The New Edinburgh Edition of the
Collected Works of Robert Louis Stevenson
General Editors: Stephen Arata, Richard Dury, Penny Fielding and Anthony Mandal
Supported by a Scottish Government award from the Royal Society of Edinburgh
The New Edinburgh Edition is a major international research and publication project based in the Department of English and Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh. The aim of the project is to make available for the first time all of Stevenson’s works in a modern scholarly form
Published by Edinburgh University Press, the 38 planned volumes will fully research the textual history of Stevenson’s writing from the initial creative process, through serial publication to the first edition and subsequent editions during Stevenson’s lifetime.
The individual texts will be edited by a team of scholars from Britain, France, Italy, Germany, America and Australia and each volume will have full annotations, an introduction to the text and its literary contexts, and an essay on its origins, production and reception. In many cases, Stevenson’s texts have had a chequered history—some were suppressed, and others published in fragmentary form. In some cases Stevenson checked proofs very carefully, but in others proofs never reached him. The New Edinburgh Edition will describe and evaluate all the states of writing and publication. Our aim is to publish accurate versions of texts as mediated by the circumstances of production in which the author collaborated—a text that is useful for readers today and which would be recognised by its original readers.
As the edition progresses, searchable digitized texts will be deposited in a textual archive held at the National Library of Scotland so that the full extent of the production of Stevenson’s works can be accessed by future readers and scholars.
SWINC organises a programme of public and academic events to disseminate and contextualise the work of the Stevenson Edition. Recent events have include a workshop and public lectures, and in 2011 we will hold a series of 3 lectures and workshops at the National Library of Scotland to introduce and discuss ideas about scholarly editing.
The first wave of texts includes Kidnapped, The Amateur Emigrant, Prince Otto, The Dynamiter,Weir of Hermiston and four volumes of Stevenson’s essays, collected for the first time with a comprehensive index.
For the latest updates on the Edition, please take a look at our blog.
