Early Modern Texts and their Afterlives
The research carried out within this group looks at issues of textuality, as viewed in terms of editing, translating, rewriting and adapting literary texts. One focus is on the editing of sources and texts (including work on religious manuscripts and the edition of Sir Thomas Browne’s writings, to be published by OUP), projects currently carried out by two members. Secondly, several colleagues are working on or have just completed translation projects, such as the translation by three researchers, including a Professor specializing in early US history, of the Journal kept by Governor Morris (1752-1816), and the forthcoming publication of a translation of Defoe’s The Storm (1704). A third aspect of this research, building on theories of intertextuality (Genette), postmodernism and adaptation (Hutcheon), studies the means whereby literary texts from the early modern period are appropriated, reworked or rewritten, and the nature of the manifold intertextual relations thus created. Prior publications on the posterity of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) lay the groundwork for a wider scale project on this question, which also interconnects with the research carried out in this programme by the Swift focus group.
