Verslagen en mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse taal- en letterkunde. Jaargang 2005

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Introduction

The study of manuscripts and variants, and the genesis of a literary work is a central focus of modern editorial theory and practice. Nowadays it is not only the French critique génétique that concentrates on the study of manuscripts of modern authors; more and more, the German and Anglo-American schools of scholarly editing take into account holograph variants and the study of variation between print editions of a literary work. As for the presentation of editorial scholarship, electronic scholarly editions have become true alternatives for scholarly editions in print.

This volume collates the papers presented at the international conference Manuscript - Variant - Genesis held in Leuven on 12 May 2004. This conference was initiated and chaired by Marcel De Smedt who had introduced modern textual criticism and scholarly editing in academic Flanders almost fifteen years earlier on the conference De teksteditie in theorie en praktijk (Leuven, 8 November 1989).¹ The papers from that conference had the edition of nineteenth-century texts as their focus. The problems of scholarly editing were discussed from an international perspective by Marcel De Smedt and Dick van Vliet proved that the contradiction between reading and scholarly editions is false. There were two papers on the editing of correspondence material (Ada Deprez and G.J. Hooykaas), and a survey of printing press developments and their ramifications for scholarly editing was provided by Marita Mathijsen. The conference raised the awareness of scholarly editions of modern texts and correspondence material in Flanders and was the first in a series of colloquia, conferences, and a wide range of initiatives on this theme.²

1 Marcel De Smedt, ‘De problematiek van de teksteditie in internationaal perspectief.’ In A. Deprez (ed.), Vijfde Colloquium. De Teksteditie. Theorie en Praktijk. Leuven, 8 november 1989. Contactgroep 19^de eeuw. Dr. F.A. Snellaertcomité. Offprint from Spektator, 19/3 (1990): 297-314.

2 More detailed overviews of the initiatives in Flanders in the field of scholarly editing and textual criticism can be found in Marcel De Smedt, ‘Editiewetenschap in Vlaanderen. Een stand van zaken.’ In Edward Vanhoutte & Dirk Van Hulle (eds.), Editiewetenschap 〈!-- in de praktijk --〉. Gent: Genese, 1998, p. 15-35, online at 〈http://www.kantl.be/ctb/pub/editiewetenschap/desmedt.htm〉; and Marcel De Smedt, ‘De editie van moderne teksten.’ In Georges De Schutter (ed.), De toekomst van ons literair verleden. Offprint from Verslagen en Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, 108/1 (1998): 41-54.

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In September 1993 the interuniversity task force Genese was founded as a foundation for textual criticism and the genetic study of modern texts. The task force wanted to coordinate textual studies in Flanders and be the motivation for more collaboration among the different scholars and institutes in the field. Their political force as an academic lobby group was little. Nevertheless they succeeded in changing the mentality in Flanders step by step.³

The founding of the Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies (Centrum voor Teksteditie en Bronnenstudie-CTB)⁴ at the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature was the first structural, though modest, answer to the need for a coherent policy concerning scholarly editing in Flanders. In collaboration with Flemish universities and literary archives, the CTB unfolded a diverse range of activities in record time, amongst which were the scholarly editing of Flemish literature and the organisation of colloquia.⁵ With international partners, the CTB ran workshops in Flanders and Africa⁶ and the CTB can boast an impressive publication record.⁷ In the meantime, the CTB has become a leading expert centre on the use of advanced ICT in scholarly editing and textual criticism.⁸

3 Genese organised two conferences. The first was held in Ghent at 2 June 1995 entitled tekst/texte/text and resulted in the following two publications: Marcel De Smedt (ed.), Tekstgenese en Teksteditie. Special issue of Spiegel der Letteren, 37/4 (1995); and Marysa Demoor, Geert Lemout, and Sylvia van Peteghem (eds.) Editing the Text. Essays presented at the tekst/texte/text-conference Ghent, Belgium 1995. Tilburg: Tilburg University Press, 1998. The second colloquium was held in Antwerp on 3 December 1997 and resulted in the publication Edward Vanhoutte & Dirk Van Hulle (eds.), Editiewetenschap 〈!-- in de prakijk --〉. Gent: Genese, 1998. The complete volume is published online at 〈http://www.kantl.be/ctb/pub/editiewetenschap/〉.

4 〈http://www.kantl.be/ctb/〉

5 For example the yearly one-day colloquium on textual genetics in Antwerp and the occasional series Seminars in Electronic Editing 〈http://www.kantl.be/ctb/seminar/〉.

6 Het uitgeven van brieven. Antwerp, 2 November 2002; Book & Text Studies: Humanities Computing. Grahamstown, Rhodes University (South Africa), 8-12 September 2003 (with support from the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, TEI-Consortium, SLAIS-University College London & Rhodes University); and Manuscript & Electronic Text Academy - META04, Ghent, KANTL, 13-17 September 2004 (with support from the TEI-Consortium and SLAIS-University College London).

7 The complete list of publications can be consulted at 〈http://www.kantl.be/ctb/pub/publist.htm〉.

8 See Bert Van Raemdonck and Edward Vanhoutte, ‘Editorial Theory and Practice in Flanders and the Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies.’ In Mats Dahlström, Espen S. Ore en Edward Vanhoutte (eds.), Electronic Scholarly Editing-Some Northern European Approaches. A Special Issue of Literary and Linguistic Computing, 19/1 (2004): 119-127.

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In modern textual criticism or editorial science, Flanders is an active participant both in the theoretical debate and in the practice of scholarly editing. Typical of the Flemish attitude, this activity always has an international perspective. Contrary to, say, the German, French, English, Spanish, or Italian speaking textual critic, the Flemish scholar is used to reading the multilingual international literature and to attending international gatherings on the subject. As a logical consequence, the organisers of the international one-day colloquium Manuscript-Variant-Genesis decided to offer the delegates an international programme. This volume is the next logical step and presents the papers of the conference in essay form either in Dutch or in English.

In this volume, seven authors⁹ focus on the study of manuscript texts, textual variants in manuscripts and textual variants across printed texts. The study of the genesis of a literary work is an important factor not only for establishing a reliable authorial text, but it also attributes to better interpretations of the work.

The volume opens with an essay by Yves T'Sjoen (University of Ghent) who compares three printed editions and a manuscript version of Firmin Van Hecke's Verzen/Gedichten. This opens new perspectives, according to T'Sjoen, for the study of the poet's internal poetics, his composition technique, and all other aspects of Van Hecke's poetry. H.T.M. Van Vliet's essay agrees with T'Sjoen's conclusions and focuses on the genetic study of the extant manuscripts, typescripts, and printed versions of Simon Vestdijk's literary debut Terug tot Ina Damman. Van Vliet not only attributes this research to the interpretation and evaluation of the published texts, but argues that it also sheds new light on the author's development against the background of the contemporary literary climate.

This contemporary aspect is of great importance to the study of Stijn Streuvels' work as demonstrated by Marcel De Smedt (K.U. Leuven) and Joke

9 For reasons of copyright, the conference paper of Edward Vanhoutte could not be printed in this volume. His paper entitled ‘Variants and Variables. (Digital) endeavours to disclose genetic variation’ studies the genetic evolution of some fragments of Malcolm Lowry's The Last Address (a phase in the genesis of Lunar Caustic) and of some fragments of Stijn Streuvels' De teleurgang van den Waterhoek. Whereas knowledge of Lowry's writing process is essential in the interpretation and ordering of the many versions he produced, digital techniques are necessary to make the different versions with Streuvels legible. Since Streuvels had the habit of pasting a piece of paper containing a revised passage over the previous passage, he created a reversed palimpsest where top layers make underlying layers illegible. The paper disclosed some of these passages for the first time since Streuvels had concealed them.

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Debusschere (CTB). In his genetic study of Streuvels' Levensbloesem Marcel De Smedt proves the importance of the study of contemporary reception and critique and demonstrates how it can influence the way authors revise their work greatly. Joke Debusschere studies the genesis of the German translation of Levensbloesem on the basis of Streuvels' correspondences with his publishers and translators. Debusschere's essay is a convincing defence of the importance of authors' correspondences for the study of the genesis, production, meaning, and reception of their work, and for a better understanding of the contemporary (literary) climate. For her study, Debusschere made extensive use of the research possibilities offered by the electronic edition of the correspondence between Streuvels and his publishers which she worked on at the CTB for more than four years.¹⁰

The University of Antwerp is another academic institution which explores the possibilities of electronic editions for the genetic interpretation of literary works. Dirk Van Hulle (University of Antwerp) discusses the electronic edition's problems of presentation by means of the electronic genetic and critical edition of Samuel Beckett's penultimate work, called Stirrings Still, translated into French by the author as Soubresauts. Van Hulle meditates on the status of the variant and the invariant in manuscripts, and pleads for a closer collaboration among genetic criticism, humanities computing, and textual scholarship. Only this federation of disciplines can find adequate solutions for the genetic, electronic, and critical representation of textual modifications in modern manuscripts. Domenico Fiormonte (Università Roma Tre, Italy) and Cinzia Pusceddu (University of Edinburgh, UK) present a model for the representation of the ‘mobile text’ with the Magrelli Genetic Machine. Their discussion of the Digital Variants project is preceded by a reconstruction of the history of that concept which goes back as far as the 1930s, and by a discussion of the theories of the Italian editor and philologist Gianfranco Contini. Genetic criticism, psychology, scholarly editing, textual criticism, and humanities computing are hereby mentioned in one breath.

The volume closes with an essay by Peter Shillingsburg (De Montfort University Leicester, UK). Shillingsburg observes from the study of the genesis, writing, and the revision process of W.M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair that the

10 This electronic edition is part of the larger DALF (Digital Archive of Letters in Flanders) project that aims at building a diachronic corpus of correspondence material through the production of electronic editions. More information on this project can be found at 〈http://www.kantl.be/ctb/project/dalf/〉.

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many contradictions, uncertainties, and obscurities are not the result of inattention and ineptitude on Thackeray's part but that they are on the contrary subtle and deft touches that introduce the reader to the moral debate of the novel.

The first four essays are published in Dutch, the last three in English. In order to contribute to the efforts of the readers who do not read Dutch, the English abstracts of all essays are printed at the end of the volume.

It is appropriate to thank the Faculty of Arts of the K.U. Leuven and the Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies of the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature for their support of this one-day colloquium, and the executive board of the Royal Academy for their offer to publish these proceedings.

Edward Vanhoutte
Centre for Scholarly Editing
and Document Studies
(CTB-KANTL)
October 2005