Dr Mark Byron

PhD Camb, BA MPhil
Lecturer

+61 2 9351 2276
Room N328, John Woolley Building A20

I teach and research in twentieth-century literature (drama, prose, poetry) with an emphasis on the various denominations of modernism. My research interests focus upon difficult modernist texts – often with unruly manuscript archives – and the methods required to produce comprehensive and coherent scholarly editions of such texts. My research also entails the history and methods of scholarly editing, and the relationship between textual criticism and hermeneutics.

I held an ARC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2006-10) to develop a suitable electronic editorial apparatus and corresponding methodology to account for Samuel Beckett's 1953 novel Watt and its 980-page manuscript, resulting in a (forthcoming) full electronic edition. I currently hold an ARC Discovery Project Grant (2011-13) which seeks to extend this work to develop specific methods for editing complex modernist literary texts and their manuscripts. A longitudinal study of editorial theories and practices will produce a robust basis upon which to develop comprehensive and flexible editorial practices that adequately represent complex texts and their manuscripts.

Research areas

• Samuel Beckett; Ezra Pound; Gertrude Stein; twentieth-century poetry and prose; modernism and editorial theory; textual criticism; history of the book; manuscript studies; modern drama; literature and music; literature and the visual arts; the discourse of the paragone; philosophy and literature, particularly nineteenth- and twentieth-century; hermeneutics

ARC Project 2011-13

Editing Complex Modernist Texts: A Methodological Study

Current projects

• Textual Ontogeny and the Understanding of Modernist Texts, a monograph-length study of modernist textual and archival complexity, in the contexts of editorial theory and cutting edge editorial methods (especially electronic editing)
• Samuel Beckett's Watt: An Ontogenetic Electronic Edition, with parallel manuscript transcription and photographic reproduction, critical apparatus and editorial introduction
• Ezra Pound’s Cantos: An Electronic Variorum Edition, co-edited with Emeritus Professor Richard Taylor, University of Bayreuth, Germany
• an edition of Samuel Beckett’s unpublished prose work, The Long Observation of the Ray (1966-1972), with critical apparatus and editorial introduction

Selected publications

Books

• Byron, M S (ed) 2007, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York

Journal articles

• Byron, M S 2010, Digital scholarly editions of modernist texts: navigating the text in Samuel Beckett's Watt manuscripts, Sydney Studies in English, 36(2010), 150-169
• Lassman, E, Byron, M S 2010, Modernist quinella: Joyce, Beckett and Dublin's Leopardstown, The Journal of Beckett Studies, 19(1), 78-94
• Byron, M S 2010, Report on the excursion to Siena, 4-5 July 2009, Ezra Pound Review, 12, 77-80

Book chapters

• Byron, M S 2010, Textual criticism, Ezra Pound in Context, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 136-147
• Byron, M S 2007, Introduction: Endgame- Very Nearly, But not quite, Samuel Beckett's Endgame, Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, xi-xiii
• Byron, M S 2006, Musical Scores and Literary Form in Modernism, Phrase and Subject: Studies in Music and Literature, Legenda, Oxford, 1, 87-98

Encyclopaedia entries

An Ezra Pound Encyclopaedia, ed. Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen J. Adams (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2005):

• 'Arabic History'
• 'History: European Enlightenment'
• 'Philosophy: Ancient European'
• 'Philosophy: Medieval and Renaissance European'
• 'Philosophy: Eighteenth-Century to the Present European'