taylorcate
commented
5 years ago Short Description
From manuscript, to print publication, to open source repository, "Nutting" has one of the richest textual, sociological, and personal histories of all Wordsworth's poetry. Collected here for all audiences, The Digital Variorum of Wordsworth's "Nutting" seeks to remediate the divide between scholars, children, and those who simply find joy in reading wonderful poetry.
The Digital Variorum of Wordsworth's "Nutting"
This description is way too long for promotional purposes so I will edit it and save this for longer prose later!
Description:
From manuscript to print publication to open source repository, the works of William Wordsworth have undergone countless scrutiny and editing at the hands of the poet and the editors dedicated to the task after his death. Though many editions of Wordsworth's poetry exist in both print and digital formats, for each the audience largely remains the same—a fractional academic community of scholars. In this edition, I have sought to trace the dynamic history of "Nutting" taking into consideration an audience more akin to those Wordsworth cared about. Children, the meekest and most innocent of all people though voraciously tethered to the rural tenements of Nature, claim some of the greatest roles in Wordsworth's poetry. "Nutting" stars a young William who came across a particularly bountiful bower of hazels ripe for the picking and, almost without hesitation, "dragg'd to earth both branch and bough, with crash/And merciless ravage." It is a children's story and its reemergence in children's perception depends on a remediation of its representation. My solution to this is a choose-your-own-adventure edition wherein readers select one era of composition of three—creation, publication, and adaptation—and from there encounter visual and audio transcriptions and illustrations of the poem as it existed and changed during that era.