Jennifer Egan's Editorial Processes and the Archival Edition of Emerald City

This is an author's accepted manuscript of an article accepted for publication in LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory. It is made available, here, on a personal website with no embargo and will also be available in Birkbeck's institutional repository 18 months after publication, as per Taylor & Francis's OA policy at the time of acceptance. Data appendices will be openly available at or around the time of publication.

Textual Scholarship and Contemporary Literary Studies: Jennifer Egan's Editorial Processes and the Archival Edition of Emerald City

Despite a strong pedigree of textual scholarship in literary studies, the study of contemporary literature often eschews such methods on the grounds that there is an insufficient archive to fully comprehend the production of just-published work. In this article I argue for a turn to textual scholarship in the field of contemporary literary studies through the comparison of geographically diverse publications of texts serving as documentary co-archives of emergence. To make this case I document the two very different versions of Jennifer Egan's first-published collection of fiction, Emerald City (1993 and 1996), charting the interpretational consequences of her editorial processes within that early work.

Author's accepted manuscript available for download

Jennifer Egan's Editorial Processes and the Archival Edition of Emerald City was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at eve.gd: Martin Paul Eve on July 06, 2019.