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Editing the Rubaiyat: two case-studies and a prospectus

Editing the Rubaiyat: two case-studies and a prospectus. Daniel Karlin.
Victorian Poetry, 46 (2008), nr 1, p. 87-103.

The Variorum and Definitive Edition of the Poetical and Prose Writings of Edward FitzGerald is an enjoyably preposterous example of Edwardian bookmaking–if the latter epithet may be applied to an American product. It was published in New York, by Doubleday, Page, and Company, in seven volumes, the first in 1902 and the last in 1903; though “published” is not quite the right word for an edition which, we are told on a half-title page, “consists of twenty-five sets on Japanese paper, one hundred sets on hand-made paper.

Much ado about nothing in the Rubáiyát

Much ado about nothing in the Rubáiyát. D. Karlin.
In: FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Popularity and neglect. Ed. by A. Poole et al. London, Anthem Press, 2011. pp. 115-26.

Karlin probes the metaphysical gap between FitzGerald’s idea of ‘nothing’ and Tennyson’s, tracing the antecedents of the former in an English literary tradition that includes Shakespeare, Donne, and Rochester.