Project description
Exploring how great writers read
Before every famous writer started to write, they read. How did books inspire writers such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett? How did the books they read shape their own groundbreaking works? The ERC-funded MARGINAL project aims to digitally reconstruct the authors’ personal archives to determine whether reading left creative fingerprints in the margins of modernist literature. Specifically, the project will map the connections between the texts these writers read and the masterpieces they produced. In doing so, it shifts attention from output to input, uncovering the intellectual networks that fuelled a century of literary innovation and showing how knowledge, once absorbed, becomes art.
Objective
MARGINAL examines authors’ creativity through the traces of their own reading. The project starts from the idea that knowing what and how a writer read can help us understand the origins of their work. A work of literature often starts in the margins of another book.
The project focuses on the reading habits of three modernist authors – Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. The rationale behind the selection of these case studies is based on a twentieth-century crisis of ‘encyclopedism’ – in the sense of comprehensive learning or knowledge. Many modernist and late-modernist writers problematized the encyclopedic ambition that marked their time, but the paradox is that they were only able to do so because they were so knowledgeable themselves. As key representatives of their period, Woolf, Joyce and Beckett read a wide range of European authors and left substantial personal libraries that have largely been preserved.
Traces of authors’ reading have so far often been considered a ‘marginal’ phenomenon in textual scholarship. MARGINAL uses recent advances in digital scholarly editing to reverse this formal priority between centre and margin and shift the attention from the authors’ output to their input. It digitally reunites the books they once owned, which are dispersed over dozens of archives and collections (the ‘extant’ library) and reconstructs the parts of their libraries that have been lost (the ‘virtual’ library). The three resulting online, open-access editions of Woolf’s, Joyce’s and Beckett’s libraries will establish and annotate the connections between source texts, reading notes and the authors' own works to see how their multilingual reading informed their writing.
By mapping this marginal zone between reading and writing, the purpose is to consider modernist authors as readers in the first place and examine which books they read, how they read, what records they made of this reading, and how this translated into their own works.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
This project's classification has been human-validated.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
This project's classification has been human-validated.
Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-ADG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
2000 Antwerpen
Belgium
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.