MARGINAL · Modernist Authors' Reading: Genesis in Authors' Libraries

MARGINAL examines authors’ creativity through the traces of their own reading. The project starts from the idea that knowing what and how a writer read can help us understand the origins of their work. A work of literature often starts in the margins of another book.The project focuses on the reading habits of three modernist authors – Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. The rationale behind the selection of these case studies is based on a twentieth-century crisis of ‘encyclopedism’ – in the sense of comprehensive learning or knowledge. Many modernist and late-modernist writers problematized the encyclopedic ambition that marked their time, but the paradox is that they were only able to do so because they were so knowledgeable themselves. As key representatives of their period, Woolf, Joyce and Beckett read a wide range of European authors and left substantial personal libraries that have largely been preserved. Traces of authors’ reading have so far often been considered a ‘marginal’ phenomenon in textual scholarship. MARGINAL uses recent advances in digital scholarly editing to reverse this formal priority between centre and margin and shift the attention from the authors’ output to their input. It digitally reunites the books they once owned, which are dispersed over dozens of archives and collections (the ‘extant’ library) and reconstructs the parts of their libraries that have been lost (the ‘virtual’ library). The three resulting online, open-access editions of Woolf’s, Joyce’s and Beckett’s libraries will establish and annotate the connections between source texts, reading notes and the authors' own works to see how their multilingual reading informed their writing. By mapping this marginal zone between reading and writing, the purpose is to consider modernist authors as readers in the first place and examine which books they read, how they read, what records they made of this reading, and how this translated into their own works.