Archival Geographies and Literary Tourism: May Sinclair’s Papers
Event details
The Edinburgh Critical Editions of the Works of May Sinclair will be publishing Sinclair’s collected work in themed tranches. The first tranche, ‘Philosophy and Mysticism’, will consist of the novels Mary Oliver: A Life (1919) and Arnold Waterlow: A Life (1924) alongside her two full-length works of philosophy: A Defence of Idealism (1917) and The New Idealism (1924). The aim is to open up parallels and cross-currents of thought between the fiction and the non-fiction; to establish a kind of map of Sinclair’s temporally-situated thought. In so doing we’re spending a lot of time with Sinclair’s archive(s).
There are all kinds of geographical curiosities in May Sinclair’s archives: maps of walks, descriptions of landscapes, floor plans of houses, postcards. It’s possible to map the precise locations of her novels and to walk the same walks her characters do. Real places are given lightly fictionalised names; places are, in real life, precisely as described in the fictional text. This feels, for some reason, completely thrilling. I’m interested, as a textual editor, in why it feels thrilling. If a reader of a scholarly edition is given an account of these archival-geographical curios; if we created a resource for walkers to walk the same route as the character Mary Olivier, or Gwen in The Three Sisters, what new experiences of the text are opened up? Is this literary tourism (even if an archival, reading-based tourism) or something more? I’d like to think about geographies in terms of the internal geography of the archive (file folders; multiple holdings in multiple locations) and in terms of the relation of the archive to the world.
About the speaker
Dr Rebecca Bowler (University of Keele)
Rebecca Bowler is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century English Literature at Keele University. She is the author of Literary Impressionism: Vision and Memory in Dorothy Richardson, Ford Madox Ford, H.D. and May Sinclair and co-edited May Sinclair: Re-Thinking Bodies and Minds with Claire Drewery. She is co-founder of the May Sinclair Society and co-General Editor on the forthcoming Edinburgh Critical Editions of the Works of May Sinclair, also with Claire Drewery and Suzanne Raitt. She is editing Thus to Revisit (1921) and Return to Yesterday (1931) for the forthcoming OUP Edition of the Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford.