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

Text as Process grows out of Sally Bushell's work co-editing a long poem with a complex manuscript history for a prestigious series: The Excursion, edited with James Butler and Michael Jaye, in the Cornell Wordsworth series (2007). Unable to find a satisfying and robust methodology for her work on Wordsworth manuscripts within the Anglo-American textual editing tradition, Bushell presents Text as Process as a provisional but powerfully synthesised contribution to filling that gap. The book proposes a theoretically-informed methodology to promote the grounded critical interpretation of the drafts of nineteenth-century poetic texts, and other prepublication materials associated with them, considered in their own right and not simply as background to the published work. This methodology is then tested in three author-based case studies of creative practice in the drafts of long poems worked on over many years, and of the major editions that attempt to reproduce them. The case studies are: Wordsworth's The Prelude and The Excursion, and the Cornell series; Tennyson's Idylls of the King, and The Tennyson Archive edited by Christopher Ricks and Aidan Day (1993); Emily Dickinson's poetic oeuvre; and R.W. Franklin's facsimile edition of The Manuscript Books (1981). There is a clear rationale for the selection of these representative studies of major figures, over and above Bushell's desire to extend her field of expertise. The fact that 'Dickinson's texts never achieved an authorized printed form' and the ensuing 'heightened awareness of text-critical issues' in Dickinson Studies make the American poet the ultimate test-case for any new theory of the 'pre-text'. Yet the choice of authors is also a polemical gesture. Bushell seeks to dynamically intervene in editorial and critical theory across Romantic, Victorian and American Studies, and suggests her thesis has implications that could be extended by scholars working on other literary genres and periods.

If the above makes it sound like Bushell is on a mission as much as writing a scholarly monograph, this impression is not entirely wrong. Yet the spirit driving Bushell's project is less intellectual egotism than a principled earnestness, a conviction that most Anglo-American critics think little about the significance of draft materials or the ways in which editorial method affects critical practice, and a determination to reintegrate editorial, critical and creative processes. She does not pretend to be working alone in the wilderness, acknowledging intellectual debts and affiliations to critics who have bridged the editorial and critical divide, and affirmed the literary text's instability and multivalency, notably John Bryant, Jerome McGann, Hershel Parker and Jack Stillinger. Bushell takes familiar debates - such as those about the fallacy of the 'single, stable state' text and about possibile expanded definitions of the 'text' - and sheds light from intellectual traditions usually marginal to Anglo-American editing. Her argument for studying draft materials alongside the published text - as one 'continuum of text' - is rooted in a distinctive challenge to the insularity of national editing traditions. The opening chapter on 'Contextualizing Process' considers the German editorial theory of 'versions', before identifying French genetic criticism, or critique génétique (as practised, for instance, by Almuth Grésillon and Pierre-Marc de Biasi), as the most promising basis for a systematic study of textual origins, due to the relative autonomy, and status, given to draft materials as the 'avant-texte', the materials which make the finished text possible.

There follows a chapter offering a close-grained theoretical account of textual 'process', focusing on debates about the denial of origins, the discrediting of models of authorial intention and how to establish meaningful historical, social and philosophical contexts for the reconstruction of such 'process'. The core of the theory of 'creative composition' is argued in Chapter 3, 'Reclaiming Process: Toward a Compositional Method'. This chapter focuses on the material, social and linguistic contexts in which texts are conceived. It also elaborates on a view...