Dr. Katherine D. Harris
English 201 (Fall 2007)

Textual History Group Project:
Composition
 

In writing a composition history, one takes primary and secondary evidence from two types of sources: biographical and textual.

Biographical Resources

Primary biographical sources:

• Your writer's letters and journals

Secondary biographical sources:

• Comments about your writer or your text in the letters and journals of others who knew them.

Benjamin Disraeli's letters for example provide one of the few extant descriptions about the composition practices of his friend, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington:

"Miladi here writes ten hours a day."

• Published "conversations" of your writer
• Memoirs of others who knew your writer
• Biographies, if they exist for your writer
  

Textual Resources

Primary textual sources:

• Authorial manuscripts or typescripts
• Comments of publishers or editors who vetted the work prior to publication; one typically finds this sort of materials in the correspondence between an author and a publisher.
• Authorial comments on proofs and other preliminary states of the text

Secondary textual sources:

• Scholarly editions of the text
• Scholarly articles examining composition or publication history, etc.