Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts: a critical edition in four volumes

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

As a record of the creative mind of one of English Literature's most famous writers, Jane Austen's fiction manuscripts are priceless. Since 1845 when her sister Cassandra died, they have been scattered, first among family members, and subsequently in libraries, museums, and private collections around the world. A digital edition, created with the generous support of the AHRC Resource Enhancement Scheme, has made accessible a new resource for this major writer: images of every page of the manuscript fiction and fully searchable transcriptions of their contents. The real public benefit of the digital edition is that Austen's fiction manuscripts are now freely available online for anyone worldwide wishing to consult or enjoy them. The digital edition was the first part of a more ambitious project that aims to incorporate alongside full facsimile images and transcriptions (derived from the digital edition) a close-grained study of Austen's working practices. This new research will culminate in a four-volume print edition of Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts, to be published by Oxford University Press. New elements will be: an introduction tracing the genesis of the individual manuscript writings, their relationship to Austen's print career, their publication history and critical reception; short essays on features of the manuscripts ('Composition and Revision'; 'Writing Habits'; 'Jane Austen's Gatherings'; 'Jane Austen's Reading'; 'Punctuation'; 'The Dynamics of the Manuscript Page'; 'Hands other than Jane Austen's'); full textual critical apparatus and textual annotations for each manuscript. In total, around 50,000 words of new material will be added to the images and transcriptions. I will further consolidate the relationship between digital and print forms of the edition in two essays on their conceptual and practical relationship, to be published in scholarly journals. Though previous studies exist (notably Brian Southam's pioneering Jane Austen's Literary Manuscripts (1964; revised edition, 2001)), systematic examination has been hampered by the relative inaccessibility of the manuscripts themselves and by repeated inconsistencies in editorial practices in dealing with them. Now that we have high quality images with consistently and deeply encoded diplomatic transcriptions, it is possible to develop the first fully comparative scholarly analysis of the compositional features of the manuscript fiction, to create a comprehensive textual critical apparatus, and to map Austen's working methods as a writer: the creative development of individual works, and the comparative understanding of her practices across her career. This new research will be presented in the print edition. Taken together, the distinct digital and print components will create a powerful hybrid edition: part textual laboratory and part authoritative, stable reference source. It is already clear that for Austen there was a vital link between composition surface and the act of writing. Further research for the print edition will substantiate a definition of manuscript editing as the editing of an object (shop-bought notebook or homemade paper gathering) as well as its written text. It will address such questions as: how might we incorporate the formal features of manuscript (information from paper, its quality, shape and size, from ink, and the disposition of words on the page) into our understanding of the meaning of texts? what are the differences between an author's appearance in manuscript and in print, and how might manuscript evidence, as a collection of events and surfaces (objects that encode time as well as space), adjust our understanding of authorial practice?I will draw on the visual and searchable evidence within the digital edition for much of this work. Further research will be undertaken on primary Austen materials held in the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, in King's College, Cambridge, and in the British Library, London.