School of Critical Studies

Please join us on Wednesday 6 March for the next talk in the English Literature Visiting Speaker Series, when Dr Rebecca Bowler (Keele University) will be discussing her work on May Sinclair. Details below. Talk starts 5.15, with refreshments available from 5pm. Room 202, 4 University Gardens. All welcome!

'(Re)Presenting May Sinclair: Scholarly Editing and the Archive'.

The Edinburgh Critical Editions of the Works of May Sinclair are publishing Sinclair’s works over a six year period (2022-2028). Sinclair was not just a novelist. She wrote philosophy and studies of psychoanalysis as well as fiction, literary history, biography and poetry.The editions are divided into five main tranches: “Philosophy and Mysticism” (2022), “Psychology and Genius” (2022), “Women, War and Feminism” (2024), “Social Realism” (2026) and “Social Satire” (2028). These themed tranches are designed in part to reflect the development of Sinclair’s interests, her mode of experimentation, and her intellectual thought; and in part to emphasize the interdisciplinarity of her practice. The archives at the Kislak Center, UPenn, demonstrate this interdisciplinary appetite better even than her published works, as the May Sinclair Papers contain examples of her workbooks, manuscript drafts, typescript drafts (sometimes more than one version), and marked up page proofs of more than half of her novels as well as most of her published non-fiction, including not only holograph copies of the published works, but multiple drafts. There are fifty-two boxes of material relating to Sinclair, including forty-eight individual workbooks, in three of the boxes. In this paper I will present some archival curiosities, but also explore what use we can put this wealth of archival material to, as textual editors.

Rebecca Bowler is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century English Literature at Keele University and is the author of Literary Impressionism: Vision and Memory in Dorothy Richardson, Ford Madox Ford, H.D. and May Sinclair. She is General Editor on the Edinburgh Critical Editions of the Works of May Sinclair and co-edited, with Claire Drewery

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First published: 26 February 2019