Editing and Textual Scholarship

Editing and Textual Scholarship is a research group working on the production, dissemination, and reception of literature, and how to re-present the texts from the past for new readers in the present.

We are interested in all modes of scholarly and literary editing at the intersection of the creative and the critical, as well as forms of ‘material’ investigation: literary archives, genetic scholarship, book history, the history of reading, and literary heritage.

Our research crosses all genres in the period from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Our work aligns with the School of Social and Humanities’ research theme Hidden Voices, Contested Pasts.

The Archaeology of the Poem

Wim Van Mierlo (Senior Lecturer in English) is working on a monograph that comparatively studies the creative process of six major poets from the eighteenth to the twentieth century: William Wordsworth, Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Wilfred Owen, W. B. Yeats, and Ted Hughes. Using the poets’ extensive archives, the book seeks to uncover the cultural undercurrents that characterize creativity across time, while developing ‘modern palaeography’ as a new method of analysing the manuscripts. The argument is not so much about the idiosyncrasies of poetic composition, but about the similarities in the way these poets employed paper and ink to create their poetry.

James Joyce Library: His Reading and his Readers

Emily Bell is Vice-Chancellor Independent Research Fellow. She is working on a monograph based on her doctoral research which reconstructed James Joyce’s library. Her doctoral dissertation addressed the double-ended problem of intertextuality as a writerly and readerly mode of textual production. Her research applies approaches from book history and bibliography to the findings of genetic criticism to reconstruct the habits and circumstances of Joyce’s reading, his book acquisition and book-borrowing. A particular intervention of this research is to apply material, historical and affective lenses to the methodology of genetic criticism to understand Joyce as a reader in his socio-cultural environment.

James Joyce’s Poetry

Professor Clare Hutton has recently completed editing Joyce’s Poems for the New Penguin Joyce Series (General Editor: Andrew Gibson). Beginning with The Holy Office (1905) and running through to ‘Ecce Puer’ (1932), Hutton’s edition presents the fifty-three poems which Joyce published during his lifetime. Editors make meaning in the selection, arrangement and annotation of texts. In deciding to only publish those poems which Joyce actively consigned for publication, this edition is moving away from the ‘grey’ canon (which has prevailed in critical discussion) and is focussing, instead, on the poems Joyce authorised for publication. This selection enables a fresh appraisal of Joyce as a poet, one which places the happenstance of his career front and centre. The edition will appear in 2025.

Scholarly editions

Aphra Behn, Plays 1682–1696, ed. by Rachel Adcock, Kate Aughterson, Claire Bowditch, et al., vol. 4 of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Aphra Behn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Evelyn Waugh, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: A Conversation Piece, ed. by Barbara Cooke, vol. 14 of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.

B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, Where There Is Nothing and The Unicorn from the Stars: Manuscript Materials, ed. by Wim Van Mierlo. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012.

Recent publications

Emily Bell and Andrea Davidson, ‘The Sick Body of Writing: Towards an Affective Genetic Criticism’, Humanities, 13(3),

Barbara Cooke and Nonia Hazel Williams, ‘Moments of Being-in-the-Archive’, Open Library of Humanities, 10(1), pp. 1–24.

Adelle Hay, Anne Brontë Reimagined: A View from the Twenty-First Century. Norwalk, Conn.: Saraband, 2020.

Clare Hutton, Serial Encounters: Ulysses and The Little Review. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Wim Van Mierlo, James Joyce and Cultural Genetics: The Joycean Genome. London: Bloomsbury, 2023.

Mathelinda Nabugodi (UCL), ‘White Masks, Dead Poets’

13 November, 4.15pm, Brockington (B0.08) or via Teams

Abstract: Romanticism is commemorated as a movement celebrating political and imaginative liberty—the human mind freeing itself from the shackles of tradition. But Romanticism also coincided with the apex of the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery on Caribbean plantations. This talk reconnects Romantic poetry of freedom to contemporary practices of enslavement, aiming to revise our conceptualisation of cultural production in the period. Taking its cue from Franz Fanon’s classic Black Skin, White Masks (1952), the talk reflects on a selection of Romantic-era white masks: a carnival mask worn by Lord Byron at the carnival in Ravenna in 1821, a death mask of John Keats produced in Rome in the same year and contemporary Jamaican Jonkonnu masks that testify to West African masquerade traditions being brought across the Atlantic by African captives. Establishing a direct, physical link between the Romantic past and our own present, these masks prompt a wide-ranging exploration of how we engage with the undead legacy of Romanticism—its poetic ideals as well as its atrocious realities.