Dr. Frank Felsenstein will be giving a presentation entitled, “From the Typewriter to the Internet: Editing Smollett for the Twenty-First Century,” on Tuesday, February 21 in Bracken Library 104. Continue reading to see a flyer for the event as well as a short description from Dr. Felsenstein.

Having first published a scholarly edition of Tobias Smollett’s Travels as a Clarendon (Oxford University Press) volume in 1979, I was recently commissioned to re-edit the text by Broadview Press (2011). The two editions span from the era of the typewriter to the age of the internet. In the last thirty years, the editing of eighteenth-century texts has been transformed by new technology. My illustrated talk will explore some of the effects of these changes, what has been gained, and what might have been lost or misplaced in scholarship as a consequence of the digital revolution. I shall also wish to consider the Travels through France and Italy (1766) as an important manifestation of Enlightenment thinking, in an age that only two years later and in satirical response to Smollett (Laurence Sterne famously belittled him as “the learned Smelfungus”), was almost literally swept off its feet by the new vogue of sentimental journeying.