Versions and Versioning: A Critical Archive of D. H. Lawrence

The essay gives an account of the dealings of the editors of the Cambridge University Press Works of D. H. Lawrence series with the archive of Lawrence manuscript and other materials distributed in special collections of libraries around the world, collected mainly from the 1950s as his star began to rise. The essay considers the recent arguments of Suzanne Bost, making use of Jacques Derrida’s argument in his essay ‘Archive Fever’, about the inevitably preconditioned interpretation of archival materials (Derrida) and the need to give them air before settling into a program of editorial or other analysis (Bost). The essay grants Derrida his case in theory but argues for a more pragmatic approach based on the fruitfulness of the archival enquiry and citing as evidence the lessons learnt in the four decades of the Lawrence Works series that were not brought to the editorial enquiry in the early years of the series. The first is the essential versionality of Lawrence’s writings, which is only partially captured in the scholarly editions. The second is the deep relevance of book history to scholarly editing, which is yet to make its presence felt in the literary critical domain of Lawrence studies. Finally, in a coda, the essay envisions a future vehicle for the presentation of a versional Lawrence: a critical archive in digital form. Its technical features are described partly via a critique of the recent Oxford Scholarly Editions Online. Giving the reader easy access to versions of works written around the same time, both in facsimile and transcription, is one requirement. Collaborative commentary is envisaged. Nevertheless, the traditional need to distinguish clearly between the archive and the edition – the need to understand the latter as an argument about the former – will remain in the digital environment

The Present, the Past and the Material Object

Before Thomas Hardy rose to fame as the author of Tess of the D’Urbervilles and then later as a poet, he had pursued a professional career as an architect and, for a time, as a restorer of medieval church buildings. When he could afford to do so he gave up his professional life for writing, but an abiding attitude toward the past and its material manifestations links the two phases of his life. In his literary works he frequently returned to the possibility of recovering the past, to the conditions of that recovery and thus to the nature of its ongoing life in the present. For him, the ancient natural landscape and the historic built environment served as vital links. This essay starts with discussion of a poem of Hardy’s that serves as the spur for a meditation on the general conditions of our intercourse with the past, especially as engaged by its material forms, whether in buildings or art works or literary works. Distinctions between the forms are of course necessary but, it is argued, continuities remain: the mute testimony of the material object concerning the agents of its creation; the role of the viewer or reader in realising the work; the hand of the editor-conservator; and the role of time in its successive forms of existence

Under Western Eyes [by Joseph Conrad]

Set in the tumultuous political world of Tsarist repression and revolutionary intrigue in St Petersburg and Geneva, Under Western Eyes (1911) renders with searing intensity the psychological torment of its Russian protagonist, a university student who, in betraying another, has betrayed himself. Based upon a comparison of the existing manuscript and other materials, this scholarly and first extensively annotated edition of Joseph Conrad's great novel Under Western Eyes differs from all previous printings by more accurately reflecting Conrad's writing process. The reading text is supported by new scholarly materials that are the result of fifteen years of investigation: essays on the textual and biographical history of the novel, extensive notes, appendices and maps, as well as a full listing of the thousands of textual variants in the early forms of the novel, including the 18,000 words that Conrad himself deleted. • The first extensively annotated edition, including historical, biographical, contextual annotations • Full listing of textual variants in the early forms of the novel, including retrieval of the 18,000 words Conrad deleted during revision • An MLA Approved Edition, MLA Committee on Scholarly Edition

The Charles Harpur Critical Archive: A History and Technical Report

This is a history of and a technical report on the Charles Harpur Critical Archive (CHCA), in preparation since 2009. Harpur was a predominantly newspaper poet in colonial New South Wales from the 1830s to the 1860s. Approximately 2700 versions of his 700 poems in newspaper and manuscript form have been recovered. In order to manage the complexity of his often heavily revised manuscripts traditional encoding in XML–TEI, with its known difficulties in handling overlapping structures and complex revisions, was rejected. Instead, the transcriptions were split into simplified versions and layers of revision. Markup describing textual formats was stored externally using properties that may freely overlap. Both markup and the versions and layers were merged into multi-version documents (MVDs) to facilitate later comparison, editing and searching. This reorganisation is generic in design and should be reusable in other editorial projects

Romantic Poetry, Technical Breakthrough and the Changing Editorial Role

This report provides (1) a short history of the Charles Harpur Critical Archive (CHCA), which has been in preparation since 2009. Harpur was a predominantly newspaper poet in colonial New South Wales. Writing from the 1830s to the 1860s, he was unable to publish in book form because of the undeveloped state of the local literary publishing scene. Approximately 2700 versions of his 700 poems in newspaper and in manuscript form have been recovered. (2) A summary of the technical approach, a new one for special-purpose digital archives, is provided. The principal innovation is the use of a Multi-Version Document (MVD) file format. Because it is not dependent on conventional XML encoding, overlap is no longer a problem and automatic collation of versions, and of layers of revision in individual manuscripts, has become possible. Synchronous scrolling of facsimile image and transcription has also been achieved, lessening the need for detailed encoding of document elements and physical features. (3) The report then reflects on the theoretical implications of the concepts and methods used for the CHCA and on the changing role of the editor

Charles Harpur: The Editorial Nightmare

Coming to grips with the literary-historical phenomenon that colonial poet Charles Harpur represents requires a shift in focus and a querying of traditional assumptions about the shape and manifestation of literary careers. The failure to make that shift editorially for Harpur has hindered the efforts of ordinary readers and literary critics for nearly 150 years. Harpur’s poetic works have been accessible only partially or misleadingly, despite some very considerable editorial efforts stretching back to the late 1940s. An explanation of this situation is the principal subject of the essay. It then describes a potential digital-editorial solution that is in preparation: the Charles Harpur Critical Archive

The Archival Impulse and the Editorial Impulse

There is no firm, outside vantage-point from which to survey and thus to define archive and edition as securely differentiated categories. As readers we inhabit the same textual field as the approaches to documents and texts that we seek to define. To record is first to read and analyse sufficiently for the archival purpose; to interpret is first to read and to analyse sufficiently for the editorial purpose. In practice, the archival impulse anticipates the editorial, and the editorial rests on the archival. We may envisage the relationship of archive and edition as a horizontal slider or scroll bar running from archive on the left to edition on the right. In this model every position on the slider involves interpretative judgement appropriate to its purpose. Every position along the slider involves a report on the documents, but the archival impulse is more document-facing and the editorial is, relatively speaking, more audience-facing. Yet each activity, if it be a scholarly one, depends upon or anticipates the need for its complementary or co-dependent Other. The archival impulse aims to satisfy the shared need for a reliable record of the documentary evidence; the editorial impulse to further interpret it, with the aim of orienting it towards known or envisaged audiences and by taking their anticipated needs into account. The sliding scroll-bar model dispenses with recently expressed anxiety about digital literary archives (special-purpose collections) replacing editions. The latter will continue to be prepared as long as there are readers whose requirements need to be served. The slider model helps us to survey the full range of archival and editorial possibilities. The term “representation” embraces the archival impulse. The editor’s aim, on the other hand, is less to represent something that is pre-existing than to present something (the text of a version, the text of a work, a process of writing) that typically has not existed in precisely this form before, together with the critically analysed materials necessary to defend the presentation

Australian Classics and the Price of Books: The Puzzle of the 1890s

Feminist accounts of literary canon formation in which male authors typically predominated tend to stress the ideological pressures that marginalised female aspirants for critical attention, both at first publication and then again in ongoing critical debates within influential literary coteries. So it was in the 1980s as feminists sought to account for the overlooking of Australian women novelists (Ada Cambridge, Catherine Martin, Rosa Praed and Tasma), who achieved publication in London in the 1890s but who failed to gain a foothold as ‘classics’ when a proto-canon of the colonial literary achievement began to be formulated in and after the 1890s. Textual and book-historical research carried out for various scholarly editing projects since the 1980s, once brought together, has opened up the possibility of an empirical, book-historical approach that is very different. The first candidates put forward for elevated status – Henry Kingsley’s The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn (1859), Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life (1874) and Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery Under Arms (1888) – share a remarkable condition. In the year after the 1888 centenary the three novels were available, cheaply, in the bookshops and therefore in the libraries and mechanics institutes, and all at the same time, despite their varying, original dates of publication. The essay explores the implications of this fact, together with the shift in international tastes towards realism, as reflected and adapted in the Australian colonies