Acknowledgements

This volume is part of a series on the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages (CHLEL), which was launched by the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) in 1967. The proposal for the current volume was presented to the Coordinating Committee in 2018, at the CHLEL conference in Antwerp. We wish to thank all the members of the CHLEL Coordinating Committee, for their annual advice on the progress, and especially Karen-Margrethe Simonsen and Helga Mitterbauer, the presidents of CHLEL in the relevant period. One of the fundamental premises of CHLEL is that it has become almost impossible for individual scholars to write comprehensive histories, which implies we must rely on structured teamwork and draw on collaboration from various cultural and linguistic regions. We are very grateful to our contributors from various countries, ranging from Poland to Portugal, from Australia to Finland, from Ukraine to the US. The conceptual framework for this volume was developed in an article called “Towards a Comparative History of the Literary Draft”, published in Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 256:1 (2019); we wish to thank the editorial board, Vera Brand at Erich Schmidt Verlag, and especially Christa Jansohn, for permission to use a revised version as part of the Introduction.

The genesis of the present volume has been long and winding, with the Covid pandemic significantly disrupting its progress. But in the end, we have made it to the finish line, and we couldn’t have done it without the kind help of many individuals and institutions that were involved in the project during its long life. In particular, we would like to thank Anya Reeve, Kelly Frost, Michelle Kelly, James Critchley, Benjamin Helssen and Jana Wabbes, for all their help with formatting and copy-editing. A special thanks to Trish Van Bolderen for her help with translation. And last but not least, we acknowledge the role of the numerous drafts that have been instrumental in giving shape to this volume.

We are grateful for the generous support of OCTET (the Oxford Centre for Textual Editing and Theory, University of Oxford), ICLA-CHLEL, and the University of Antwerp's Department of Literature. We would also like to thank the following archives and holding libraries for their kind permission to reproduce facsimiles in this collection: The Wordsworth Trust for the image of William Wordsworth’s manuscript in Chapter 1.1.4, Klassik Stiftung Weimar and the Goethe-Schiller Archive for the images of Goethe’s manuscripts in Chapter 1.2.5, Bibliothèque nationale de France for the images of Hugo’s and Pascal’s manuscripts in Chapter 1.2.6, Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, San Marino, for the image of Ariosto’s manuscript, Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense for the image of Manzoni’s manuscript, Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea for the image of Bassani’s manuscript; special thanks to the Estate of C. E. Gadda for their kind permission to include an image of Gadda’s manuscript from Archivio Liberati (all in Chapter 1.2.7). We also thank Éditions de l’Aube for their permission to use images of Dani Laferrière’s manuscripts in Chapter 1.2.9. A special thanks to the Master and Fellows of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, for their kind permission to use the image of Samuel Ward’s manuscript in Chapter 1.3.3. We thank the Bodleian Library for the image of the Ormulum in the Introduction, and for the images of the manuscripts by Jane Austen, John Gagnier and John Clare in Chapter 2.1.1; Bildarchiv Foto Marburg for the reproduction of Otto Wagner’s Postsparkasse and Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft for the image of O. M. Ungers’ designs (both in Chapter 2.3.3). Last but not least, we would like to thank several institutions for the images of F. Chopin’s draft scores in Chapter 2.3.4: Fryderyk Chopin Institute Warsaw; Muzeum i Archiwum Warszawskiego Towarzystwa Muzycznego im. Stanisława Moniuszki, Warsaw; Biblioteka Jagiellońska, Kraków; the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, the University of Chicago Library; Faber Music Limited, London.

We dedicate this book to Almuth Grésillon.