Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts

Abstract

Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition (JAFM), edited by Kathryn Sutherland, provides high-resolution pages images and diplomatic transcriptions for all of Austen’s surviving fiction manuscripts (totalling approximately 1100 manuscript pages), all unpublished in her lifetime. It assesses the site’s editorial principles, functionality, and contribution to Austen studies, digital scholarship, and textual editing. As a site that offers diplomatic transcriptions not reading texts — what Elena Pierrazo (the Technical Research Associate) has termed ‘Digital Documentary Editions ’— JAFM offers an excellent opportunity to investigate the ways in which the print paradigm for textual editing is being reimagined and reshaped for digital editions.

Keywords

• diplomatic edition
• diplomatic transcription
• documentary edition
• facsimile
• genetic edition
• handshift
• literature
• manuscript
• medadata
• pedagogy
• romanticism
• tei