Writers whose work was affected by the process of printing and publication
Issues:
- author's revision
- censorship
- self-censorship
- changes to get published or meet popular taste
- publishers' editors suggesting changes
- author's family contributing
- other writers making changes
- self-publication
- etc etc.
Where to look for information.
1. Choose an author, maybe from the list below, and find the best modern edition of that author and read the textual notes; follow up the references given there. Use the Library catalogue for this.
2. Maybe someone has written a book about this author that includes publishing information. Biography? Again, Library catalogue.
3. Articles; frustrating, can be very rewarding. Use MLA catalogue (computer eg in the English reading room) and BIDS (link to the latter in my Useful Links page).
4. Try browsing Studies in Bibliography, now on-line for free, all 50 years of it. This periodical is about nothing but how printing and publishing changes text. Link in my Useful Links page. Also a paper copy in the Library. Other similar journals (not on-line): Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, The Library, Proof.
Authors that should be interesting:
- William Blake
- Anthony Burgess (Clockwork Orange, including the film)
- Byron, Don Juan
- Carroll, Alice
- Coleridge, Ancient Mariner
- Conrad
- Stephen Crane, Red Badge of Courage
- Dickens
- Emily Dickinson
- George Eliot, Middlemarch
- T.S.Eliot, esp Waste Land
- Scott Fitzgerald
- Fowles, Magus
- Gray's Elegy
- Hardy
- Hopkins
- Housman
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- Henry James
- Samuel Johnson, Vanity of Human Wishes
- James Joyce
- Keats, St Agnes Eve, Odes
- Lawrence DH
- Milton, esp Comus
- Shakespeare, William
- Shelley, Frankenstein
- Stoker, Dracula
- Tennyson
- Wilde
- Virginia Woolf
- Wordsworth
- Yeats
- and, probably, every author who ever wrote anything...