The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Aphra Behn: Plays 1682-1696, volume IV
- Submitting institution
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Loughborough University
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 2453
- Type
- R - Scholarly edition
- DOI
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- Title of edition
- The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Aphra Behn: Plays 1682-1696, volume IV
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- ISBN
- 9781108840743
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- March
- Year of publication
- 2021
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
-
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- Yes
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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5
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- The production of this output required a sustained research effort which began in 2014 when content and editorial principles were set. In 2015-16 Hobby (and a PDRA) undertook collation in the USA at 10 libraries, with Hobby completing further collation in the USA, UK, Eire and France in 2018-19. In 2016 Hobby produced base-texts for the volume, and from then until August 2019, when the volume was submitted for publication, provided feedback to editors on their work-in-progress, and drafted the technical parts of two Headnotes (pp. 24-28, 730-37). Further, from 2017-19 Hobby co-edited The Emperor of the Moon (pp. 373-530).
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This volume contains Behn’s plays: The City-Heiress (1682), The Luckey Chance (1686, pub. 1687), The Emperor of the Moon (1687), The Widdow Ranter (1696), and The Younger Brother (1696).
It is the first of the eight-volumes of the CUP edition of Aphra Behn’s work to appear and provides definitive texts of her plays and other writings, accompanied by substantial editorial annotation. By collating first editions of plays held in libraries across the UK, Ireland, France, USA, and Australia, the edition supersedes the seven-volume edition from Ohio UP (1992-96). The edition uses computational stylistics to generate new insights concerning Behn’s creative practice, and to address questions of precursory authorship, collaboration, and derivative adaptation.
Between 2014 and 2019, Hobby co-edited The Emperor of the Moon, documenting its engagement with seventeenth-century science (earlier editors focus largely on its adaptation of French and Italian sources). She also made the significant discovery that parts of The Widdow Ranter and The Younger Brother were printed as prose in the 1690s but were in fact were written in iambic pentameter. She devised the textual notes that indicate that editorial intervention and contributed to the Headnotes.
Collation in the USA and UK was undertaken by Hobby and her PDRA Claire Bowditch, and took 18 months; collation in Australia and France was undertaken solely by Hobby, taking a further 4 months. Hobby and Bowditch used those collations to prepare the base-texts distributed to the volume’s editors. Hobby, Bowditch, and the edition’s other General Editors, Mel Evans and Gillian Wright, then guided editors through the production of the final versions, providing detailed feedback at 3-month intervals across a four-year period on draft annotations, provisional textual emendations, and the material provided in Headnotes.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
