Cover not available

In:A Comparative History of the Literary Draft in Europe
Edited by Olga Beloborodova and Dirk Van Hulle
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXV] 2024
► pp. 353–364

Get fulltext
PDF logo with download linkDownload Chapter PDF

1.5.2
Pruning

Editorial intervention and its effects

 | University College Dublin
Open Access logo
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 8 November 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxxv.24gro
Abstract
Editorial intervention is often essential to a text’s development, and yet the work of literary editors is often obscured. This chapter examines some of the critical issues around the role of the editor, arguing for the importance of the editorial process and considering examples of textual development and critical issues resulting from it. Specifically, it analyses the editing of the ending of Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark to demonstrate the way in which textual cutting can significantly impact a literary work’s development and reception; these kinds of cuts can echo throughout an author’s career in surprising ways.
Article outline
  • Editing: Invisible and essential
  • “Starting all over again”: Jean Rhys and the editing of Voyage in the Dark
  • Editing, textual variance, and interpretation
  • Cutting as theme and echo
  • Notes
  • References
References (30)
References
Angier, Carole. 2000. “Introduction.” In Voyage in the Dark, by Jean Rhys, v–xiv. London: Penguin. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Berg, A. Scott. 2013. Max Perkins: Editor of Genius. London: Simon & Schuster.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brown, Nancy Hemond. 1985. “Jean Rhys and Voyage in the Dark.” London Magazine 25 (1/2): 40–45.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Burgess, Anthony, and John Cullinan. 1973. “Anthony Burgess, The Art of Fiction No. 48.” Paris Review 56. [URL]
Carr, Will. 2021. “Did Anthony Burgess Hate the American Ending of A Clockwork Orange?” The International Anthony Burgess Foundation (blog). 4 March 2021. [URL]
Finkelstein, David, and Alistair McCleery. 2019. “Publishing.” In The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume 7: The Twentieth Century and Beyond, ed. by Andrew Nash, Claire Squires, and I. R. Willison, 146–190. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Foley, Abram. 2021. The Editor Function: Literary Publishing in Postwar America. University of Minnesota Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Greenberg, Susan L. 2019. A Poetics of Editing. Paperback. New York; London: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Groenland, Tim. 2019. The Art of Editing: Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace. New York; London: Bloomsbury Academic. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
King, Stephen. 2009. “Raymond Carver’s Life and Stories.” The New York Times, 22 November 2009. [URL]
Maslen, Cathleen. 2009. Ferocious Things: Jean Rhys and the Politics of Women’s Melancholia. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publisher.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Max, D. T. 1998. “The Carver Chronicles.” The New York Times, 9 August 1998.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Morris, Mervyn. 1989. “Oh, Give the Girl a Chance: Jean Rhys and Voyage in the Dark.” Journal of West Indian Literature 3 (2): 1–8.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Owen, Katie. 2000. “Introduction.” In Quartet, by Jean Rhys, v–xviii. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Raine, Craig. 2009. “Raymond Carver.” Arete Magazine 29. [URL]
Rhys, Jean. 1979. Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, ed by Diana Athill. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1984. Jean Rhys Letters: 1931–1966, ed. by Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly. London: Deutsch.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1990. “Voyage in the Dark: Part IV (Original Version).” In The Gender of Modernism, ed. by Bonnie Kime Scott, 381–89. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2000. Voyage in the Dark. London: Penguin.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Savory, Elaine. 1998. Jean Rhys. Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2009. The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Scott, B. K. 1990. The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Bloomington: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Seshagiri, Urmila. 2006. “Modernist Ashes, Postcolonial Phoenix: Jean Rhys and the Evolution of the English Novel in the Twentieth Century.” Modernism/Modernity 13 (3): 487–505. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sharpe, Leslie T. 1994. Editing Fact and Fiction: A Concise Guide to Book Editing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Smith, Helen. 2017. The Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett. London: Jonathan Cape. Ebook edition.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Spyra, Ania. 2013. “Language and Belonging in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark.” In Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives, ed. by Mary Wilson and Kerry L. Johnson, 67–86. New York ; London: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sullivan, Hannah. 2013. The Work of Revision. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Thacker, Andrew. 2012. “Texts and Editions of Jean Rhys: Another Voyage in the Dark?” Women: A Cultural Review 23 (4): 510–24.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Torgovnick, Marianna. 1981. Closure in the Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
West, James L. W., III. 2012. Making the Archives Talk: New and Selected Essays in Bibliography, Editing and Book History. Penn State Series in the History of the Book. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue