Wednesday, February 22, 2012

the Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain archive - the papers of a female Haitian anthropologist come to Stanford

Over the summer Stanford Libraries acquired the papers of Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain, a pioneering Haitian woman anthropologist. Fatoumata Seck, a grad student in the department of French and Italian, was responsible for bringing the collection to our attention. Thanks to support from the department, she has already processed it, making its contents available to researchers. Her engaging story about the collection and its journey to Stanford are recounted in her own words in ReMix, the SULAIR Newsletter.

"Discovering Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain: une grande intellectuelle Haitienne" by Fatoumata Seck

Thursday, February 16, 2012

New arrivals in French and Italian studies


A selection of books that have recently made their way to the library...

France
Aragon, André Breton, and Lionel Follet. Lettres à André Breton: 1918-1931. [Paris]: Gallimard, 2011.
Ayres-Bennett, Wendy, and Magali Seijido. Remarques et observations sur la langue française: histoire et évolution d'un genre. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2011.
Badiou, Alain. Entretiens. 1, 1981-1999. [Caen]: Nous, 2011.
Beasley, Faith Evelyn. Teaching Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Women Writers. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2011.
Beauvoir, Simone de, Margaret A. Simons, Marybeth Timmermann, and Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir. "The Useless Mouths", and Other Literary Writings. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011.
Blanchard, Jean-Vincent. Éminence: Cardinal Richelieu and the Rise of France. New York: Walker & Co, 2011.
Bonnefoy, Yves. Sous le signe de Baudelaire. Paris: Gallimard, 2011.
Cerquiglini-Toulet, Jacqueline. A New History of Medieval French Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.
Mouysset, Sylvie, Jean-Pierre Bardet, and François-Joseph Ruggiu. Car c'est moy que je peins: écritures de soi, individu et liens sociaux : Europe, XVe-XXe siècle. Toulouse: CNRS, 2010.
Murray, Brittany, Diane Perpich, and Fadela Amara.Taking French feminism to the streets: Fadela Amara and the rise of Ni Putes Ni Soumises. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011.
Paige, Nicholas D. Before Fiction: The Ancien Régime of the Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.
Palmer, Susan J. The New Heretics of France: Minority Religions, La République, and the Government-Sponsored "War on Sects". New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Pastorello, Thierry. Sodome à Paris: fin XVIIIe-milieu XIXe siècle, l'homosexualité masculine en construction. [Paris]: Creaphis, 2011.
Skornicki, Arnault. L'économiste, la cour et la patrie: l'économie politique dans la France des Lumières. Paris: CNRS, 2011.
Tsien, Jennifer Shianling. The Bad Taste of Others: Judging Literary Value in Eighteenth-Century France. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.
Voltaire. Un jeu de lettres: 1723-1778.  Edited by Nicholas Cronk, et al. Orléans: Paradigme, 2011.



 Italy
Anselmi, Gian Mario, and Gino Ruozzi. Banchetti letterari: cibi, pietanze e ricette nella letteratura italiana da Dante a Camilleri. Roma: Carocci, 2011.
Asquer, Enrica. Storia intima dei ceti medi: una capitale e una periferia nell'Italia del miracolo economico. Roma [etc.]: Laterza, 2011.
Beltrami, Pietro G. La metrica italiana. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011.
Canova, Gianni, and Luisella Farinotti. Atlante del cinema italiano: corpi, paesaggi, figure del contemporaneo. Milano: Garzanti, 2011.
Carotti, Carlo. Le donne, la famiglia, il lavoro nel cinema di Pietro Germi. Milano: Lampi di stampa, 2011.
Dante poeta e italiano: legato con amore in un volume : mostra di manoscritti e stampe antiche della raccolta di Livio Ambrogio : Roma, Palazzo Incontro, 21 giugno-31 luglio 2011 : catalogo. Roma: Salerno, 2011.
Francesco Petrarca, 1304-1374 : atti del XXVI Simposio internazionale di studi italo-tedeschi "Francesco Petrarca nel 700o anniversario della nascita" = Akten des XXVI. Internationalen Symposiums deutsch-italienischer Studien "Francesco petrarca zur 700. WiederKehr des Geburtstages." Merano : Accademia di studi italo-tedeschi, [2011].
Fukushima, Osamu. An Etymological Dictionary for Reading Boccaccio's Decameron. Firenze: F. Cesati, 2011.
Gavitt, Philip. Gender, Honor, and Charity in Late Renaissance Florence. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.


Lucht, Hans. Darkness Before Daybreak: African Migrants Living on the Margins in Southern Italy Today. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
Mattone, Antonello, and Pinuccia F. Simbula, eds. La pastorizia mediterranea: storia e diritto, secoli XI-XX. Roma: Carocci, 2011.
Pignotti, Lamberto, and Stefania Stefanelli. Scrittura verbovisiva e sinestetica. Pasian di Prato (Udine): Campanotto, 2011.
Viroli, Maurizio, and Antony Shugaar. The Liberty of Servants: Berlusconi's Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

Friday, February 10, 2012

Series searching now available in SearchWorks

One of the features in the legacy catalog, Socrates, but missing in SearchWorks, was the ability to search for a series in the "basic search." I am pleased to report that this is no longer the case.

SearchWorks now offers searching by series in the simple search using the pull-down menu.

To see how this works, try searching "Collection de documents inédits" as a series - this brings up the individual titles in the "Collection de documents inédits sur l'histoire de France" (as well as titles from several other series with similar names like the "Collection de documents inédits sur l'histoire économique de la Révolution française."). To bring up the record for the entire series, you can search the series as a title, but the record is too general for most needs, it notes that the titles are cataloged separately. Some journals which have many issues with thematic titles are also cataloged in this way, for example Yale French Studies.

Some of the other important series that may be of interest include:

Textes de la Renaissance
Faux titre
Collections de l'école française de Rome
Civiltà letteraria italiana
Manoscritti datati d'Italia

Many scholarly works in both French and Italian are published in long series. Works published by scholarly associations or university departments are some examples, or by major publishing houses, such as the various series entitled "Storia d'Italia."

FYI : Unfortunately there still exist some series whose cataloging is inconsistent, with some titles not being cataloged separately, and others listed in the catalog as separate titles but without a series. But if you are stuck, sometimes it helps to search by series.

Monday, February 6, 2012

Recently acquired rare and antiquarian, December and January 2012

Dupont, Paul-François. Essais pratiques d'imprimerie, précédés d'une notice historique. Typographie-lithographie. Paris: Impr. P. Dupont, 1849.
A printer’s specimen produced for the Paris Industrial Exposition of 1848, with examples of printers’ types, lithography, color printing, including 20 colored prints.

Les Femmes. Paris: Comité mondial des femmes contre la guerre et le facisme, 1937. A French magazine covering the cultural, social, and political interests of women in the 1930s. Wonderful illustrations! 

Perrault, Charles. Les hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant ce siecle: avec leurs portraits au naturel. Paris: Antoine Dezallier, 1696-1700.
from vendor’s description: “FIRST EDITION, first issue, of this impressive French portrait gallery, representing the greatest Frenchmen in the arts and sciences of the "Grand Siècle." These 103 portraits are accompanied by brief biographical texts. The portraits are the work of some of the best artists of the time...”

DU ROURE, Jacques. LA PHILOSOPHIE DIVISEE EN TOVTES SES PARTIES, établie sur des principes évidents & expliquée en tables et par discovrs, ou particuliers ou tirez des anciens, & des nouveaux auteurs & principalement des Peripateticiens et de Descartes [- Tome II.]. Paris, François Clouzier, 1654.
By an early follower of Descartes, this is the first work to apply Cartesian ideas rigorously to a complete philosophical system.

[DIÈRES]. LA PHILOSOPHOMANIE, Poëme, ou la Maladie des Têtes à Systèmes, Ainsi que celles des Professeurs de doctrines étranges et bizarres; Ouvrage métaphysique et moral sur l’état naturel du Genre-Humain, voué par lui-même à la Folie et à la Charlatanerie. A la suite sont une Lettre sur la conduite politique de la faction des Jacobins en France, et une Satyre attribuée au même Auteur. Le tout publié par un de ses amis. Rouen, [no printer, publisher or date, 1794].
From the vendor’s description: “First edition of this bitter satire, lampooning the philosophical deliberations which led to the Terreur, partly written as a dialogue between two inmates of the lunatic asylum of Charenton. Both end tragically, one poisoned, the other committing suicide.”
brought to you by...
Sarah Sussman, curator of French and Italian Collections