Framing Pieces Designs of the Gloss in Joyce, Woolf, and Pound [Hardcover]

InFraming Pieces, Whittier-Ferguson recovers and explores drafts, notes, glosses, essays, and guides that high modernists, such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound generated in order to interpret their own work. These archival materials reveal a complex picture of how texts likeFinnegan's Wake,A Room of One's Own,Three Guineas, andABC's of Readingwere annotated and framed by their authors, and how the authors illuminated and obscured various aspects of the annotations. Whittier-Ferguson also examines the first editions and periodicals in which these works appeared to show how modernist writers gauged the extent of their audience and tried to control their readers' encounters with their writing.

Whittier-Ferguson's topic--the modernists' desire to control or confound the ways in which their own texts were received--is precise, but his rangy, speculative argument will interest anyone wanting to speak more precisely about the political valence of literary texts. Elegantly written, thoughtfully conceived,Framing Pieceswill help set the agenda for modernist studies well into the next century; but it will also offer insights--and pleasures--that no reader should miss. --James Longenbach,University of Rochester

The reader ofFraming Piecesis left with the sense of a prodigiously competent and professional piece of work...To produce such an even-handed reading across the deeply entrenched authorial territories of such canonical modernist figures, whilst producing at least something of interest to specialists in each of those territories, is in itself atour de force.--James Joyce Literary Supplement

Whittier-Ferguson's presentation of this set of texts and activities helps us to see a great deal about the making of modernism, and particularly about the handling of its obscurities. --Woolf Studies Annual

Well-writteló!