligence, 91, 183-203.
Swanson, D. R., & Smalheiser, N. R. (1999). Implicit text linkages between MEDLINE records:
Using Arrowsmith as an aid to scientific discovery. Library Trends, 48(1), 48-59.
Swanson, D. R., Smalheiser, N. R., & Bookstein, A. (2001). Information discovery from complementary
literatures: Categorizing viruses as potential weapons. Journal of the American Society for Information
Science and Technology, 52, 797-812.
Van de Sompel, H., & Hochstenbach, P. (1999). Reference linking in hybrid library environments. Parts 1-3.
D-Lib Magazine, 5(4), 5(10). Retrieved October 8, 2006, from http://www.dlib.org/back.html
Weed, M. (2006). Undiscovered public knowledge: The potential of research synthesis approaches in tourism
research. Current Issues in Tourism, 9(3), 256-268.
Willinsky, J. (2000a). If only we knew: Increasing the public value of Social Science research.
New York: Routledge.
Willinsky, J. (2000b). Proposing a knowledge exchange model for scholarly publishing.
Current Issues in Education, 3(6). Retrieved October 8, 2006, from
http://cie.ed.asu.edu/volume3/number6/
Appendix A
Sample List of Student Projects on “Public Knowledge” Supervised by Robert C. Evans
Atkins, E. W. (2005). References to Jonson in scholarship on Shakespeare. Ben Jonson Journal, 12, 203-216.
Burdett, J., & Wright, J. (1997). Ben Jonson in recent general scholarship, 1972-1996. Ben Jonson Journal, 4, 151-79.
Crocker, M. W. (1996). Moulsworth’s “Memorandum”: An analytical concordance. In A. Depas-Orange &
R. C. Evans (Eds.), “The birthday of my self”: Martha Moulsworth, Renaissance poet (pp. 119-121).
Princeton: Critical Matrix: The Princeton Journal of Women, Gender, and Culture.
Darby, C. (1999). Modern books on Ben Jonson: A general topical index (first supplement),
Ben Jonson Journal 6, 261-75.
Evans, R. C. (Ed.). (2000). Ben Jonson’s major plays: Summaries of modern monographs. West Cornwall, CT:
Locust Hill. [Contains work by four students.]
Hill, D. (2000). Ben Jonson in general scholarship, 1900-1972. Ben Jonson Journal, 7, 517-37.
Magaw, K. (1998). Modern books on Ben Jonson: A general topical index. Ben Jonson Journal, 5, 201-47.
Probst, N. P. (1996). A topical index to Jonson’s Discoveries. Ben Jonson Journal 3, 153-78.
Appendix B
Preface from One of the Published Books Involving Faculty and Student Compiling of “Undiscovered Public Knowledge”
Evans, R. C. (Ed.). (2000). Ben Jonson’s major plays: Summaries of modern monographs. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press.
PREFACE
Purposes and Uses
Ben Jonson has long been recognized as perhaps the most important dramatist, other than Shakespeare, of the English Renaissance. Interest in Jonson has especially flourished in the twentieth century, particularly in its latter half. New books and articles about his works have been published at an exponential rate, a fact that has made it increasingly difficult even for dedicated Jonsonians to master all the relevant scholarship. Four standard reference guides to secondary work on Jonson have been published and are very useful, but all four guides are now twenty to thirty years out of date:
Brock, D. H., & Welsh, J. M. (1974). Ben Jonson: A quadricentennial bibliography, 1947-1972. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow;
Lehrman, W. D. (1980). The plays of Ben Jonson: A reference guide. Boston: G. K. Hall;
Judkins, D. C. (1982). The non-dramatic works of Ben Jonson: A reference guide. Boston: G. K. Hall;
Godshalk, W. L. (1977). Ben Jonson. In T. P. Logan & D. S. Smith (Eds.), The new intellectuals: A survey and bibliography of recent studies in English Renaissance drama (pp. 3-116). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
The most significant deficiency of all four guides, however, is that none of them covers monographs (book-length studies) in any significant detail. Instead, a three-hundred-page book is typically summarized in as many lines as are devoted to a twenty-page article. Students or scholars seeking information about articles on Jonson will thus find the available reference guides useful, but anyone seeking a truly detailed overview of the most important thinking about Jonson’s major plays will find the guides somewhat limited and therefore disappointing. Paradoxically, the sources likely to be most helpful to most serious students of the playwright—that is, book-length studies, usually written by the most committed and dedicated Jonsonian scholars—are precisely the sources the current reference guides treat in least detail.
The present book seeks to remedy this unfortunate situation. Beginning with the birth of modern Jonson scholarship in the late nineteenth century and proceeding forward to the present day, it focuses exclusively on monographic studies of Jonson’s major plays. Whenever a book-length study of Jonson discusses one of the plays, the main points of that discussion are summarized, often in great detail. The present book, then, neither duplicates nor replaces the previous research guides; rather, it seeks to supplement them by filling a major gap in their coverage.
The present volume is also likely to be helpful to students and scholars for a number of other reasons, however, including the following:
- Most libraries (especially public libraries and the libraries of smaller colleges) do not own large collections of Jonson monographs. This volume, then, seeks to give the patrons of such libraries access to a handy one-volume overview of nearly all the English-language books on Jonson published in the last hundred or so years.
- This book will allow scholars and librarians with limited access to Jonson scholarship to know which monographs it would be most useful to order through interlibrary loan.
- The present volume, if shelved in reference collections, should give patrons of even large libraries access to highly useful information, especially if some of the books it discusses happen to be unavailable when a patron needs them.
- Because this volume includes an extensive topical index, it should still be useful even to libraries or scholars that do happen to possess all the books it synopsizes. The book seeks to provide a very handy guide to which topics are discussed in which monographs on Jonson.
- Because the entries are organized chronologically, readers should be able to get a very quick but reliable sense of how scholarly debates about Jonson in general (or about a particular play) have developed over the decades. Readers should also be able to see which topics have proven most important (or have recurred most frequently) in previous discussions of Jonson, and readers should also be able to follow the development of various trends in literary criticism.
- Because a number of the monographs on Jonson are not indexed, this book will make it easier for readers to use those studies, since it often indicates the precise pages on which discussions of particular plays appear. Although such page listings cannot be found in the relevant monographs themselves, they do often appear here.
- Because the coverage of the monographs is fairly thorough, owning the present book should be the next best thing to owning actual copies of all the studies it discusses. For example, by reading the summaries of one particular scholar’s comments on all the major plays, a reader will be able to experience the next closest thing to having read the original book itself.
The present book, in short, is intended to be useful not only to seasoned scholars of Jonson but also to beginning students. It is meant to appeal to readers who have access to well-stocked libraries but also (and perhaps especially) to readers who use collections housing only a few titles on Jonson. It seeks to compete with none of the current very fine bibliographical guides to Jonsonian research but instead hopes to supplement them all.
Coverage
The present volume is devoted mainly to English-language monographs published during the modern period, beginning with the pioneering study by J. A. Symonds first published in 1886 and extending to volumes published as recently as the very end of 1999. It does not include essay collections, since the individual essays they include are likely to have been summarized already in existing or forthcoming annotated bibliographies. For the same reasons, it does not cover individual editions of particular plays, although it does cover the monumental Oxford edition of all the works. This edition, prepared by C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, was published between 1925 and 1952. More than any other work of modern scholarship, the Oxford edition helped spur and facilitate the twentieth century’s interest in Jonson, and the discussions it offers of individual plays are among the best they have ever received, particularly in the case of the very early and very late plays.
The present volume deliberately focuses on Jonson’s dramas, rather than on his poems and masques, not only because the dramas are still the works of most interest to most readers but also (and especially) because a guide to research on the masques and poems would require a volume (or volumes) of its own. The sheer number of the poems and masques makes it wise to consider them separately. The coverage of this book, moreover, is deliberately limited to the major plays—that is, the canonical works whose authorship is definitively Jonson’s and that survive in fairly substantial texts. “Lost,” fragmentary, or disputed works (such as Richard Crookback, Mortimer His Fall, or The Bloody Brother) are therefore not included, nor is Eastward Hoe, since the precise extent of Jonson’s involvement in that work is extremely difficult to determine. The Sad Shepherd, however, is included, not only because it is such a lengthy fragment and because its authorship is undisputed, but also because it is generally so highly regarded and has therefore been the subject of so much important commentary.
Explanation of Annotations
The plays as a whole are treated in alphabetical order; commentary on each particular play is then reported chronologically, so that readers can see how the critical tradition on each work has evolved. The passages summarized are those offering extended, substantial discussions of each play; however, the total number of pages on which briefer, scattered remarks occur has also been reported when the index of the book in question has made it possible to provide such information. The following numbers are given, for instance, at the conclusion of the summary of Calvin Thayer’s commentary on The Alchemist: “84-111; 19p.” These numbers indicate that Thayer’s major discussion occurs on pages 84 through 111 but that the play is mentioned, additionally, on nineteen other pages in his book. In some cases, authors provide only scattered or incidental references to particular plays; in such cases the annotation included here may therefore be as simple as the following: “13p.” When a monograph comments on a play in passing and lists no specific page numbers to indicate where the play is discussed, the phrase “passim” is used.
The following summaries concentrate especially on any ideas that make a particular author’s commentary unique or unusual. There seemed little point in summarizing, over and over again, the standard statements or facts repeated by numerous writers. Often it was possible to synopsize even apparently lengthy discussions fairly quickly, since often even extended discussions of the plays are devoted mainly to summaries of their plots. The present volume includes its own brief plot summaries of the plays so that commentators’ references to characters and events can quickly be placed in context.
When the original monograph does not include an index of its own, that fact is indicated by placing an asterisk (*) in front of the boldfaced last name of the author. The present book, therefore, provides rudimentary indexes for a number of books that were not indexed when they were first published. In this way as in the others mentioned above, this study should make some of the best work on Jonson more accessible both to beginning students and to seasoned scholars alike. |
