Studies Toward a Critical Edition of Thomas Hardy's A Group of Noble Dames PDF Download

Author: Alyssa Diane Leavell
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Languages : en
Pages : 692

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Book Description
This dissertation makes steps toward a complete critical edition of Thomas Hardy's second book of short stories, A Group of Noble Dames. It includes introductory essays describing the publication history of the stories and the general categories of changes that Hardy made for the editions published during his lifetime. A Group of Noble Dames contains ten short stories in total, which are united by a framing narrative. According to Hardy's preface to the Wessex Novels edition of the text published in 1896, the stories were inspired by genealogies and legends of the families of local nobility and landed gentry in the southwest of England, although the stories were dramatized with "motives, passions, and personal qualities" that Hardy imagined (v). This dissertation contains the edited text of five of the short stories, with a textual apparatus containing all substantive and accidental changes. "The First Countess of Wessex," "Squire Petrick's Lady," "The Lady Penelope," "The Duchess of Hamptonshire," and "The Honourable Laura" have been chosen for inclusion in this study because they were all published in separate serial magazines before being collected, and therefore they represent every stage in the publication history. The work presented in this dissertation will contribute toward the first critical edition of A Group of Noble Dames to date. As G. Thomas Tanselle discusses in his book A Rationale of Textual Criticism, a critical edition provides scholars with a reliable and accurate text for future scholarship; additionally "any text that a textual critic produces is itself the product of literary criticism, reflecting a particular aesthetic position and thus a particular approach to what textual 0́correctness' consists of" (35). This dissertation uses the 1891 first edition as copy text, the earliest version to have all ten stories collected together within the framing narrative. Substantive variants from all revised editions are listed in footnotes keyed to the text. A complete list of accidental variants is included as an appendix, along with lists of editorial emendations. This will allow readers the option of reconstructing the version of the text that they deem most suitable for their research purposes.