The following publication from Pickering & Chatto Publishers which may be of interest to some members.

Continuations to Sidney’s Arcadia, 1607–1867 is now available. Continuations to Sidney’s Arcadia is an all Australian-production; the general editor is Marea Mitchell (Macquarie University), and volume editors are Dianne Osland (University of Newcastle) and Ann Lange (Macquarie University).

Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia has held a significant place in literary imagination since its inception over 430 years ago. William Shakespeare and Samuel Richardson both took inspiration from it. Arcadia has a complex publishing history which has seem it extracted or rewritten many times.Sustained adaptations of the work are less common and can be limited to just six texts. Of these, only Weamys’s continuation of 1651 exists in a modern scholarly edition.

This project presents the remaining five as well as two short supplements that attempt to bridge the gap between Sidney’s original and revised versions of the work. All the texts are rare, with two versions being particularly obscure. Publication of these volumes allows for serious scholarly comparison as well as re-interpretation. An extensive general introduction analyses the history of Arcadia’s reception and the place of each version in that history. Consideration is given to authorship and editorship and how these were defined overtime. Each text is prefaced by its own introduction and includes a bibliography of key material relating to the edition. It will be of interest to scholars of seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature as well as those who study print culture and the history of the book.

Pickering & Chatto have generously offered ANZAMEMS members a code which can be use to get 25% off the RRP of Continuations to Sidney’s Arcadia.

Members should contact ANZAMEMS Communications Officer, Marina Gerzic for the code.

Many thanks to Eleanor Hooker at Pickering & Chatto for organising this for ANZAMEMS.