Content area
Full Text
The Work of Revision. Hannah Sullivan (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2013) 349pp.
Hannah Sullivan's recent monograph traces the practice of revision across several centimes, uncovering its primacy in modernism's print culture and following its reverberations later in the twentieth century. Like many of the high modernist texts it engages, The Work of Revision is reclusive in its chronicling of textual practice. Beginning and ending with the twenty-first century, Sullivan works from a premise no doubt familiar to readers: revision is paramount. Citing contemporary writers such as Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Cunningham, and Monica Ali, Sullivan poses a series of claims about contemporary creative practice, all of which revolve around today's solemn, even compulsive, fidelity to process. This allegiance, one entangled with claims to integrity and sincerity, is relatively recent. For contrast, she points to the doctrine of Romantic-era poets, who particularly valued writing for its spontaneous provenance. Here, she echoes Keats's quip: "if Poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree it had better not come at all" (3). In the early twentieth century, though, writers came to associate creative quality with revision practices that Sullivan aptly describes as "Sisyphean" in relentlessness and gravity (2). At stake here are str ikingly different attitudes about textual value: whereas nineteenth-century writers had cast revision as "adornment or encrustation," their twentieth-century successors understood it in terms of "getting below the surface to the passionate heart of the matter" (33).
If earnest and diligent revision is today "an indicator of authorial integrity," this prejudice is a direct repercussion of modernism. The Work of Revision's foremost argument concerns this inheritance: "the association of revision and literary value is the legacy of high modernism and the print culture that nourished it" (2). Such practices were neither understated nor incidental. On the contrary, claims Sullivan, modernists "revised overtly, passionately, and at many points in the lifespan of their texts. They used revision, an action that implies retrospection, not for stylistic tidying-up but to make it new through large-scale transformations of length, structure, perspective, and genre" (2). Key writers include Henry James, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot, and Sullivan treats each...