Ransom Center Magazine

About Elizabeth S. Page

Page oversees the Harry Ransom Center's communications, marketing, and media outreach efforts. She holds B.A. in anthropology and a master’s degree in historical administration and museum studies from the University of Kansas.

Inspiration and insight in the papers of author Julian Barnes

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by VANESSA GUIGNERY

In the fall of 2001, I was in Normandy with author Julian Barnes to take part in an event around his most successful novel, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), when he told me with a wry smile that I would soon be going to Austin, Texas. As I looked at him quizzically, he explained that he had decided to place his archive at the Harry Ransom Center. At that time, I had completed my doctoral thesis on “Postmodernism and modes of blurring in Julian Barnes’s fiction” at the University of La Sorbonne in Paris and published books and articles of literary analysis of Barnes’s work, but I had never examined a writer’s archive and I had never been to the United States. [Read more…] about Inspiration and insight in the papers of author Julian Barnes

ABOUT VANESSA GUIGNERY
Guignery is professor of Contemporary English and Postcolonial Literature at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France, and author of Julian Barnes from the Margins Exploring the Writer’s Archives (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).

University’s foundational rare book collection acquired a century ago

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Image: Curator Aaron Pratt is the early and rare book specialist on staff at the Ransom Center. The volumes in the Wrenn Library have multiple layers of research value, including by author, genre, and the way they were created and collected.

Wrenn Library inspired journey that led to today’s Ransom Center

One hundred years ago today, The University of Texas acquired a collection of 6,000 first and rare editions of mostly seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English and American authors, in addition to notable manuscripts of the Bronte sisters, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and the Brownings. This collection, known as the Wrenn Library, would plant the seed for what is today the Harry Ransom  Center.  [Read more…] about University’s foundational rare book collection acquired a century ago

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