This essay provides an overview of recent contributions to the field of manuscript studies in the long eighteenth century. Although a number of early (and some contemporary) scholars have read print as the primary written form during the long eighteenth century, most researchers today acknowledge that manuscript traditions persisted despite the advent of print; recent scholarship reads them as complementary, where manuscript is no longer subsumed by print culture. This increased valuation of manuscript culture has shaped our understandings of literary and non‐literary genres and even the concept of authorship itself. This essay discusses the foundations and methodologies of manuscript studies of the eighteenth century, which arise out of the fields of bibliography and textual studies and corresponding developments in the early modern period. The latter part of the essay surveys some of the recent developments and directions of the field, including the intersecting disciplines of women's studies, genre theory, and readership and authorship practices.
In fixating on Frances Burney’s determination not to change Cecilia ’s confrontation scene and ending, we have neglected to detect her willingness to make other changes. Unlike Evelina , which was written in secret, members of Burney’s family circle read and commented on Cecilia as a novel-in-progress. An examination of the manuscript draft held at the Berg Collection of The New York Public Library confirms the extent to which Burney amputated Cecilia . She systematically softened her most trenchant sarcasm and even suppressed a description of satanic rites, which is undeniably one of her darkest and most intriguing prose set pieces.
One of the most prominent scenes in Frances Burney's The Wanderer (1814) is the amateur theatrical performance of Sir John Vanbrugh and Colley Cibber's The Provok'd Husband (1728). This episode was recycled from a discarded fragment, which has not been previously discussed, from Burney's Camilla (1796). Ostensibly Burney uses these scenes to comment on the late eighteenth‐century private theatrical vogue, but her use of The Prokov'd Husband in both novels highlights her editorial practice as a writer of long fiction and, more significantly, her failure to espouse theories of realistic characterisation during the last years of her literary career.
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