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Part of
A Comparative History of the Literary Draft in Europe
Edited by Olga Beloborodova and Dirk Van Hulle
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXV] 2024
► pp. 353–364

1.5.2
Pruning

Editorial intervention and its effects

Editorial intervention is often essential to a text’s development, and yet the work of literary editors is often obscured. This chapter examines some of the critical issues around the role of the editor, arguing for the importance of the editorial process and considering examples of textual development and critical issues resulting from it. Specifically, it analyses the editing of the ending of Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark to demonstrate the way in which textual cutting can significantly impact a literary work’s development and reception; these kinds of cuts can echo throughout an author’s career in surprising ways.
Keywords: pruning, editing, cutting, textual variance, revision, interpretation, reception, Jean Rhys, modernism
Article outline
  • Editing: Invisible and essential
  • “Starting all over again”: Jean Rhys and the editing of Voyage in the Dark
  • Editing, textual variance, and interpretation
  • Cutting as theme and echo
  • Notes
  • References
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References (30)
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