Text as Process: Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Dickinson (review)

Sally Bushell’s Text as Process is noteworthy both for its ambition and for the clarity with which it states its goals and procedures: it “presents a methodology for the study of draft materials” and hopes to become “the basis of a new subdiscipline” (2). Put another way, it aims to do for the pre-publication process of composition what Jerome McGann has done for the social determinants of a text’s production and dissemination. Bushell turns to the French tradition of genetic criticism as a model for uniting the techniques and concerns of textual criticism and editorial work with those of interpretive literary criticism. Instead of subordinating manuscript evidence to further our understanding of a final, printed text, Bushell often inverts the usual hierarchy and uses published versions as a frame to aid in the reconstruction of the prepublication process. Four theoretical chapters advocate this new approach and relate it to several key critical debates. The first briefly sketches the history of changing editorial theories in the Anglo-American, German, and French traditions. The second recuperates a qualified conception of authorial intentions (and their embodiments on the page) while acknowledging the insights of New Critical and poststructuralist attacks on intent. The crucial third chapter establishes a methodological framework to engage with both published texts and text as process, including many types of intentional acts and many possible materials and contexts of composition. The monograph concludes by attempting to reconcile phenomenology with a methodological focus on compositional process.

These chapters clearly speak to Bushell’s intended audience of textual scholars, while the three central chapters—case studies of William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, and Emily Dickinson—have much to offer critics of these authors. A fascinating section discusses the eclectic contents and layout of the notebook containing the earliest draft material for The Prelude (1805; 1850), which begins at the back of the notebook and runs up against tables of German verbs and a draft of the “Essay on Morals” (1798). Bushell describes how Wordsworth works from back to front in delimited chunks, sometimes turning the notebook sideways: “Each new accretion of the text is both constrained and reassured by the presence of the previously entered text that exists behind it (working inward from the back of the notebook)” (87). She persuasively suggests that Wordsworth does this to allay his general anxiety about moving from mental and spoken composition to the page, and his more specific anxiety about beginning a lengthy poem.

The Dickinson chapter traces several idiosyncratic methods of revision that recur in her manuscripts. For instance, Bushell argues that when Dickinson uses crosses to mark words in a poem that have variants listed above, beside, or below them, it “works to keep all alternative meanings at the same level of significance” and “allows for revision that does not replace. It allows for a state of textual suspension” (194, emphasis original). In other cases the exploration of many options for one word in the text leads to a decision of one option over the others, but the decision then destabilizes a nearby section of text and spurs a list of possible variants for that neighboring word or phrase.

Of greatest interest to Victorianists will be the chapter on Idylls of the King (1859–85). In it, Bushell explores Tennyson’s printing of “trial books” as an active part of revision and composition (rather than to correct printing errors) (124), and his unusual anxiety about reception at this phase of his writing process. She also assesses Tennyson’s translation from earlier sources and self-translation from his prose sketches, and the changing titles of individual idylls. Perhaps the highlight of the chapter is her subtle and astute analysis of the shifting order of episodes in initial drafts and various published forms of the Idylls, and her connection of these formal dynamics of part and whole to the poem’s thematic concerns. If the plots...