Literary Works in Multiple Versions

Most literary scholars can think of instances in which an author’s idea has been expressed in several versions, a process that G. Thomas Tanselle has called “vertical revision.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Trimalchio,” for example, became The Great Gatsby.  Eudora Welty transformed a short story for The New Yorker into the novel The Optimist’s Daughter and thereby won a Pulitzer Prize in literature. And of course there are Piers Plowman, King Lear, or Great Expectations-not to mention seventeenth-century sermons published under the same title but with significantly different texts.

This panel seeks to investigate the implications of multiple versions.  Preference will be given to papers that consider the issues the situation raises for scholarly editors.  Other possible topics include the roles that publishers’ editors have played in transforming works into new versions (including new genres) and the literary implications of such transformations.

Please send proposals of 500 words or less and academic affiliation/bio information to Carol DeBoer-Langworthy (CDBL@Brown.edu) by 15 March 2013. The MLA meeting will be held in Chicago, 9–12 January 2014. We welcome preliminary inquiries.