The punctuation from Porlock
The punctuation from Porlock
The punctuation from Porlock: Stevie Smith, the comma, and wrong-doing
‘Oh talking voice that is so sweet, how hold you alive in captivity, how point you with commas, semi-colons, dashes, pauses and paragraphs?’: the British writer Stevie Smith’s paean to unpunctuated prose in her literary debut Novel on Yellow Paper (1936) ushered in a career that made punctuation into a reliable enemy: a 1969 interview confessed it was always a ‘bother’, poetry editors were asked to ‘collaborate’ with her on proofs as full stops came and went, and her work found its most appreciative audience during her lifetime in performance. While she was vehement about the inclusion and placement of her drawings alongside the poems, she remained ambivalent about punctuation - public pronouncements on her composition and compilation process cast her squarely as the author-in-distress, looking for an editor to shoulder the responsibility. This chapter will trace the changing status of her poems’ punctuation over her thirty-five year career and in posthumous editions, consider how notions of captivity and wrong-doing in her writing relate to notions of textual scholarship, and suggest that Smith’s work allows us to understand punctuating itself as a kind of literary performance.
Cambridge University Press
May, Will
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May, Will
f41afa4c-1ccc-4ac6-83b6-9f5d9aad0f67
May, Will
(2022)
The punctuation from Porlock.
In,
The History of Punctuation in English Literature.
Cambridge University Press.
(Submitted)
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Abstract
The punctuation from Porlock: Stevie Smith, the comma, and wrong-doing
‘Oh talking voice that is so sweet, how hold you alive in captivity, how point you with commas, semi-colons, dashes, pauses and paragraphs?’: the British writer Stevie Smith’s paean to unpunctuated prose in her literary debut Novel on Yellow Paper (1936) ushered in a career that made punctuation into a reliable enemy: a 1969 interview confessed it was always a ‘bother’, poetry editors were asked to ‘collaborate’ with her on proofs as full stops came and went, and her work found its most appreciative audience during her lifetime in performance. While she was vehement about the inclusion and placement of her drawings alongside the poems, she remained ambivalent about punctuation - public pronouncements on her composition and compilation process cast her squarely as the author-in-distress, looking for an editor to shoulder the responsibility. This chapter will trace the changing status of her poems’ punctuation over her thirty-five year career and in posthumous editions, consider how notions of captivity and wrong-doing in her writing relate to notions of textual scholarship, and suggest that Smith’s work allows us to understand punctuating itself as a kind of literary performance.
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The Punctuation From Porlock (draft)
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Submitted date: 1 August 2022
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Local EPrints ID: 472206
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/472206
PURE UUID: c90b0049-f4a4-4202-9c3c-1ce0e27adb1a
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Date deposited: 29 Nov 2022 17:36
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 23:04
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