Textual scholarship, bibliography, and book history

Faculty members researching in this area:

Permanent Postholders: Professor Vincent Gillespie, Dr Sally Mapstone, Dr John Pitcher, Professor Kathryn Sutherland and Professor Daniel Wakelin.

Research and college staff: Dr Giles Bergel

Our research:

The Faculty has a particular strength in the study of the history of the book and a number of Faculty members are involved in the Bodleian Centre for the Study of the Book.

Research on the History of the Book continues to expand and enrich the link between academic work and research training for graduate students through a wide range of medieval and modern engagements with manuscript studies, bibliography, and textual criticism. Noteworthy is the work of Gillespie, Mapstone, and Hanna in the medieval period, Ferdinand in aspects of the early modern book trade, Kathryn Sutherland on Austen manuscripts and digital technology, and P.D.McDonald on censorship in twentieth-century South Africa.

P.D.McDonald’s work in numerous essays on censorship and publishing in South Africa and Britain has made a strong contribution to debates on the history of the book and on Modernist publishing. Reception, marketing and publishing history are also ingredients in the work of Boehmer, Jones, Kelly, and Lee.

In editing, Kelly’s ongoing, definitive edition of Yeats’s letters is recognised as one of the major modernist editorial works of its time, an invaluable publication for Yeats studies. Linked to this edition are an edition of a Yeats chronology and co-editing of the Cambridge Companion to Yeats. The Faculty has a prolific output of editions, introductions and anthologies for a range of authors, eg. Boehmer (Baden-Powell), Bradshaw (Woolf, Lawrence, Huxley), Cunningham (Murdoch), Jones (Conrad), Kelly (Ferguson), Lee (Woolf, Penelope Fitzgerald), D.P.McDonald (MacNeice), Newlyn (Edward Thomas), Whitworth (Woolf).

Recent publications:

Other information:

Bodleian Centre for the Study of the Book