Full Description
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shows how writers' manuscripts and revisions give us a better understanding of their published work by drawing on unpublished archival sources to unveil, across genre and gender, the intricacies of their craft.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.
Contents
1. Introduction: Archival Revelations, Jonathan Bloom and Catherine Rovera.- 2. Vision and Revision in the Manuscripts of William Wordsworth and W. B. Yeats, Wim Van Mierlo.- 3. The Unwritten Waste: Revisions in the Poetry and Memoir of A. S. J. Tessimond, James Bainbridge.- 4. Inspiration and Narrative in the Short Poem, Bernard O'Donoghue.- 5. The 'Newness' of Manuscripts, Daniel Ferrer.- 6. Unwriting The Waves, Christine Froula.- 7. The Writer's Hunger: Considering a Novel in Progress, Sonia Overall.- 8. To Cut a Long Story Short: The Production of Mary Lavin's New Yorker Stories, Grainne Hurley.- 9. The Handmade Tale: The Paper Medium as the Place for Action, Claire Bustarret, translated by Jonathan Bloom.- 10. 'No speech at my command will fit the forms in my mind': Shaping the Spiritual through Writing and Typing in George MacDonald's Lilith manuscripts, Christine Collière-Whiteside.- 11. Processing Modernism, Alexander Christie.
