Intentionality and the Romantic Literary Manuscript
Intentionality and the Romantic Literary Manuscript
Chapter 1 supplies an essential description of manuscript and print cultures in the Romantic period. It probes the attempts by book historians, manuscript scholars, and textual editors to establish guidelines for understanding modern literary manuscripts, that is, manuscripts created in the age of print. It questions conceptions of scribal culture that rest upon the scholar’s capacity to discern authorial intention, and that exclude from consideration those manuscripts intended for print. Donald Reiman, in his categorisation of modern manuscripts into three groups – private, confidential or social, and public – relies upon an editor’s ability to determine the intended audience of any given manuscript. However, as this chapter demonstrates, intention is rarely discernible. This chapter grounds its theoretical analysis in a detailed survey of the literary writing and material practices of Charlotte Smith and Dorothy Wordsworth, two authors who have long been regarded as belonging, respectively and exclusively, to the divided worlds of print and script.
Keywords: Authorial Intention, Textual Scholarship, Private, Confidential and Public Manuscripts, Charlotte Smith, Dorothy Wordsworth
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