barrie’s book is in a book…
October 31, 2014 3:20 pm Leave your thoughts
Some time ago, back in 2011 in fact, we had an e-mail from Dr. Annette Gilbert. She said that she was organising a conference and writing about ‘Appropriated Literatures’ and she wondered if we could send a copy of The Ghost in the Fog for inclusion in the book.Well. The book – Reprint Appropriation (&) Literature is now out in the bookshops, and Annette kindly sent us a copy – and a very fine thing it is indeed.
The Ghost in the Fog is in very good company, the book has a huge amount of works covering many different forms of appropriation – as she says ‘Since the 1960s, writers have radically challenged the notion of originality and creativity in literature. They stopped writing new texts for their books and instead drew upon pre-existing books: canonical texts of world literature or intellectual history are transcribed by hand, edited, altered, alphabetically arranged or simply copied and republished under one’s own name. By now Appropriation Literature amounts to a critical mass that has generated its own tradition. The present anthology is the first to give an international overview of the phenomenon, presenting 126 books and projects by over 90 authors.Included is Derek Beaulieu’s Flatland (which, as you may know, is one of Barrie’s favourite books).
And of course the great Tom Phillips’ A HUMUMENT…
It also includes a work based on another book close to Barrie’s heart: In this Dark Wood by Elisabeth Tonnard. The book ‘is a modern gothic’, Tonnard paired ‘images of people walking alone in night-time city streets with 90 different English translations collected from the first lines of Dante’s Inferno’. 
There are a host of other works in the book, and to choose one above another would be doing Annettes’s encyclopaedic research a disservice. So, delve in. The book is available on Amazon. Just one click away…And no, we’re not on commission.
Categorised in: book release, collections, reviews
This post was written by caseroom2020