Ruth M. McAdams
Sample Syllabus
ROMANTICISM AND REVISION
Course Description
William Wordsworth revised The Prelude throughout his life, leaving students and scholars to sort
through three totally different, competing versions: (1) the short, two-book Prelude he completed as a
young man in 1798; (2) the vastly expanded twelve-book version from 1805; and (3) the final text
discovered upon his death in 1850 at the age of eighty. In this course, we will study some of the
major works of the Romantic period through their many surviving revisions, often using new digital
archives to access these materials and examine their differences. The detailed comparison of multiple
versions of the same work reveals the way that small changes can have huge consequences for a
text’s meaning and impact, and this analysis will provide an ideal plane on which to hone our skills
of close reading.
As we compare multiple revisions of the same work, we will also ask: how do we know which
version is the “right” one? Although Romantic poetry and prose can look inert in modern
anthologies, in fact its rendering poses difficult theoretical questions for scholars and editors
confronting a messy archive. How do we evaluate a revision that a writer made under pressure from
friends or readers? How do we make sense of the drafts that an author chose not publish? What do
we do in the case of typos, and what is a typo anyway? How does our own historical and cultural
distance from a text impact the editorial process? We will contextualize our comparisons of multiple
versions of the same work by reading influential textual and editorial theories that have grown out of
the thorny questions raised by Romantic poetry and prose. We will discuss and debate the relative
merits of competing theories of “author’s last intentions,” “first complete version,” and other
hybrid, contextual models, in order to gain a better sense of the issues involved in textual editing.
Our study of Romantic revision will be shaped by assignments that encourage students to see their
own scholarly writing as an ongoing process of revision, starting with small, informal assignments
that build toward larger research papers. Following models of creative exchange used by the
Romantic poets, this course will provide opportunities for students to workshop their scholarship in
progress.
Learning Goals
1) to hone the analytical skills of close reading through detailed comparisons of multiple
versions of the same literary work
2) to consider the implications of small textual changes on a work’s meaning and impact
3) to wrestle with the central questions of editorial and textual theory in order to understand
the challenges of textual editing
4) to come to understand writing as an ongoing process of repetition and return
Final Essay Assignment
Choose a work we have discussed or, with instructor permission, another literary work that survives
in multiple versions. In the first part of your essay, do an extended close reading that compares the
multiple surviving versions of the work, discussing the implications of the differences between them.
If it is a very long work, focus on a few key passages. This first portion of the paper need not cite
additional sources. In the second part of the paper, write a proposal for an edition of the work that
outlines and justifies its editorial theory, making reference to textual theories we have read as well as
the context of the work’s composition and publication and the intended contemporary audience of
your edition.
Possible Readings
Primary Texts:
- William Wordsworth, Prelude (1798, 1805, 1850 versions)
- Wordsworth, “The Ruined Cottage”
- S. T. Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner
- William Blake works from the William Blake Archive (http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/)
- Lord Byron, Don Juan
- Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (allegedly a revision of a lost epistolary version)
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (using the notebooks available here:
http://shelleygodwinarchive.org/)
- Walter Scott, Introductions to the Waverley Novels
- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (two alternative endings)
Secondary Texts:
- Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism
- Zachary Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship
- Jack Stillinger, Coleridge and Textual Instability
- D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts
- Fredson Bowers, Principles of Bibliographical Description
- Gerard Genette, Paratexts