Text as Process: Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Dickinson

Text as Process is about the literary work before it becomes a completed work of art. It is concerned with draft materials, with the manuscripts that constitute text in a state of process. What is text as process? And what should we, as readers, try to do with it?

Bushell's aim in Text as Process is to develop a research method for the study of compositional material. Although she draws on an international context--mainly French and German traditions--for current approaches to textual criticism, hers is the first book to apply a new form of critical analysis to authors in the Anglo-American tradition.

Bushell revisits issues of intention within process and makes this the center of her new approach, employing "case studies" of the work of three major nineteenth-century poets: Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Dickinson. She applies her methodology to each writer in different ways, allowing for cross-comparison as well as the recognition of individual distinctiveness in creativity. In doing so, Bushell demonstrates the need for a unique hermeneutics in relation to the making of the literary work of art. The author concludes with a philosophical account of the status and meaning of the literary work as it comes into being.