A critical and textual history of Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh, with two editions of “Paradise and the Peri.”
Tonra, Justin
Tonra, Justin
Publication Date
2009-09
Type
Thesis
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Abstract
The purpose of this three-part thesis is to construct a study which outlines the composition, publication and reception history of Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh, and to create two closely linked scholarly editions of “Paradise and the Peri.” The first part of the thesis is a Critical and Textual History of Lalla Rookh. This study includes an examination of Thomas Moore’s compositional practices from the beginnings of his work on Lalla Rookh in 1811 to its publication in 1817. There follows a thorough assessment of the circumstances of the work’s publication in various editions by Longman between 1817 and 1880, and commentary on the significant changes to the publication format and text during this period. The critical reception of Lalla Rookh upon its publication is also discussed, and the final chapter examines a variety of different media and formats which adapted Lalla Rookh, and contributed to its reception and its position in the cultural consciousness of the nineteenth century. This Critical and Textual History takes an interdisciplinary approach to examining a literary text, incorporating perspectives from Literary Theory, Bibliography and Textual Studies, and Book History to present a holistic picture of the literary, publishing and cultural significance of Lalla Rookh. The second part of the thesis comprises an annotated edition of “Paradise and the Peri,” which contains all of Moore’s original textual notes as well as the annotations of the current editor, bibliographies and an appendix of contextual information on the sources that the author used in preparing the text. This edition is informed by traditional editorial practices, and recognises that scholars and general readers often require an edition in this format, without the features that the third part of this thesis offers. The third part is a hypermedia genetic edition of Moore’s “Paradise and the Peri” which is encoded in XML to the recommended standards of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI P5). This edition is based on the three extant manuscript drafts of Lalla Rookh, its corrected proof copy and its first edition, and its aim is, on the one hand, to provide the user with a Documentary Edition of Lalla Rookh, but also to assist the user in tracing the textual development of the work and examining Moore’s compositional practices. The edition includes facsimile reproductions of the manuscript drafts and printed texts along with annotated transcriptions; these are encoded and displayed in a manner that amounts to a genetic edition, enabling the user to dynamically examine the text and compare textual variants of individual verse lines from any point in the edition. This is accompanied by a document detailing the Editorial Methodology and Encoding Standards that were undertaken in preparing the edition.
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Publisher
NUI Galway