Online.Swift
Online.Swift is the Ehrenpreis Centre’s most recent and most ambitious project, made possible through the financial support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Council). Its objective is an old-spelling critical online edition of the Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, with introductions and variorum commentaries. The edition is based on the textual and historical researches of the late Dr David Woolley (London, later Perth, Western Australia) and Professor Angus Ross (University of Sussex, Brighton), who in the 1980s were commissioned to prepare a new two-volume edition of Jonathan Swift’s prose. This edition was to present, for the first time in the history of Swift scholarship, a text established according to the bibliographical and textual principles of the New Anglo-American Bibliography and was never finished. The material collected by Ross and Woolley for their project has now been made available to the Editors and is to be utilized and incorporated into the edition. Online.Swift presents Woolley’s collations, supplemented by his and Ross’s textual and historical Introductions yet both revised whenever necessary in the light of new evidence. In addition, the Editors of Online.Swift provide commentaries of their own on all texts. On the one hand, these summarize the history of Swift criticism since 1745; on the other, they explicate and annotate Swift’s texts, in many cases for the first time, on the basis of Swift’s library and (demonstrable) reading experience. For such an undertaking, the Ehrenpreis Centre is ideally equipped: its collection of Swift criticism is very nearly complete, and its almost complete replica of Swift’s library and reading in identical imprints provides perfect working conditions.
The unique feature of this new scholarly project is that all fully collated and annotated texts are made available online in searchable PDF documents. All commentaries are integrated into the texts and displayed through pop-ups when clicked (see also Hints on how to use the PDF files). At the same time, the running commentary’s explanatory potential is presented in a separate document. The in progressu mode of Online.Swift will make it possible to update its various components – texts, introductions, annotations – whenever relevant new research is published. The Editorial Board also invites Swift scholars to submit corrections and improvements as well as additional notes and glosses for consideration. A collection of images and facsimiles of the texts is added.
All texts will be printed in a two-volume edition, whose page settings and paginations are identical with those of the online texts.
