Description
Book SynopsisThis 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
Trade ReviewSutherland...amply shows the variety of ways in which manuscripts acquired new significance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. * Rachael Scarborough King, Modern Philosophy *
Table of ContentsIntroduction 1: Dealing with the Leftovers 2: Samuel Johnson and the Origins of Writing 3: 'this warm scribe my hand': The Autograph Craze 4: Nothing Wasted: Frances Burney's Fiction Manuscripts 5: Whose Property? Walter Scott's Manuscripts 6: Jane Austen Fragment Artist Afterword
