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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. 365–377

1.5.3
Orthography. <hie>rogueglyphics

Spelling between manuscript and print

When it comes to orthography, there is no straightforward triumph of type technology over manuscript. If printing brought greater regularisation, it did so over centuries. Until at least 1900, spelling variation signified the flexibility available within public printed and private handwritten text. Examples in verse and prose from c.1600–1900 suggest how spelling is bound up with issues of readership and standard usage, on the one hand, and, on the other, of recording those forms that lie beyond print: dialect, slang, archaisms, phonetic rendering of speech forms, and more. Orthographic irregularity represents the world as multi-voiced, providing a rhythm for both eye and ear. Authors, publishers, and printers have all used spelling to censor or enable communication.
Keywords: manuscript, printers’ manuals, speech forms, standardisation, Jane Austen, Robert Burns, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Dickens, Walter Scott
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