“Edward Young and Samuel Richardson’s Correspondence” is the subject of a talk at 7:30 p.m. April 5 in Sydnor Performance Hall, Schewel Hall by Dr. James E. May, associate professor of English, Penn State University. The talk is co-sponsored by the Ida Wise East Memorial Lecture and Phi Beta Kappa and is free and open to the public.
Samuel Richardson was an 18th-century English writer and printer. He is best known for his three novels: Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady (1748) and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753). Edward Young was an English poet of the same time period, best known for Night Thoughts.
Dr. May is an associate professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University’s DuBois Campus. His specialization is in analytical bibliography, book and printing history in the eighteenth century, and textual editing.
For two decades he has surveyed rare books and manuscript sales for The Scriblerian (and more recently for Swift Studies), compiled Section 1 (Bibliographical and Print History Studies) of The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography, and edited The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer.
He edited “The Life of Young” in the Lives of the Poets for the Yale edition of The Works of Samuel Johnson. His recent publications include: “The Authoritative Editions of Smollett’s Complete History of England and his comparable study of the publication and text of Smollett’s Continuation of the Complete History of England; New Contexts for Eighteenth-Century British Fiction, edited by Christopher Johnson (2011); “Collected Editions of The Complaint: Or, Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality to 1765” in Eighteenth-Century Poetry; and “On the Trail of Edmund Curll” in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (2011).
Dr. May is editing the correspondence of Samuel Richardson and Edward Young for the Cambridge edition of Samuel Richardson. He is completing a descriptive bibliography of Young’s writings to 1775 and has begun a descriptive bibliography of works by Jonathan Swift.
The Ida Wise East Lecture series was established in 1979 by an endowment gift from Margaret East Nelson of Norfolk, Va., in memory of her mother, Ida Wise East, and in recognition of the lifelong interest of the East and Nelson families in the humanities.
03/29/2012, University of Lynchburg Communications and Marketing