An Old-Spelling Critical Online-Edition of the Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, with Historical Introductions and Variorum Commentaries

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Hermann Josef Real
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2008 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 82391515

The objective of Online.Swift is to provide an old-spelling critical digital edition of the Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, with introductions and variorum commentaries. The edition is based on the textual and historical researches of the late Dr David Woolley (London, later Perth, Western Australia) and Professor Angus Ross (University of Sussex, Brighton), who in the 1980s were commissioned to prepare a new two-volume edition of Jonathan Swifts prose. This edition was to present, for the first time in the history of Swift scholarship, a text established according to the bibliographical and textual principles of the New Anglo-American Bibliography and was never finished. The material collected by Ross and Woolley for their project has now been made available to the Editors and is to be utilized and incorporated into the new edition. Online.Swift presents Woolleys collations, supplemented by his and Rosss textual and historical Introductions yet both revised whenever called for in the light of new evidence. In addition, the Editors of Online.Swift provide commentaries of their own on all texts. On the one hand, these summarize the history of Swift criticism since 1745; on the other, they explicate and annotate Swifts texts, in many cases for the first time, on the basis of Swifts library and (demonstrable) reading experience. For such an undertaking, the Ehrenpreis Centre is ideally equipped: its collection of Swift criticism is very nearly complete, and its almost complete replica of Swift's library and reading in identical imprints provides perfect working conditions. The in progressu mode of Online.Swift will make it possible to update its various components - texts, introductions, annotations - whenever relevant new research is published.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Participating Person: Dr. Dirk Friedrich Paßmann