Pilgrimage and Its Paratexts
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PILGRIMAGE AND ITS PARATEXTS By RENÉE JANE STANTON A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English Literature School of English, Drama and American and Canadian Studies University of Birmingham September 2015 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Dedication For Jeremy – my book for you. Acknowledgements Firstly I would like to thank very warmly my PhD supervisors at the University of Birmingham, Michael Toolan and Deborah Longworth, who, in their very different ways, helped me focus my thinking. Their time, dedication and expertise have been much appreciated. I would like to say a particular thank you to Gill Hanscombe who responded generously to my enquiries and whose interest and encouragement was so helpful. Also I would like to express my gratitude to Scott McCracken and Becky Bowler at the University of Keele for their welcome on my research visits. Their support, advice and willingness to share their knowledge have been invaluable. Thanks go to the members of the Dorothy Richardson Society whose work I have listened to and read and whose conversations and company I have enjoyed. A special thank you goes to Stephen Rogers who shared his knowledge about Walter Allen. Helen Trollope at the University of South Wales must also get a special thank you for dealing so efficiently with all my inter-library loan requests. And a personal thank you goes to Bob and Hils for their gift which enabled me to visit the Beinecke Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. And lastly my thanks must go to Jeremy for his love, understanding and unfailing support and to my children, Ursi and Theo. CONTENTS PREAMBLE 1 INTRODUCTION 7 Methodology 8 Narratology 9 Modernist and New Modernist Studies 13 Stylistics 17 Introduction to Pilgrimage’s material form and early publishing history 19 CHAPTER ONE: “THE CHILL WATERS OF AUTHORSHIP” 21 Introduction 21 A methodological note on data collection 26 Pointed Roofs, Backwater and Honeycomb (later to become Volume I of the 1938 Dent edition) 28 Analysis 29 Letters that refer to The Tunnel and Interim (later to become Volume II of the 1938 Dent edition) 33 Analysis 35 Letters that refer to Deadlock, Revolving Lights and The Trap (later to become volume III of the 1938 Dent edition) 45 Analysis 46 Letters that refer to Oberland and Dawn’s Left Hand, (the first two chapter-volumes of what was to become volume IV of the 1938 omnibus edition) 52 Analysis 56 Concluding comments 66 CHAPTER TWO: “THE ENDLESS BUSINESS” 68 An epitextual analysis of the letters leading up to publication 68 The materiality of the 1938 omnibus editions: form and early sales figures 75 ‘Dent’s little fanfare’ (letter to Bryher, September 1938, Fromm, 1995, p.350): The material form of Richard Church’s epitextual essay 77 The proto-brochure 78 The lead-up to the published brochure of 1938 82 Reviews of the 1938 Dent and Knopf editions 93 ‘Seriously I don’t believe in prefaces’ (letter to Koteliansky, dated 20th March 1934, Fromm, 1995, p.260): The context to Richardson’s authorial Foreword of 1938 97 Analysis of Richardson’s 1938 Foreword/peritextual preface 101 CHAPTER THREE: LATER 20TH CENTURY ALLOGRAPHIC PERITEXTUAL PREFACES 111 Introduction to Walter Allen’s preface to the 1967 Dent edition 111 Walter Allen’s literary criticism on Pilgrimage prior to 1967 112 Tradition and Dream 1964 118 An analysis of Walter Allen’s 1967 preface: functions and pragmatic status 119 Concluding comments on Allen’s preface 127 Gillian Hanscombe’s preface to the 1979 Virago edition: background to the choice of preface writer and the feminist context 128 An analysis of Hanscombe’s 1979 preface: functions and pragmatic status 130 A gender-sensitive stylistic comparison between the two allographic prefaces 139 A gender-sensitive comparison between different representations of Richardson in Hanscombe’s preface and Anthony West’s Aspects of a Life 148 Concluding comments on the feminist agenda of Hanscombe’s preface 150 CHAPTER FOUR: THE MATERIAL FORM OF THE 1967 DENT AND THE 1976 NEW YORK POPULAR LIBRARY OMNIBUS EDITIONS 152 Peritextual variation and reading community 152 Capturing Miriam’s mind state: The cover illustrations of the 1967 Dent Omnibus edition 154 Analysis of the front covers of volumes I-IV 156 Other peritextual features of the 1967 Dent edition: the metatextual function of the jacket flap and dust wrapper 163 The provenance of the quotation from Frank Swinnerton on the jacket flap 165 An examination of Frank Swinnerton’s The Georgian Literary Scene 167 Dent’s publishing voice in the 1967 edition 169 Pilgrimage’s framing on the back page peritext 170 The 1976 New York Popular Library edition: what is foregrounded and what is disguised in the peritextual back cover blurb 174 The 1976 New York Popular Library edition: the role of the flyleaf textual summaries 177 The New York Popular Library edition covers: a sexualised reading of Pilgrimage 187 Concluding comments 193 CHAPTER FIVE: PILGRIMAGE’S NEW SOCIOCULTURAL MATRICES 194 Virago: Creative transformation or feminist appropriation of Pilgrimage? 194 Breaking a silence: The origins, aims and ideology of Virago 195 ‘The green gravestones’: Virago Modern Classics 197 Virago’s take on the canon: the influence of Leavis 201 Traces of negative metatexts in the epitextual flyer 206 Foregrounding and silence in the peritextual blurb of the Virago edition 207 The front covers of the Virago edition: a spiritualised atmospheric reading 210 Exploring the visual grammar of the paintings 212 Reading with ‘a whole self’ 216 Reading as emotional adventure in Pointed Roofs 223 Concluding comments on the Virago covers 227 The Virago edition of Pilgrimage: developments post 1979 228 Scholarly interest in Pilgrimage from North America 229 Concluding comments on the Virago edition of Pilgrimage 232 Pilgrimage – a text to be studied: more recent sociocultural matrices – the Broadview and Oxford University Press editions of the 21st century 234 CONCLUSION 239 PREAMBLE ‘What one paratextual element gives, another paratextual element, later or simultaneous, may also take away; and here as elsewhere, the reader must put it all together and try (it’s not always so simple) to figure out what the whole adds up to’ (Genette, 1997, p.183). Gérard Genette’s theory of the paratext describes how any text is framed by its paratext, material appended to a text or more loosely associated with it once it is published, read and circulated in book form. The paratext is conceptualised as a spatial field, like a ‘threshold’ which the reader can either step across or turn away from, ‘a zone between text and off text’. Its key function is to convey a ‘commentary’ that shapes how a text is interpreted and perceived. Genette explains how the liminal zone of the paratext has the power to achieve a ‘better reception’ or a ‘more pertinent reading’ of a text (1997, p.2). But a paratextual commentary does not always straightforwardly serve the needs of the text to which it is anchored; it can be complex and mutable. As the Genettian epigraph suggests, the paratext is a transitional zone that can ‘give’ and ‘take away’ meanings at different points over time. I would go further and suggest that the paratext can be a zone where ideas about a text can also be in states of collision or collusion. I am interested in examining the paratextual space framing Dorothy Richardson’s long modernist novel Pilgrimage (1915-67), a text published in thirteen chapter-volumes over the unusually protracted time period of fifty-two years. In Genettian terms ‘figuring out’ what the whole of any text ‘adds up to’ can be difficult but, in the case of Pilgrimage, there are a cluster of complicating factors to contend with: unusual length, difficult style, slow evolution, and a ‘false’ omnibus edition of 1938. 1 Today’s reader is, perhaps, in a privileged position, able to read Pilgrimage’s multiple volumes back-to-back in a bid to grasp the text as a whole, whereas its first readers had to wait years to read most chapter-volumes. I would guess that some might, but most would not, reacquaint themselves with earlier chapter-volumes before reading the latest, whereas others might read chapter-volumes out of sequence or be even unaware that the one they were reading formed part of a larger whole. Potential uncertainty for the reader with regard to start and end point or the long passages of time between chapter-volumes did not, in theory, cause Richardson any concern. In an article entitled ‘Novels’ for Life and Letters (1948), she reflects on the way in which experimental novels of the modernist type demand a different kind of vertical reading from the conventional linear or horizontal model associated with the realist novel. Indeed she celebrates and finds pleasure in a new kind of reading, one that is indirect and uncertain but nevertheless substantial, sensitive and autonomous: The interest of any single part is no longer dependent for the reader upon exact knowledge of what has gone before or upon a frothy excitement (…) as to what next will happen. Such novels may be entered at any point, read backwards, or from the centre to either extremity and will yet reveal, like a mosaic, the interdependence of the several parts, each one bearing the stamp of the author’s consciousness’ (reproduced in Scott, 1990, p.435).