There is a new publication at COVE Editions that has now successfully gone through peer review: William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City, edited by Seth Reno and Allison Hamilton. The text would be next-to-impossible to get published through a traditional press since, as the edition states, “There is little scholarship on the novella, and it’s not commonly taught in high school or college classrooms.” The edition makes a strong case for its relevance to Victorianists: “Doom’s engagement with nineteenth-century science, environmental concerns, and the post-apocalyptic genre lend it much relevancy in the twenty-first century. It is also a unique story in the history of post-apocalyptic literature and Last Man narratives, both fashionable nineteenth-century genres that have sustained their popularity into the twenty-first century.”
The novel is now available also in COVE Studio for addition to an anthology and for multimedia annotation; it pairs nicely with other material at COVE and BRANCH that bears on climate and climate change, including:
- Nathan K. Hensley (Georgetown U) and John Patrick James (Georgetown U), “Soot Moth: Biston Betularia and the Victorian End of Nature”
- Carolyn Lesjak (Simon Fraser U), “1750 to the Present: Acts of Enclosure and Their Afterlife”
- Krista Lysack (King’s UC at Western U), “The Royal Charter Storm, 25-26 October 1859″
- Monique R. Morgan (Indiana U), “The Eruption of Krakatoa (also known as Krakatau) in 1883″
- Ellen Rosenman (U Kentucky), “On Enclosure Acts and the Commons”
- Gillen D’Arcy Wood (UIUC), “1816, The Year without a Summer”
If you have a work that you would like to have published at COVE or BRANCH, contact Dino Felluga (felluga@purdue.edu) for further guidance.