J.H. Prynne, The oval window: a new annotated edition
- Submitting institution
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Bath Spa University
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 2699
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Bloodaxe Books
- ISBN
- 9781780371269
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- March
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- J.H. Prynne granted us first use of his papers connected to this poem sequence, which we identified as an important and revealing work in Nearly Too Much, our 1995 study of the poet. He also asked us to select and publish some of the photographs he had taken of the crumbled shieling that features extensively as an encountered object and complex metaphor. Prynne took these photographs and later consulted them as part of his process of composition. A cropping from one, depicting the oval-shaped window he found in the ruin, appeared on the original cover. The phrase ‘the oval window’ refers to this opening, and to eyes and mouths. It is also the scientific name for part of the inner ear. Our selection circles the window.
Prynne’s papers were highly revealing as to the sources of the found material in the text. In addition to literary, historical, and scientific sources, there were phrases and lines from newspapers, nearly all from a nine-day period in 1983. That period constitutes another kind of ‘window’. Prynne scholarship has not previously had access to evidence like this, and the insight it provides into the poet’s mode of collage composition. Our use of it took the form of an annotated text identifying the quotations, and a new critical essay from both editors. My essay, of more than 10,000 words, provides new analysis of Prynne’s method, a new critical close reading of, especially, the opening and closing parts of the sequence, and an analysis of the unusual methods of reading appropriate to this text and to Prynne’s work generally. I examine the great difference that the availability of internet search-engines can make to the reader’s experience of far-reaching collage poetry such as Prynne’s (not least, the effect on the pace of reading).
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
