MACMILLAN Genesis and Revision in Modern British and Irish Writers

This unusually diverse collection of ten essays, devoted to British and Irish writers and poets from 1895 to the present, explores many aspects of the creative process, from inspiration to publication and beyond. The volume shows how writers’ manuscripts and revisions give us a better understanding of their published work by drawing on unpublished archival sources to unveil, across genre and gender, the intricacies of their craft. It examines how the paper medium and writing implements influence the act of composition; reveals the latest developments in such fields as life writing and digital humanities―especially how modern scholars, through the filter of hypertext, revisit modernist texts, or respond to newly-found material; and analyzes the hidden handwork, be it throughout the writer’s exhaustive self-editing process or the writer-editor collaboration. Finally, it captures an award-winning poet and a living novelist reflecting upon their craft and work in progress. Review “The genesis of a literary work is always fascinating. This timely study combines empirical research in manuscript culture with recent continental genetic literary theory. Discover a collection of wide-ranging essays which open up chosen texts to their private pre-existences in drafts and versions, in all their material complexities, and their subsequent presentations in public. The distinction between revision and final text is never a clear-cut one. Finished texts are never entirely completed, and they are never quite free of the struggle to bring themselves into being. The archive fever of the engaged scholars at work here is catching, but we also learn from creative writers themselves the central truth of the book: revision is writing.” ( Robert Sheppard, Emeritus Professor of Poetry and Poetics, Edge Hill University, UK) From the Back Cover This unusually diverse collection of ten essays, devoted to British and Irish writers and poets from 1895 to the present, explores many aspects of the creative process, from inspiration to publication and beyond. The volume shows how writers’ manuscripts and revisions give us a better understanding of their published work by drawing on unpublished archival sources to unveil, across genre and gender, the intricacies of their craft. It examines how the paper medium and writing implements influence the act of composition; reveals the latest developments in such fields as life writing and digital humanities―especially how modern scholars, through the filter of hypertext, revisit modernist texts, or respond to newly-found material; and analyzes the hidden handwork, be it throughout the writer’s exhaustive self-editing process or the writer-editor collaboration. Finally, it captures an award-winning poet and a living novelist reflecting upon their craft and work in progress. About the Author Jonathan Bloom is Senior Lecturer at the University of Paris-Dauphine, Paris Sciences & Lettres, France. He has published widely and his book The Art of Revision in the Short Stories of V. S. Pritchett and William Trevor (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) received critical acclaim. He has been awarded three Harry Ransom Center Fellowships and is a member of the University of Montpellier III research group EMMA.  Catherine Rovera is Senior Lecturer at the University of Paris-Dauphine and head of the James Joyce research team at the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (ITEM, CNRS/ENS), Paris Sciences & Lettres, France. A specialist in genetic criticism and modernism, she is the author of a monograph titled Genèses d'une folie créole: Jean Rhys et Jane Eyre (Paris: Hermann, 2015).