Why Modern Manuscripts Matter

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Kathryn Sutherland (Senior Research Fellow, St Anne's College, University of Oxford)

Why Modern Manuscripts Matter

Kathryn Sutherland (Senior Research Fellow, St Anne's College, University of Oxford)

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English

Oxford University Press
09 June 2022

Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800; Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers; Storage, maintenance & preservation of collections

This is a study of the politics, the commerce, and the aesthetics of heritage culture in the shape of authors' manuscripts. Draft or working manuscripts survive in quantity from the eighteenth century when, with the rise of print, readers learnt to value 'the hand' as an index of individuality and the blotted page, criss-crossed by deletion and revision, as a sign of genius. Since then, collectors have fought over manuscripts, libraries have curated them, the rich have stashed them away in investment portfolios, students have squeezed meaning from them, and we have all stared at them behind exhibition glass. Why do we trade them, conserve them, and covet them? Most, after all, are just the stuff left over after the novel or book of poetry goes into print. Poised on the boundary where precious treasure becomes abject waste, litter, and mess, modern literary manuscripts hover between riches and rubbish.

In a series of case studies, this book explores manuscript's expressive agency and its capacity to provoke passion--a capacity ever more to the fore in the twenty-first century now that books are assembled via word-processing software and authors no longer leave in such quantity those paper trails behind them. It considers manuscripts as residues of meaning that print is unable to capture: manuscript as fragment art, as property, as waste paper. It asks what it might mean to re-read print in the shadow of manuscript. Case studies of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Walter Scott, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen--writers from the first great period of manuscript survival--are interspersed with discussions of William Godwin's record keeping, the Cairo genizah, Katie Paterson's 'Future Library' project, Andy Warhol's and Muriel Spark's self-archiving, Cornelia Parker's reclamation art, and more.

By: Kathryn Sutherland (Senior Research Fellow St Anne's College University of Oxford)
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 240mm, Width: 163mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 1g
ISBN: 9780192856517
ISBN 10: 0192856510
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 09 June 2022
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Introduction 1: Dealing with the Leftovers 2: Samuel Johnson and the Origins of Writing 3: 'this warm scribe my hand': The Autograph Craze 4: Nothing Wasted: Frances Burney's Fiction Manuscripts 5: Whose Property? Walter Scott's Manuscripts 6: Jane Austen Fragment Artist Afterword

Kathryn Sutherland is Senior Research Fellow at St Anne's College, University of Oxford. She is the author of Jane Austen's Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood (OUP, 2005) and editor of Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts (OUP, 2018).

Reviews for Why Modern Manuscripts Matter

Sutherland...amply shows the variety of ways in which manuscripts acquired new significance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. * Rachael Scarborough King, Modern Philosophy *