Making Literature: How Editors Create Texts
When you read a novel by Jane Austen or a play by Shakespeare, do you ever think about how those works have been edited? These are usually presented to you in a modern readable format, complete with notes and introduction but standing behind these works, shaping what you read and how you read it, is the figure of the editor. Mainstream literary criticism is completely dependent on high-quality scholarly editing and this course will teach you its theory and introduce you to its practice. Over the course of the Summer School, we will help you select and edit a text from a range drawn from archives in Newcastle and surrounding areas.
You will choose between competing versions, untangle authorial revisions, annotate the text and compose an introduction. These writings will cover a range of historical periods, and include literature, letters and diaries and memoirs. We will visit a range of archives to look at authorial drafts and manuscripts including the Seven Stories Centre for Children's Books and Wordsworth's archive at his Lake District home of Dove Cottage. We work with Dove Cottage, the major Wordsworth/Coleridge archive and museum in Cumbria, meaning thatwe can use their manuscripts on the course. This includes the opportunity to create an edition from some of their unpublished manuscripts and upload it to the Dove Cottage website as a digital edition. This is a major opportunity for you to work directly on a significant literary archive and complete a meaningful editing project that you can cite as part of an academic or any other kind of CV.
The School of English has expertise in editing texts from the late Viking Age through to twenty-first century children's literature via Renaissance and Romantic poetry and prose and this knowledge will be available for you to draw on as you hone your own editing skills.
This course will include visits to regional archives including (but not limited to) Seven Stories Centre for Children's Books, Dove Cottage Tyne and Wear Archives, Newcastle upon Tyne Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society
