Editors: Dennis
Denisoff and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, eds.
An avant-garde magazine innovative in both form and content,
The Yellow Book was the defining
document of the decade it coloured as "the yellow nineties" and
remains central to the study of fin-de-siècle art, literature, and society. In
response to issues of access to the periodical itself and the lack of a
cohesive centre for aggregating scholarly commentary on The Yellow Book, editors Dennis Denisoff
and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra have turned to digital technology. The Yellow Nineties Online places The Yellow Book in the context of
related fin-de-siècle aesthetic periodicals and the transatlantic reviewing
mechanisms they generated. The site gives immediate open access to historical
documents, while preserving, in a regularly updated virtual form, periodicals
in danger of disintegration due to their crumbling, pulp-based and
chemical-bleached paper.
Most importantly, The
Yellow Nineties Online opens the pages of The Yellow Book and related periodicals to new forms of
reading and analysis by bringing the visualization technologies of our digital
age to bear on the material objects of fin-de-siècle print culture. In its
current phase, all 13 volumes of The
Yellow Book (1894-1897) are available in digitized form, and the first half
of the print run has been fully edited. The single-volume Pagan Review (1892) has been
included in this initial stage of site development because of its many
connections to The Yellow Book,
its extreme rarity (only two copies are known to be extant), and its expansion
of the publishing context from urban London to rural Sussex. The digitization
of these two periodicals and their respective paratextual materials allows users
to juxtapose key print documents of the aesthetic and decadent movements with
those coming out of the Celtic Revival and neo-paganism.
Denisoff and Janzen Kooistra provide introductory essays for
each individual volume as well as scholarly overviews of each magazine as
whole. Their editorial theory of text as socially and collaboratively produced
is made explicit in the Biographies section of the site. Here users can access
scholarly biographies on contributors to the periodicals published as well as
other individuals who made significant contributions to the 1890s in the areas
of culture, literature, visual art, book-design, publishing, and technological
innovation. In a series of meta-critical essays, the research team reflects on
the process of building The Yellow
Nineties Online and on the relationships between fin-de-siècle
periodicals and twenty-first century digital projects, both produced
collaboratively and serially, with a fixed starting point but a theoretically
continuous life span. All documents on The
Yellow Nineties Online are marked-up and fully searchable, and the
site has been peer-reviewed and federated by the Networked Interface of Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship
(NINES).
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