Editing Modernism/Modernist Editing

Start date and time

Friday 13 May 2016

Location

Edinburgh Napier University, Merchiston Campus

‘Editing Modernism/Modernist Editing’ was a one-day conference held at Edinburgh Napier University (Merchiston Campus) on Friday the 13th of May 2016. The conference invited scholars to share their research about and methodologies for textual editing of modernist literature. ‘Textual editing’ broadly refers to developments in the traditional research and practices involved in discovering, contextualising, and preparing literary works for publication, for both scholarly and other readers. However, it also concerns problems and methods inherent to the production and dissemination of modernist digital editions and digital archives. We welcome proposals in any area of modernist scholarship that engages with ‘editing’, the archive, and editorial practice.

This conference spoke to the recent resurgence in interest in the modernist text as editorial object and the various platforms through which readers encounter modernist text. In modernist studies, several large-scale editorial projects are currently underway, including the Dorothy Richardson and the Wyndham Lewis Editions projects, and last year saw the Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot: Vol. II win the Modernist Studies Association book prize. These are paralleled in recent digital archives and editions such as the Modernist Versions Project and Infinite Ulysses. The question of how contemporary editorial practice can draw on modernist practice is of keen interest, as textual editing was often a key self-reflexive concern for modernist authors, many of whom were publishers and editors themselves. From the collaborative editorial practices that underpinned such works as T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood to the production of modernist little magazines, innovative modernist editorial practices continue to interest scholars as they take on the role of contemporary editors to texts such as these.