Romantic revisions - Robert Brinkley

Romantic writers, perhaps more than any others, revised their works incessantly, in manuscript and in successive published editions. Wordsworth's Prelude, for example (which remained in manuscript for fifty-two years) is well known in two editions, but the various drafts and stages of manuscript composition give us many more versions of a poem whose text is rendered increasingly unstable in the process of revision. This collection of essays, the first of its kind, responds to the recent radical overhaul in the editing of Romantic texts. Leading American and British editors of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Keats and Clare explain and illustrate the implications of their editorial methods for the ongoing process of revision (in texts and their reception) which they have both reflected and helped to produce. The volume offers insights into the urgent debate over editorial practices and their theoretical bases, while uncovering the complex revisionary processes of creativity at the heart of Romantic writing.