Fall 2015, the Sabbaticalization: Day Two

Reading with only one functional contact lens is not much fun.  (For those who have asked: reading glasses won't fix this particular situation.)  Nevertheless:

1) Reading: read all of Patricia Demers' Heaven upon Earth and J. W. Cunningham's A World Without Souls (c. 1806).  A World without Souls was a religious allegory that enjoyed some popularity for the first couple decades of the nineteenth century before going poof: Gustavus, who has been raised in near-isolation in Switzerland (traditional home of virtue), is taken to the mysterious city of O. (stand-in for London), where he encounters lots of irreligious types and returns home, faith unshaken.  Some echoes of Rousseau.  Cunningham is now best remembered (er, by people like yours truly) as the author of a popular it-narrative, The Velvet Cushion.

2) Writing: getting my secondary sources in gear for chapter one, focusing on constructions of audience and readership--here, the overlapping constituencies of women, children, and working-class readers (frequently figured in terms of each other).  

3) Miscellaneous: answered editor's queries about a proof.