This page was created by Anonymous.
Note for Readers
This project was primarily meant for a Graduate Seminar titled “ENGL 573: Editing in a Digital Age” that I have taken in Fall 2020 with Dr. Donna Campbell. I began this project with an intention of comparing the First American Edition (FAE) and the First British Edition (FBE) of Summer, since Wharton preferred the British Edition more than the American Edition. Therefore, the comparative charts that this project includes at this point have a full list of alterations that have been made in the FBE of Summer. However, after receiving some installments of Summer in McClure’s Magazine (May 1917-August 1917) and the EWPFAE that was found in Wharton’s home library in The Mount, I decided to expand my project and incorporate those materials into my comparative study of the editions. Therefore, I incorporated a complete list of 50 corrections that were made by Wharton on her copy of the FAE.
As I continued to expand my project, I felt that I needed two things that were still missing––the Manuscript and first three installments of Summer in McClure’s Magazine (February 1917-April 1917). I reached out to Beinecke library and they generously agreed to send me scanned pdfs of the Manuscript. However, I received the pdfs on the day my project was due. Since I received an extension from Dr. Campbell, I could incorporate some examples from the Manuscript into my project. Also, I could find the copy of the first three installments of Summer (February 1917-April 1917) from HathiTrust a couple of days before my project was due. So, I could only incorporate a few examples from those issues that I found important for understanding certain variations across the editions. For submitting the project for my class, I kept the complete comparative lists as they were and added two pages in this Scalar book–– “From Wharton to McClure’s to Appleton to Macmillan: Complete Comparative Chart, Chapter 1” and “From Wharton to McClure's to Appleton to Macmillan: Editorial Process.” These pages are placed right after the "History of the Major Editions of Summer" section. The first page provides a complete list of variations in Chapter 1 across the editions (including the manuscript). The second page includes two sample excerpts from these editions to provide examples of paragraph level editing that has been done to Summer as the novel moved from the Manuscript to the First British Edition.
This is an ongoing project, and now that I have all the materials I needed, I will continue working on this project and expand the comparative charts by including data from all five versions as well as update all the written content of different section. While working on these editions, I have noticed that change of one information can significantly influence the conclusions I have drawn from my earlier study of only two editions. Also, since I have manually done all the comparisons, transcribing, and collation, my lists may not be hundred percent accurate. I have done this whole project in less than two months while taking three graduate seminars and one 1-credit course and teaching two new undergraduate classes. In fact, since I was waiting for the manuscript, the actual proofreading of the comparative list and building the project began 10 days before the submission of the project. Thus, I did not have enough time to proofread the lists several times or take enough break in-between so that I can go back to the lists with fresh eyes. First, I created a master list with detailed comments; then I created a cleaned up version of that master list (the complete list included in this project), and then I created smaller lists from that cleaned up list, based on different categories. Creating the lists was a very meticulous process, and I noticed that my eyes often failed to notice obvious things after working for one or two hours at a stretch. Every time I went back to my list I could see that either a page number was missing or I forgot to highlight something or add a criteria or missed a variation. Also, adding information from two new sources in three days was also challenging and may lead to some misreading or misinterpretations of the documents. Therefore, at this point, like the comparative charts, I consider my arguments in the Literary Analysis section and my explanations in the introductory sections of different pages as works-in-progress.
In her plenary speech “Mapping Migration: Beyond the Migrant “Problem,”” Roopika Risam has suggested that the archivists need to explain their work process and rhetorical choices in detail because every rhetorical choice has “repercussions.” Even though Risam made this suggestion in a different context and for the archivists whose digital projects deal with the history of historically marginalized communities, I find her suggestion very insightful. Keeping in mind the fact that my work process and design choices may impact the way my audience will engage with the data that I have shared in this project, I decided to add this section. My objective is to inform my readers about the limitations of this project so that they keep these limitations in mind when they engage with the comparative charts and the discussions presented in this project.
