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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. 378–389

1.5.4
Punctuation

Dorothy Richardson, the long modernist novel, and the literary draft

All literary drafts manifest the signs of their provisionality. For experimental writers, such as the pioneering modernist writer, Dorothy Richardson, who resist the illusion of the artwork as complete, the improvisatory nature of the draft is a strength, a quality the writer carries over to the published version. This chapter reads the manuscript of Pointed Roofs, the first “chapter-volume” of Richardson’s long modernist novel Pilgrimage, in order to examine three aspects of Richardson’s compositional method: first, its experimental nature, which includes a degree of improvisation; second, her innovative use of punctuation, ellipses, and compression; and third, the relationship between the Richardsonian sentence and the emergence of modernist prose at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Keywords: literary draft, Dorothy Richardson, modernism, experiment, punctuation
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References (24)
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