What is Authorial Philology?

Contents

Preface

Introduction to the English Translation

Acknowledgments

Introduction Download
Paola Italia and Giulia Raboni

1. History Download
Paola Italia and Giulia Raboni

2. Methods Download
Paola Italia

3. Italian Examples Download
Paola Italia and Giulia Raboni

4. European Examples

4.1 Lope de Vega’s La Dama Boba Download
Marco Presotto and Sònia Boadas

4.2 Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Poems Download
Margherita Centenari

4.3 Jane Austen’s The Watsons Download
Francesco Feriozzi

4.4 Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu Download
Carmela Marranchino

4.5 Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot Download
Olga Beloborodova, Dirk Van Hulle and Pim Verhulst

References

Glossary

List of Illustrations

Paola Italia teaches Italian Literature and Scholarly Editing at the University of Bologna. She has worked on editions of texts, both paper and digital (Editing Novecento, 2013 and Editing Duemila, 2020), with a particular focus on the study and edition of authors' variants (How Gadda worked, 2017 forthcoming in French). She curates the website www.filologiadautore.it (which has had more than 800,000 hits since 2010) and has produced digital editions of Leopardi (Leopardi Ecdosys) and Gadda (Wiki Gadda).

Giulia Raboni is professor of philology of Italian literature at the University of Parma.Her main research interests are the poetry of the sixteenth-seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and the work of Alessandro Manzoni, to whom she has devoted numerous contributions, including the monograph How Manzoni Worked. She is the scientific director of the Manzoni Online portal (www.alessandromanzoni.org), which censuses, describes and makes available in digital format the writer's works, letters, papers and books.

Olga Beloborodova is a postdoctoral researcher and teaching assistant at the University of Antwerp’s Centre for Manuscript Genetics. She has published articles and book chapters on the subjects of Beckett, cognition and genetic criticism. She is Assistant Editor of Journal of Beckett Studies and member of the Editorial Board of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. Her first monograph, The Making of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Play’ / ‘Film’, was published with UPA/Bloomsbury in 2019. Her second book, Postcognitivist Beckett, came out in 2020 as part of the new Elements in Beckett Studies Series (Cambridge University Press). She is currently finalizing the digital genetic edition of Beckett’s Play for the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org).

Margherita Centenari teaches Digital Philology and Scholarly Editing at the University of Parma. She has worked on Giovanni Della Casa, Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi (ed. Inno a Nettuno e Odae adespotae, 2016) with a particular focus on the study of his erudition and his translations of Greek and Latin classics. She is a member of the international research group "Manzoni Online: papers, books, editions, tools”, based at the University of Parma.

Francesco Feriozzi earned his bachelor’s degree in Italian literature and his master’s degree in Modern Philology at Università degli Studi di Roma ‘Sapienza’ and is currently doing a DPhil in Modern Languages at Oxford supported by an AHRC OOC DTP scholarship. His thesis is on the mutual influence of Cinquecento linguistic theories and the rediscovery of troubadour poetry, and will include a critical edition of Giammaria Barbieri’s Arte del rimare. He is also Section Chief for the Humanities of St Catherine’s Academic Review.

Carmela Marranchino obtained a PhD in Italian Philology from the University of Parma in co-operation with the University of Lausanne. She carries out research at the University of Pavia, and she works on Italian literature between the 18th and 19th centuries (Monti, Manzoni, Carducci), with a particular interest in the critical and philological study of texts and author’s variants.  

Dirk Van Hulle is Professor of Bibliography and Modern Book History at the University of Oxford, chair of the Oxford Centre for Textual Editing and Theory (OCTET) and director of the Centre for Manuscript Genetics at the University of Antwerp. With Mark Nixon, he is co-director of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org), series editor of the Cambridge UP series ‘Elements in Beckett Studies’ and editor of the Journal of Beckett Studies. His publications include Textual Awareness (2004), Modern Manuscripts (2014), Samuel Beckett’s Library (2013, with Mark Nixon), The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett (2015), James Joyce’s Work in Progress (2016), and Genetic Criticism (OUP, 2022).

Pim Verhulst is a postdoctoral researcher and teaching assistant at the University of Antwerp. He has published articles and book chapters on Samuel Beckett in various journals and edited volumes, including the Journal of Beckett Studies and Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui. He has also co-authored and edited (with Magessa O’Reilly, Dirk Van Hulle and Vincent Neyt) the modules on Molloy, Malone meurt / Malone Dies and En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot in the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org), which received an MLA Prize in 2018.  

Sònia Boadas is a professor of Spanish literature at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She has been Marie Curie Fellow at Università di Bologna and Ramón y Cajal Fellow at Universitat de Girona. Her research career focuses on the study of textual issues in the Early Modern period, and more particularly on the production and transmission of Spanish Golden Age literature, analysing aspects related to primary sources, the writing process, and ecdotic aspects linked to the textual tradition.

© 2020 Paola Italia, Giulia Raboni et al.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text and to make commercial use of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:

This book is part of a wider project showcased on its sister website, www.filologiadautore.it, a resource coordinated by Paola Italia. With What is Authorial Philology?, the authors aim to provide an introduction to the field, and hope that the volume will serve as an introduction to the resources available on the website too. They are planning further volumes to tackle the issues of authorial philology arising when studying individual authors and, at the same time, to explore the synergy between the resources available on the website and the printed book.

The website www.filologiadautore.it was founded in 2010 and has now become a digital environment for information, updates and training in authorial philology, and a repository of Wiki editions of major Italian texts (WikiLeopardi and WikiGadda, whose main pages have had more than 750,000 hits). The website is consulted daily by all those looking for an introduction to the discipline. Also relevant to this development are studies of the history, methods and reviews of the critical reference texts, and the Catalogue of Digital Critical Editions produced by Greta Franzini (https://dig-ed-cat.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/).

The website contains, in the ‘Authorial Philology Exercises’ (‘Esercizi di filologia d’autore’) section, examples of editions of autographs with corrections by Gabriele D’Annunzio, Luigi Pirandello, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Elsa Morante. The site presents both the ‘French-style’ genetic edition — a diplomatic edition which is the first step for a correct deciphering of the manuscript and for a synoptic vision of the original and its transcription — and a critical edition adhering to the method of authorial philology.

The website also contains useful information about the new Philology series with Carocci, on Gadda and Manzoni (http://www.filologiadautore.it/wp/collana/), as well as information on the THESMA project (http://www.filologiadautore.it/wp/thesma-project-sapienza-ricerca-2014-2016/), as well as the RTI method developed by the non-profit organization Cultural Heritage Imaging (http://www.filologiadautore.it/wp/chi-rti-project/).