A Blog of Bosh

Michael Heyman, whose not-to-be-missed thesis on Edward Lear, Isles of Boshen, has been online for some time, has an article on Anushka Ravishankar’s Indian Nonsense in the November issue of The Horn Book, a publication about books for children and young adults.
Michael has just finished working on The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense, [...]

Ever since I heard of Google Earth I realised it would be very useful for limerick lovers, but I was too lazy to try and find out how to create interactive maps until I found this post at the Stoa Consortium blog; so here come kmz files for each of the four limerick books published [...]

I’ve started changing the page layout again, so some parts of the site might not work correctly for some time. Be patient.

The Peter Newell section of nonsenselit.org now has a full-size, perfect copy of Peter Newell’s Jungle-Jangle.

Thanks to Bob & Ellen Watters, who kindly contacted me and scanned the book.

I am going to try and upgrade the blog from Wordpress 1.5 to 2.0.2 later today, so there might be problems.

One of the questions which are often asked about Nonsense is, Why did it disappear almost completely from literature after the great season of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll? As M.B. Heyman writes in his thesis (Isles of Boshen: Edward Lear’s literary nonsense in context, University of Glasgow, Faculty of Arts, Department of English Literature, [...]

The documents section of nonsenselit.org now contains a recent essay on Edward Lear:
Winfried Nöth. “The Art of Self-Reference in Edward Lear’s Limericks.” Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis 10.1, 2005, pp. 47-66.
Many thanks to professor Nöth and the journal editors for permission to reproduce it.

Helen Stilwell’s Laughable Looloos 1906 series is now available in full colour at Nonsense in the Early Comics.

Arthur Deex has acquired a very nice copy of a rare book of limericks and has kindly chosen to share it:

Lyrics Pathetic and Humorous from A to Z by Edmund Dulac (1882-1953) is a delightful Alphabet Book of 24 colorful plates (X, Y & Z are combined), each with a limerick. The book was [...]

I’m sorry to say that the main page of nonsenselit.org has been hacked. This has already happened a couple of times since last summer, but I’m not going to repair it this time as I no longer trust PostNuke enough: I’ve been thinking of moving to another CMS for some time and this is a [...]