Presentation
Variants is the peer-reviewed journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship (ESTS). Issued once per year, it publishes original articles in English on any aspect of the theory and practice of textual scholarship, including, but not limited to, scholarly, critical and textual editing, philology, manuscript studies, codicology and palaeography, genetic criticism/scholarship, historical bibliography and the history of the book, and authorship studies. Given the journal's European dimension, it particularly encourages methodological and theoretical approaches that are transnational, comparative and interdisciplinary. Furthermore, the journal has been at the forefront of the digital wave; over the years it has provided ample space to the treatment of digital text and tools and to editing in the electronic environment (again, on the level of theory and praxis) and continues to do so. It also actively solicits reviews of digital scholarly editions to appear alongside its regular reviews of scholarly editions and monographs on textual scholarship. In each issue it also seeks to showcase new, innovative, ongoing digital or print-based editorial projects in a section called “Work in Progress” intended to show best practice and to inform prospective editors and project leaders. There is no restriction to what genre, historical period or geographical area is concerned.
Latest issue
19 | 2025
Authors and Their Drafts in Context
The theme of our current issue,“Authors and their Drafts in Context”, combines elements of the themes of two conferences that are featured in the current issue: ESTS 2023 ("Authorship, Identity, and Textual Scholarship"; Canterbury, UK), and GENESIS 2023 ("The Draft and Its Environs"; Taipei, Taiwan). After a brief introduction to the theme of the conference by its organiser Peng Yi, the GENESIS 2023 section opens with a short "vignette" 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. Afterwards, we have three essay contributions: one by Franz Johansson, who proposes "authorial avant-texte" as a new coinage to describe the archives of draft materials that have been published by authors; one by Daniela Shalom Vagata, who illustrates how a closer look at Ugo Foscolo's drafts and creative process invites us to reconsider the network of myths and stories referenced in his poem Le Grazie; and one 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”. The 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 a genetic analysis of the born-digital avant-texte of the novel Ch.; the second by Jūratė Levina, who offers a hermeneutic perspective on The Complete Works of T. S. Eliot; and the third by Michel G. Sargent, where he recounts his experiences editing the cartae, Nicholas Love’s Mirror, and Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection. Finally, 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. As usual, the issue again ends with an elaborate dossier of reviews of recent publications in the field.
[For more context regarding the composition and publication of this issue, please refer to the Editors' Preface]
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Front
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Editors’ Preface [Full text]
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Genesis 2023: The Draft and its Environs
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Introduction
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GENESIS 2023 (Taipei) [Full text]The Draft and Its Environs: From the Writer’s Desk to the Desktop
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Vignette
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Essays
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ESTS 2023: Authorship, Identity, and Textual Scholarship
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Introduction
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ESTS 2023 (Canterbury) [Full text]Authorship and Editing
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Essays
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Other Essays
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Reviews
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Review Cluster
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Book Reviews
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Reviewed Editions
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Back
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Attachment
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Variants 19 | full pdf (application/pdf – 45M)
The complete Variants 19 issue in one .pdf, including title page, colofon, etc.


