Republication, with or without textual changes, keeps a work in circulation. This protects the work from destruction but also affects how we receive it, because publication is always a socializing act. Despite its consequences for works and their reception, republication has not yet been theorized in textual studies. My dissertation addresses this research gap by employing the term resonance to discuss the relationships—between versions, contexts, and ideas—that develop out of republication. I explore republication at its extremes with four case studies of works that underwent major changes in republication. The first chapter examines Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray with a mixed-methods analysis of the reviews of its 1890 and 1891 publications in relationship to the textual revisions. The second chapter argues that in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, the much later moment of republication is a moment of nostalgic return. My chapter on Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider shows how periodical/conference publications place Lorde’s essays into larger conversations that the monograph republication replaces with a unified presentation of Lorde as a theorist. Finally, my fourth chapter brings in adaptation theory to discuss the complexities of republication for digital-born works with Andrew Hussie’s Homestuck. This dissertation enriches our understanding of republication’s consequences for four specific works. It also theorizes republication as a vital object of study that affects not just the versions of works we read but the histories that develop alongside them, and it creates a foundation for further studies of the phenomenon
