This page was created by Anonymous.
About the Project
From Wharton to McClure’s to Appleton to Macmillan: Journey of “Summer” from Manuscript to Print intends to examine the Manuscript and three major editions of Edith Wharton’s novel Summer: Serialized Edition in McClure's Magazine (February 1917- August 1917), the First American Edition (1917), and the First British Edition (1917). Edith Wharton's Summer was first published in serialized form in McClure’s Magazine from February to August in 1917. In the same year, D. Appleton and Company published this novel in book form. The First British Edition was also published in 1917 by Macmillan. The First American Edition (FAE) is closer to the serialized edition in McClure’s Magazine, except some variations in spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and word-choice. While McClure’s Magazine Americanized majority of the spellings in the serialized edition of Summer––for example, using “parlor” (McClure's Magazine Edition, p. 20, May 1917) instead of “parlour” (the FAE, p. 124), the First American Edition includes a combination of American and British spelling conventions––for example, “civilization” (American, the FAE, p. 11) and “parlour” (British, the FAE, p. 124). However, the First British Edition, that was under the publication process when the First American Edition came out, made massive amounts of alterations to the First American Edition. As the comparative charts and the discussions of this project will illustrate, some of those alterations were made to follow Wharton's manuscript and many of the 50 corrections made by Wharton on her copy of the First American Edition. The rest of the corrections resulted from Macmillan's editorial decision, some of which are based on the differences between American and British spelling conventions.
The objective of this project is to categorize all the alterations, trace the patterns, and explore the interpretive possibilities that can emerge from a comparative study of the manuscript and all the major editions listed above. In addition, the project also illustrates the pedagogical possibilities of this project and discusses how this project can be used as an example of the application of the theories, methods, and practices of textual studies in literature classrooms.
At this point, this project only includes comparative charts that list all the variations based on a comparative study of the First American Edition and the First British Edition of Summer. For the purpose of this comparative study, the project uses the First American Edition of Summer and the First American Edition of Summer with Wharton’s corrections. For the First British Edition of Summer, the project uses the reproduction of the First British Edition by Oxford World’s Classics. In addition, the project incorporates some examples from the Manuscript and the McClure’s Magazine edition of Summer in several sections.
This project is a work-in-progress. The author intends to expand the scope of comparative analysis by adding sections to the existing charts to include data from the manuscript and the serialized edition in McLure’s Magazine.
