Towards a Comparative History of the Literary Draft

• Dirk Van Hulle

In literary histories, the writing process is seldom taken into account. There is a need for a comparative literary history of writing processes. It is evidently beyond the scope of an article to write such a history, but it is possible to establish an initial framework, consciously starting from a Eurocentric perspective, in order to pinpoint the issues where we can try to de-localize its European bias. To do so, the framework proposed in this article consists of eight dimensions of the literary draft (temporal, spatial, editorial, generic, intermedial, linguistic, conceptual, and material) that help us give shape to a comparative history of our literary heritage. The main thesis is that a comparative history of the literary draft differs rather fundamentally from other literary histories in that it focuses less on literary products and pays more attention to processes, hesitations, decisions and alternatives.