by JULIA ELSKY
This essay is part of a slow research series, What is Research? Learn about the series and click here to add your voice to the conversation.
Researching the life of a novel means uncovering the traces of how it was written—not only the edits, corrections, and additions made to a manuscript, but also the conversations in letters or in diaries that show how these decisions were made. Finding and bringing together these traces reveal what cannot be known when reading the published novel alone. By teasing out these connections, the researcher can be in dialogue with the novel itself in new ways. [Read more…] about Jean Malaquais and the life of a novel