Passionate correction: the theory and practice of modernist revision

Thesis

The early twentieth century in literature was a period of second chances. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf each spent a decade on their first novels, discarding complete drafts along the way; Henry James took three years to revise his already published work for the New York Edition. The poets fared no better. The Waste Land, Ezra Pound's first Canto, W. H. Auden's Collected Poems, and Marianne Moore's Complete Poems were all multiply rewritten.

This dissertation examines the importance of textual revision to Anglo-American modernism. I ask why modernist writers revised so laboriously, what modes of selfediting they preferred, and how they figured the process of textual genesis. Revision is not normally understood as an activity exceeding the idiosyncrasies of individuals. My work shows that it can and should be historicized as a form of cultural practice. In the first chapter, I discuss and criticize available models for theorizing revision. In subsequent chapters, I make use of methods from genetic criticism and social text editing to analyze the process of textual development from early manuscript drafts to final published editions.

The modernist practice of revision was enabled by changes in technology and the literary marketplace in the 1890s. At the same time, revision is an exemplary figure for modernism itself. By rereading a text, the revising writer pays homage to what is already there, but rewriting devalues and may even destroy the original version. This oscillating movement answers to a fundamental tension or puzzle in modernist thought between innovation and tradition, "making it new" and nostalgia for the past.

Where pre-twentieth century writers were uncertain and uneasy about the benefits of revision, modernist writers tend to portray textual change in positive terms as an inevitable process of "gradual betterment." Literary critics and editors have gladly adopted this teleology. At the same time, the most famous acts of modernist revision display a surprising pleasure in textual destruction. In chapters on Henry James, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden I explore the relationship between textual practice and early twentieth-century ideas about progress, selfhood, efficiency, and organic form.

Authors: Sullivan, H

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-nbq54rabv
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Henry James; modernism; T. S. Eliot; typewriter; revision; W. H. Auden; drafting; Virginia Woolf; editing