Framing Pieces: Designs of the Gloss in Joyce, Woolf, and Pound

by John Whittier-Ferguson

Overview

In Framing Pieces, Whittier-Ferguson recovers and explores drafts, notes, glosses, essays, and guides that high modernists, such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound generated in order to interpret their own work. These archival materials reveal a complex picture of how texts like Finnegan's Wake, A Room of One's Own, Three Guineas, and ABC's of Reading were annotated and framed by their authors, and how the authors illuminated and obscured various aspects of the annotations. Whittier-Ferguson also examines the first editions and periodicals in which these works appeared to show how modernist writers gauged the extent of their audience and tried to control their readers' encounters with their writing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195097481
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/02/1996
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.44(w) x 9.56(h) x 0.82(d)
Lexile:	1540L (what's this?)

About the Author

University of Michigan

Editorial Reviews

"Whittier-Ferguson's topic—the modernists' desire to control or confound the ways in which their own texts were received—is precise, but his rangy, speculative argument will interest anyone wanting to speak more precisely about the political valence of literary texts. Elegantly written, thoughtfully conceived, Framing Pieces will help set the agenda for modernist studies well into the next century; but it will also offer insights—and pleasures—that no reader should miss."—James Longenbach, University of Rochester

"The reader of Framing Pieces is left with the sense of a prodigiously competent and professional piece of work...To produce such an even-handed reading across the deeply entrenched authorial territories of such canonical modernist figures, whilst producing at least something of interest to specialists in each of those territories, is in itself a tour de force.—James Joyce Literary Supplement

"Whittier-Ferguson's presentation of this set of texts and activities helps us to see a great deal about the making of modernism, and particularly about the handling of its obscurities."—Woolf Studies Annual

"Well-written in clear, direct language, the study sparkles at times with the author's humor...Scholars of modernism as well as scholars of bibliographic and textual studies will find the volume a rewarding study."—English Language Notes

"...Framing Pieces is a fine book which students of modernism in general—and of Joyce, Pound, and Woolf in particular—will enjoy, learn from, and find a valuable corrective to much recent work....Framing Pieces is a book well worth our attention."—Modern Philology

From the Publisher