Editors’ Preface
Full text
1As editors of Variants, the Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship, we are proud to present Variants 19, the fifteenth volume in our series, just about a year shy of our Society’s 25th anniversary. Since its inaugural issue (sadly nowadays out of print) was published back in 2002, our journal has published a number of double issues that took longer to come out than the yearly publication we have been aiming towards. This happened as early as 2004, but had become the rule rather than the exception in the last decade. The opposite has also happened: after a four-year hiatus, 2012 saw the publication of two issues of Variants: volume 8 (Private: do (not) enter: Textual Scholarship and Personal Writings; on the theme of ESTS 2008 in Lisbon), and volume 9 (Texts beyond Borders: Multilingualism and Textual Scholarship; on the theme of ESTS 2009 in Brussels). But especially since the move to our current Diamond Open Access venue hosted by OpenEdition Journals in 2016, the delays in our publication schedule have increased.
2To some extent, as we explained in a previous editorial, this is because life has a habit of getting in the way. But it is also to do with the fact that the Open Access model puts much more pressure on a journal’s editors, who now also have to take on tasks that were originally outsourced to the publisher. This is a learning process, and we are grateful to our faithful audience, who have been very patient with us as we reconfigure and optimize our workflows. These laments are nothing new, of course, and, to our mind at least, entirely worth it. We continue to be thrilled that our Society’s high-quality research from all over Europe and beyond is available to all, without any cost to our readers or authors. And we are grateful to everyone who volunteers their time at any point in our pipeline to help make that happen. But, at the same time, we are acutely aware of the difficult and often precarious situations many of our authors may find themselves in, and how much they rely on a timely publication of their research. With that in mind, we have been working tirelessly behind the scenes to regain control over our publication timeline. And so we are elated to announce the publication of Variants 19 just under a year after the appearance of Variants 17-18, and that Variants 20 is well on track for its scheduled publication in 2026.
3In large part, these recent successes have been made possible by some changes that were made in the structure of our editorial board. After experiencing first-hand how useful an Assistant Editor can be when we enlisted the help of Manon Beentjes in the final stages of the publication of Variants 17-18, we discussed the possibility of making this more of a permanent addition to the editorial team and were able to open up not one but two vacancies for the position. These were promptly filled by Zsófia Fellegi (who helped organise ESTS 2024 in Budapest) and Adelle Hay (a member of our ESTS communications team). They have done a great job copy-editing the LaTeX versions of the essays in this issue, and we thank them for volunteering their time. Another change that was made to the team was that Elsa Pereira stepped in when Elli Bleeker stepped down as Associate Editor. Elsa, who has since also become the Secretary of the Board of the ESTS, started collaborating on the current issue early on in 2024, and officially became our new Associate Editor after the publication of Variants 17-18. She has been instrumental in slimming down our submission-to-decision times and generally helping to keep us on track in the publication pipeline.
4The theme of our current issue is called “Authors and their Drafts in Context”. Unlike previous themed issues in our series, this title does not repeat the theme of a specific past ESTS conference that set the issue in motion and determined its call for papers. Instead, we picked this title because different combinations of “authors”, “drafts”, and their “contexts” appear in each of the essays, and because the title combines elements of the themes of two conferences that are featured in the current issue: ESTS 2023 (Canterbury, UK), and GENESIS 2023 (Taipei, Taiwan). Like we did for the last several issues of Variants, we again sent out a call for papers, inviting speakers to submit extended, full-paper versions of the papers they presented at the ESTS conference, held in Canterbury in 2023, for us to consider for review and publication. This time, however, we were also approached by Peng Yi, who had organised the GENESIS conference that year, and asked if we would be interested to publish papers from that conference as well. So we sent out a second CFP and set out to combine extended papers from both conferences. To help preserve the thematic cohesion of Variants 19, we then decided to deviate from our way of structuring the issue and group contributions together by conference, rather than by format (like essays, works in progress, etc.). That is why you will now find a section on GENESIS 2023 (“The Draft and Its Environs”) alongside a section on ESTS 2023 (“Authorship, Identity, and Textual Scholarship”), each with their own introduction and research, as well as a separate “Other” section that includes more spontaneous submissions.
5After a brief introduction to the theme of the conference by its organiser Peng Yi, the GENESIS 2023 section opens with a short contribution by Daniel Ferrer, who draws on examples taken from the field of architecture to illustrate interactions between processes of decontextualisation and recontextualisation in literary drafts, and the way they leave what Ferrer has previously called the memory of context in their published versions. With this contribution, we are happy to reintroduce the “Vignette” format to Variants, a format that was also used in some of our earliest issues. While vignettes are vetted by our Board, of course, they should not be regarded as full-form peer-reviewed research, but rather as musings on topics that are relevant to textual scholarship and invite us to look at our discipline in exciting new ways. Afterwards, we have three contributions in the regular essay format that our readers will be more familiar with. The first contribution is by Franz Johansson, who “Ventures Towards an Authorial Avant-Texte”, which he proposes as a new coinage to describe the archives of draft materials that have been published by authors such as the French poet Francis Ponge and Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint. Much like at least one of our reviewers, we are excited to see how this new concept will be taken up by our community of textual scholars and genetic critics. His essay is followed by a contribution by Daniela Shalom Vagata, who uses a sketch of the gulf of Naples drawn by Ugo Foscolo to illustrate how a closer look at his drafts and creative process invites us to consider the network of myths and stories referenced in his poem Le Grazie as connected to each other throughout its different editorial stages. The GENESIS 2023 section ends with an essay by Dirk Van Hulle, who argues that the implicit teleological biases in the genetic critic’s analysis of reading traces can be avoided by not just considering the “author-as-writer”, but also more explicitly the “author-as-reader” — which may in turn help provide the discipline with a more productive delineation of the concepts of exogenesis on the one hand, and intertextuality on the other. In this respect, he also offers a useful coinage in his essay. As Van Hulle argues, “it seems important to pay equal attention to both used notes and unused or vestigial notes” (73; emphasis in original).
6The issue then moves on to its second section, with essays that started as papers presented at ESTS 2023, preceded by a brief introduction on the conference theme by its organizer Rory Loughnane. This section also contains three essays, the first one by Dovilė Gervytė, who offers us a genetic analysis of the born-digital avant-texte of the novel Ch. by contemporary Lithuanian author Tomas Vaiseta. As Gervytė argues in her conclusion, the genetic critic’s reconstructions of authors’ writing processes are always the result of interpretation, inviting us to consider alternative and even contradictory configurations — variant readings which may multiply when dealing with the added complexity of born-digital manuscripts. The underlying sentiment of editorial interpretation and intervention in this argument is echoed in Jūratė Levina’s following essay on “A Hermeneutics of Authorial and Editorial Integrities in The Complete Works of T. S. Eliot”, when she argues that “editors, effectively, reauthor their author [reconfiguring their] individual authoriality and persona for further circulation in cultural discourse” (125). To some extent, the third and last essay in the section offers a look behind the scenes of such editorial interventions, as Michel G. Sargent recounts his experiences editing the cartae, Nicholas Love’s Mirror, and Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection from a textual critical methodological perspective.
7Finally, the issue presents two last essays that were submitted outside of the confines of the ESTS and GENESIS conferences: the first by Kelly Frost on the drafts of Suzanne Malherbe’s autofictional writings and the second by Vincent Neyt on Stephen King’s writing process. Interestingly, each of these builds in their own way on the concept of “creative concurrence” — a term coined by Dirk Van Hulle in his essay titled “Creative Concurrence. Gearing Genetic Criticism for the Sociology of Writing” that appeared in Variants 15-16 in 2021. We hope that the concept continues to be useful to the community and that other essays in this issue can inspire the same kind of continuation and discussion in the future.
8The final pages of the issue offer a review dossier which, like recent issues of Variants, draws on the distinction between review essays and standard reviews, but it also introduces a second distinction in the latter group, between reviewed studies and reviewed editions. Under the suggestion of senior scholars, the dossier opens with a review cluster presenting three additional reviews of the BDMP – Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, following the publication of two reviews and a review essay in past issues. The instalments under review, which include both a printed volume and a (forthcoming, at times) digital module, are the eighth, ninth and tenth (University Press Antwerp and Bloomsbury, 2019–22). Following the review cluster, the issue publishes reviews of Sakari Katajamäki and Veijo Pulkkinen co-edited book collection Genetic Criticism in Motion: New Perspectives on Manuscript Studies (Finnish Literature Society, 2023); of Davide Colussi’s and Paolo Trovato’s important edition of Torquato Tasso’s Aminta (Einaudi, 2021); and of Alan Galey’s, Ellen Forget’s and Brendan Allen’s co-edited “ApertureScience.com: A Critical Edition” (in Scholarly Editing 42, 2025). We are very grateful to our reviewers for their work and their patience, as we aim to publish the reviews which have been commissioned and submitted to our journal in the last few years.
9After the review dossier, we again conclude our issue of Variants with a brief but heartfelt thank you message to our peer reviewers, whose contributions are essential in our efforts both to uphold the journal’s high quality standard and to provide our authors with a timely decision on their submitted essays. And then, all that remains is for us to express our hope that you will enjoy the contributions carefully compiled here in this issue and to look forward to the publication of Variants 20, which we are preparing for publication in 2026 as we speak.
References
Bibliographical reference
Wout Dillen, Elsa Pereira and Stefano Rosignoli, “Editors’ Preface”, Variants, 19 | 2025, iii-vi.
Electronic reference
Wout Dillen, Elsa Pereira and Stefano Rosignoli, “Editors’ Preface”, Variants [Online], 19 | 2025, Online since 01 December 2025, connection on 16 February 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/variants/2201; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/15dof
Top of pageCopyright
The text only may be used under licence CC BY 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.
Top of page

