English Language and Literature

The History of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama research project (1999-2004) operated under the aegis of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford. It has in many ways pioneered the developing discipline of Performance Reception. It has done this by documenting as comprehensively as possible all performances worldwide of Greek and Roman drama and their adaptations between the Renaissance and the present, while hand-in-hand with that also exploring ways of interpreting those findings and that material.

The project aimed to program an on-line scholarly edition and implement an XML prototype meeting MLA’s guidelines for the electronic scholarly edition, and presenting full-text versions of all renditions to show evolution of a text to final states and devolution to original states. The first stage was to prepare a scholarly edition of William Wells Brown’s novel Clotel which provides the full text of all extant versions (those of 1853, 1860, 1864, and 1867) with explanatory annotation, textual-variant notes, and a scholarly apparatus.

British Fiction, 1800–1829: A Database of Production, Circulation & Reception (DBF) arises from more than fifteen years’ general research into Romantic-era British fiction, by the project director, Professor Peter Garside. The project provides a comprehensive bibliographical record of the production of fiction during the first three decades of the nineteenth century, supplemented by a variety of contextual secondary materials drawn from the period.

The project involved the development of a trial electronic edition of a short Middle English work, the 'Preface' to the thirteenth-century rule for recluses 'Ancrene Wisse', in conjunction with the Humanities Computing Development Team at Oxford, to work out an 'EETS template' which could serve as a model for electronic versions of future EETS editions. Since this is a prose work (the great majority of electronic editions of Middle English works are of verse texts) surviving in several manuscripts, it constituted a relatively demanding project.