A Digital Edition of W. H. Auden´s Letters to Stella Musulin

A fresh perspective on the later life and work of one of the most influential twentieth-century writers through newly available archival material From 1958 until his death in 1973, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) spent extended periods of each year in the Lower Austrian village of Kirchstetten, where he wrote most of his late poetry. Central to his later life and work, Audens creative period in Austria, however, has only recently begun to attract scholarly interest. Led by Sandra Mayer, this cross-disciplinary project at the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences makes a major contribution towards re-evaluating the Austrian Auden: it will make available, for the first time, Audens hitherto inaccessible literary papers and letters in the estate of the Welsh-Austrian writer Stella Musulin (1915-1996). The project will yield new insights into one of Audens most prolific creative periods and at the same time add a vital chapter to Austrias complex political, social, and cultural history in the 1960s and 70s. The Austrian Auden: artistic networks, collaborative practices, transnational exchange So far, Auden scholarship has tended to focus on the writers life and work in his native England and the United States, his adoptive home country from 1939. This project builds on the growing interest in Audens activities in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century and sets out to establish Austrian Auden Studies as a vibrant field of research. Drawing on theoretical concepts and methods from literary studies, life-writing research, literary sociology, and digital humanities, it will shed new light on the following aspects: Audens practices of composition, text development, and revision; his position within the local field of literary production; the transnationality of creative lives and processes; the life and work of his partner and artistic collaborator Chester Kallman; as well as Audens ambivalent relationship with his host country and its troubled engagement with its history before and after 1945. A digital scholarly edition of Audens working correspondence with Stella Musulin The relevance of Audens Austrian period in the writers biography and oeuvre is highlighted by his literary papers and letters to Stella Musulin. These will be made available to international Auden scholarship through an open-access digital edition, which makes use of state-of-the-art digital text editing and pioneering imaging technologies. Produced in collaboration with the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the edition will enable new, original Auden scholarship and offer a free resource to an interested non-specialist audience. It will be complemented by a series of public events, such as a special exhibition, organised jointly by the project team and the State Collections of Lower Austria, to address a wider public.

The project has resulted in a scholarly digital edition of the Auden Musulin Papers (https://amp.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/), which makes openly available a hitherto inaccessible private collection of letters and literary papers by British-American poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973) in the estate of Welsh-Austrian writer Stella Musulin (1915-1996). W. H. Auden was one of the most influential twentieth-century English writers, whose poetry was central to the modernist avant-garde in 1930s England. In 1939, he emigrated to the United States, where he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1948. For the last fifteen years of his life, Auden divided his time between the US and Austria, settling in the Lower Austrian village of Kirchstetten, where he wrote most of his late poetry. However, while the 'English Auden' and the 'American Auden' have been thoroughly investigated in international Auden scholarship, the poet's Austrian period (1958-1973) has long remained under-researched and has attracted heightened attention only since the early 2000s. The scholarly digital edition offers digital facsimiles and transcriptions of all documents. It provides extended opportunities for users to engage with the edited materials, including options to display original text features (such as revisions), additional information on persons, places, organisations, events, and works mentioned, as well as scholarly commentary. Analytical tools, such as a network graph, permit an exploration of the information captured by the edition beyond the scope of single documents. The material, which also includes photographs and Musulin's memoirs of Auden, sheds new light on the author's life and work in Austria, specifically his networks of social interaction and artistic collaboration - including a previously invisibilised network of female collaborators, such as Stella Musulin, Hilde Spiel, and Herta Staub. Through innovative computer-vision methods and technologies, applied for the first time to twentieth-century literary papers, near-invisible indented impressions in the paper surfaces have been visualized. This pioneering research has allowed for a better understanding of both Auden's material writing practices and his poetic practices of composition and revision. In one case, a previously unknown, otherwise lost, version of a poem could be reconstructed, thus making a valuable contribution to textual scholarship and expanding the methodological toolkit of the Digital Humanities. The Auden Musulin Papers project is a first step towards a comprehensive scholarly digital edition of all archival documents by, or related to, W. H. Auden from the period 1957-1973 held by Austrian archives, which will be realized in the context of the follow-up project Auden in Austria Digital (https://doi.org/10.55776/P37139).