This was an interesting class. It was fun to see how Goblin Market was reprinted and redesigned to fit so many formats and appeal to such various audiences. I've read this poem in a previous class before and would not have expected it to be curated in a way to appeal to children. The fact that this story was redesigned through the years to go from something for children to read to being a part of Playboy is such an interesting and unexpected concept. With a few changes of the images, even if the text was printed in full and remained unchanged, this poem was now an appropriate children's tale. This was something I did not expect since the poem is so explicit and does have a lot of erotic references in the words. It was cool to look at how big an influence on the story these illustrations hold to how this poem is recieved. As well, I've also explored the exhibit that was presented to us today in previous courses but it was fun to look exclusively at this one piece by Rosetti...

One thing that stuck out to me in curating the various editions of Goblin Market was the dearth of paratextual info in earlier editions compared with editions from the mid-20th century onwards. I assume this reflects the material conditions of the Victorian period and early 20th century - either the technical or economic limitations preventing the inclusion of more comprehensive info regarding the date of publication, location of publication, etc. It made me wonder when exactly thorough paratext to open a book was commonplace in publishing. With respect to the particular edition I curated (the 1994 Gramery Books reprint of Florence Harrison's illustrated collection of Rossetti's poems), I found the context of its publication interesting - that it was published in the heyday of a renewed shcolarly interest in Rossetti's poetry and the illustrations which accompanied it, and that it provided an opportuntiy to collect/study such work in print at a time when original pressings...

This week's reading was truly shocking because of The Goblin Market's versatility in both interpretation, and in audience. While reading the poem initially, I immediately noticed the sexual connotations of the poem especially with the help of Professor Kooistra's annotations. However, I assumed because the poem was so sensual and sexual in both description and illustrations (the ones I had seen from previous readings of the poem) I never thought this poem could be targetted towards a young audience. However, after taking a closer look at Arthur Rackhams's illustrations, I noticed how his style of art focused immensley on children's innocent which to me was depicted by the soft pale faces of the characters and their rosy cheeks. The goblins were also extermely similar to animal like creatures in other children's books with a hint of fairy tale inspired drawings. Although the poem and its various illustartions prove its versetality in its analysis especially when it comes to...

For this week's class we were tasked with the curation of a series of publications of Christina Rossetti’s classic poem “Goblin Market”. The process of curation was both incredibly interesting and uniquely challenging. Firstly, I like to point out that the experience of viewing all the first edition and primary source texts front the Ryerson Library was incredibly engaging. It was wonderful to see all those different versions of the text first hand and really illuminating to learn just how much the text had evolved overtime. By taking that virtual tour I learned a great deal about how a story can change and update itself to fit with the times. The process of curation was also interesting in its own way. Tasked with analyzing the pop-culture spinoffs, I really enjoyed learning about how these traditional literary classics can be retooled for a number of different genres and audiences. After viewing all the different versions of the text in this way I...