Modern Manuscripts


Book Description

The twentieth century has been called 'the golden age of the modern manuscript,' a time when the historical value of early manuscripts as a record of a writer's thought processes came to be fully recognized. Drawing on the critical tools of French genetic criticism, Modern Manuscripts explores the development of early 20th century literary texts, from source texts and early notes, through successive draft manuscripts to publication and successive editions. Historicizing these modernist processes of writing, Dirk Van Hulle contrasts these twentieth century manuscripts with the development of Charles Darwin's text for On the Origin of Species, itself a formative intellectual influence on modern writing. Exploring the writings of such writers as Joyce, Woolf and Beckett, this is an important study that will open up new avenues of thought for scholars of Modernist literature, material culture and book history.




The North Ship


Book Description

The North Ship, Philip Larkin's earliest volume of verse, was first published in August 1945. The introduction, by Larkin himself, explains the circumstances of its publication and the influences which shaped its contents.




The Missing Pages


Book Description

“[A] gripping, and at times unsettling, history of . . . the Zeytun Gospels, a lavishly illuminated Armenian book that miraculously survived centuries of war.” —The Wall Street Journal In 2010, the world’s wealthiest art institution, the J. Paul Getty Museum, found itself confronted by a century-old genocide. The Armenian Church was suing for the return of eight pages from the Zeytun Gospels, a manuscript illuminated by the greatest medieval Armenian artist, Toros Roslin. Protected for centuries in a remote church, the holy manuscript had followed the waves of displaced people exterminated during the Armenian genocide. Passed from hand to hand, caught in the confusion and brutality of the First World War, it was cleaved in two. Decades later, the manuscript found its way to the Republic of Armenia, while its missing eight pages came to the Getty. This is the biography of a manuscript that is at once art, sacred object, and cultural heritage. Its tale mirrors the story of its scattered community as Armenians have struggled to redefine themselves after genocide and in the absence of a homeland. Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh follows in the manuscript’s footsteps through seven centuries, from medieval Armenia to the killing fields of 1915 Anatolia, the refugee camps of Aleppo, Ellis Island, and Soviet Armenia, and ultimately to a Los Angeles courtroom. Reconstructing the path of the pages, Watenpaugh uncovers the rich tapestry of an extraordinary artwork and the people touched by it. At once a story of genocide and survival, of unimaginable loss and resilience, The Missing Pages captures the human costs of war and persuasively makes the case for a human right to art. “A well-told tale of the history of the Armenian people [and] a wondrous and terrifically engrossing journey of this sacred religious object and priceless work of art.”—Michael Bazyler, author of Holocaust Justice: The Battle for Restitution in America’s Courts




Why Modern Manuscripts Matter


Book Description

This is a study of the politics, the commerce, and the aesthetics of heritage culture in the shape of authors' manuscripts. Draft or working manuscripts survive in quantity from the eighteenth century when, with the rise of print, readers learnt to value 'the hand' as an index of individuality and the blotted page, criss-crossed by deletion and revision, as a sign of genius. Since then, collectors have fought over manuscripts, libraries have curated them, the rich have stashed them away in investment portfolios, students have squeezed meaning from them, and we have all stared at them behind exhibition glass. Why do we trade them, conserve them, and covet them? Most, after all, are just the stuff left over after the novel or book of poetry goes into print. Poised on the boundary where precious treasure becomes abject waste, litter, and mess, modern literary manuscripts hover between riches and rubbish. In a series of case studies, this book explores manuscript's expressive agency and its capacity to provoke passion--a capacity ever more to the fore in the twenty-first century now that books are assembled via word-processing software and authors no longer leave in such quantity those paper trails behind them. It considers manuscripts as residues of meaning that print is unable to capture: manuscript as fragment art, as property, as waste paper. It asks what it might mean to re-read print in the shadow of manuscript. Case studies of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Walter Scott, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen--writers from the first great period of manuscript survival--are interspersed with discussions of William Godwin's record keeping, the Cairo genizah, Katie Paterson's 'Future Library' project, Andy Warhol's and Muriel Spark's self-archiving, Cornelia Parker's reclamation art, and more.







Modern Artifacts


Book Description

Modern Artifacts includes all 18 installments of the series, copresented with Esopus and the Museum of Modern Art Archives, that originally appeared in Esopus, the award-winning nonprofit arts annual that suspended publication in 2018. Each of these installments focuses on a particular part of the MoMA Archives--subjects include the museum's first guest book, its "Art Lending Service" program, activities in the museum's garden, materials from the archives of contemporary artists such as James Lee Byars, Scott Burton and Grace Hartigan, and correspondence, photographs and other ephemera related to exhibitions such as the groundbreaking Spaces show in 1970 devoted to installation art. The book, which features several removable inserts of archival materials printed in facsimile, also includes brand-new contributions commissioned from six contemporary artists--Mary Ellen Carroll, Rhea Karam, Mary Lum, Clifford Owens, Michael Rakowitz and Paul Ramirez Jonas--who have each created a project in the book inspired by a particular item or series of items in the MoMA Archives.




A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts


Book Description

A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts provides an introduction to the language and concepts employed in bibliographical studies and textual scholarship as they pertain to early modern manuscripts and printed texts Winner, Honourable Mention for Literature, Language and Linguistics, American Publishers Prose Awards, 2010 Based almost exclusively on new primary research Explains the complex process of viewing documents as artefacts, showing readers how to describe documents properly and how to read their physical properties Demonstrates how to use the information gleaned as a tool for studying the transmission of literary documents Makes clear why such matters are important and the purposes to which such information is put Features illustrations that are carefully chosen for their unfamiliarity in order to keep the discussion fresh




Modern Manuscripts


Book Description




Early Manuscripts and Modern Translations of the New Testament


Book Description

Although valuable for their early witness to the text of the Greek New Testament, the influence of the papyri on Bible translations in this century has largely gone unnoticed. Early Manuscripts & Modern Translations of the New Testament redresses this failure by providing a detailed profile of nearly 70 major New Testament papyri and assessing their effect on modern English Bible translations. A five-page bibliography on textual criticism and fourteen photos of ancient papyrus manuscripts round out this fascinating study.




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