Why Modern Manuscripts Matter
Kathryn Sutherland
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.
Readership : Postgraduate, Research, Scholarly and General: Academics and students of Eighteenth-Century and Romantic-period British Literature, literary archives, book history, the technologies of writing, and material culture; the general reader interested in the politics of collecting, issues of cultural
property, and the expressive agency that clings to authors' manuscripts as objects of curiosity, signs of genius, or just so much waste paper.
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
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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).
Making Sense - Margot Northey
The Author's Effects - Nicola J. Watson
Book Parts - Edited by Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth
Special Features
- A new approach to manuscripts as heritage and as objects of wonder and study.
- Offers new insights on cultural property and the politics of collecting.
- Considers the changing meanings and uses of manuscripts in the modern age.
