Variants

Associate Editor: Elsa Pereira

For any inquiries about the journal, including essay submissions, please contact our journal email address: variants@textualscholarship.eu.

Variants is the peer-reviewed journal of The European Society for Textual Scholarship. It is published in Open Access via the OpenEdition platform at http://journals.openedition.org/variants.

The inaugural issue of Variants, edited by H.T.M. Van Vliet and P.M.W. Robinson, was published by Brepols in 2002. It is no longer available in print. Volumes 2/3 to 11 (2003 to 2014) were published by Brill (previously Rodopi). Back issues may still be ordered directly from the publisher. A complete list of issues published to date is available here.

Latest Issue:

Variants 19. Authors and Their Drafts in Context

[For more context regarding the composition and publication of this issue, please refer to the Editors’ Preface.]

The theme of our current issue,“Authors and their Drafts in Context”, combines elements of the themes of two conferences that are featured in the current issue: ESTS 2023 (“Authorship, Identity, and Textual Scholarship”; Canterbury, UK), and GENESIS 2023 (“The Draft and Its Environs”; Taipei, Taiwan). After a brief introduction to the theme of the conference by its organiser Peng Yi, the GENESIS 2023 section opens with a short “vignette” contribution by Daniel Ferrer, who draws on examples taken from the field of architecture to illustrate interactions between processes of decontextualisation and recontextualisation in literary drafts, and the way they leave what Ferrer has previously called the memory of context in their published versions. Afterwards, we have three essay contributions: one by Franz Johansson, who proposes “authorial avant-texte” as a new coinage to describe the archives of draft materials that have been published by authors; one by Daniela Shalom Vagata, who illustrates how a closer look at Ugo Foscolo’s drafts and creative process invites us to reconsider the network of myths and stories referenced in his poem Le Grazie; and one by Dirk Van Hulle, who argues that the implicit teleological biases in the genetic critic’s analysis of reading traces can be avoided by not just considering the “author-as-writer”, but also more explicitly the “author-as-reader”. The issue then moves on to its second section, with essays that started as papers presented at ESTS 2023, preceded by a brief introduction on the conference theme by its organizer Rory Loughnane. This section also contains three essays, the first one by Dovilė Gervytė, who offers a genetic analysis of the born-digital avant-texte of the novel Ch.; the second by Jūratė Levina, who offers a hermeneutic perspective on The Complete Works of T. S. Eliot; and the third by Michel G. Sargent, where he recounts his experiences editing the cartae, Nicholas Love’s Mirror, and Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection. Finally, the issue presents two last essays that were submitted outside of the confines of the ESTS and GENESIS conferences: the first by Kelly Frost on the drafts of Suzanne Malherbe’s autofictional writings and the second by Vincent Neyt on Stephen King’s writing process. As usual, the issue again ends with an elaborate dossier of reviews of recent publications in the field.