Brief description

Content

This workshop examines the material production of manuscripts and early printed books and assesses its impact on meaning, interpretation, and concepts of authorship and literature. The first part of the workshop focuses on manuscript culture in the later Middle Ages, using Chauser's "Canterbury Tales" as an example. The second part considers the extent to which the advent of printing transformed reading practices, taking examples from the poetry of Thomas Wyatt and John Donne.

Primary Reading
Elizabeth L Eisenstein, "The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe" (Cambridge: Canto, 1993)

SESSION 2: Good Text, Bad Text? Editing Issues in Early Modern Drama
Tutor: Mike Smith

A workshop considering problems of "authenticating" early modern dramatic texts and the assumptions underlying editorial choices. Where does "authority" reside, in the playwright or in the performance? Or is this a false dichotomy? The main texts considered will be "Hamlet" and "King Lear".

Primary Reading
Shakespeare, King Lear: A Parallel-Text Edition, ed. Rene Weiss (1993)
Shakespeare, The Three Text Hamlet, ed. Paul Bertram and Bernice W Kliman (1991)

Secondary Reading
Janete Dillon "Is there a performance in this text?", Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994), 74-86
Paul Werstine, "Narratives about printed Shakespeare texts", Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990), 65-68
Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, "General Introduction", William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (1987)

SESSION 3: The Elusive Authorial Text
Tutor: Damian Walford Davies

Wordsworth's "The Prelude" is a text of many versions. This workshop will examine the issues generated by the existence of multiple "authorial" texts. Issues discussed will include problems of editing; authorial revision; selection of text; the problems encountered in considering published and unpublished versions of the poem.

Primary Reading
Selections from "The Prelude": The Four Texts (1798, 1799, 1805, 1850), ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Penguin, 1995)

Secondary Reading
Jonathan Wordsworth "Revision as Making: The Prelude and its Peers", in "Romantic Revisions", ed. Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley (Cambridge, 1992)
Keith Hanley, "Crossings Out: The Problem of Textual Passage in The Prelude", in ibid.
Selections from the Introductions to the Cornell Wordsworth series.

SESSION 4: Literary Texts in Magazines and Journals - Two Modern Case Studies
Tutor: Peter Barry

Magazines have played a major role in the publication of modern literature, but the textual history of works which first appeared in this way is often complex. The two cases studies are Henry James's story "Daisy Miller" (first published in the "Cornhill Magazine" in 1878), and T S Eliot's "The Waste Land" (first published in "The Criterion" in London, 1922, and 'almost simultaneously' in the American Journal "The Dial").

Primary Reading
"Henry James at Work: The Question of Our Texts", pp 63-78 in "the Cambridge Companion to Henry James, ed Johathan Freedman, CUP 1998
"The Waste Land: Facsimile a\nd Trnascript of the Original Drafts", T S Eliot, ed, Valerie Eliot, Faber, 1971

Secondary Reading
Ian Hamilton, "The Little Magazines: A Study of Six Editors" Weidenfeld and Nicolsen, 1976
Jayne E Marek, "Women Editing Modernism: 'Little' Magazines and Literary History", University Press of Kentucky 1995

SESSION 5: Is there a Hypertext in this Class?
Tutor: Tim Woods

This workship wil focus on the ways in which typermedia and hypertext have altered our conceptions of the written text. It will look at some specific examples of the application of hypertext to poetry and the whole concept of the electronic text itself as a challenge to orthodox modes of reading, writing, and configuring texts.

Primary Reading
Frances Condron, Michael Fraser, Stuart Sutherland, Marilyn Deegan, "Oxford University Computing Services Guide to Digital Resources for the Humanities (West Virginia Press 2001)
Delany, Paul, and George P Landow, "Hypertext, Hypermedia and Literary Studies: The State of the Art", in Paul Delaney and Geoge P Landow, eds., "Hypermedia and Literary Studies" (Cambridge, MA, 1991)
Jeremy Hawthorne, Paul Goring, Domhnall Mitchell "Studying Literature" (Arnold 2001)
Susan Hockney, "Electronic Texts in the Humanities" (Oxford University Press 2000)
John Slatin, "Text and Hypertext: Reflections on the role of the Computer in Teaching Modern American poetry", in David Miall, ed., "Humanities and the Computer: New Directions" (Oxford, 1990)

Secondary Reading
Richard Latham, "The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution" "New Literary History 20" (1989), 265-90
Edward Barrett, ed., "Text, ConText and Hypertext: Writing with and for Computer" (Cambridge, MA, 1988)

Notes

This module is at CQFW Level 7