By Jackie Jones and Emily Sharp
The heart of our publishing
Literature publishing has been at the heart of all we do. Foundational projects include the now completed 30-volume Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels overseen by David Hewitt, as well as other Scottish literary editions still underway: including the works of James Hogg, James Boswell, John Galt and Arthur Conan Doyle, for example. The Press has published widely in Scottish literature and our editions of individual Scottish poets in the 1960s and 1970s were admired not only for their contents, but also for their beautiful craft, such as The Second Life: Selected Poems of Edwin Morgan (1968).
A full programme of publishing in literary studies has developed over the last forty years including the influential Black Writers in Britain, 1760-1890: An Anthology, edited by Paul Edwards and David Dabydeen (1991) in their Early Black Writers series, followed by publications in literary theory and criticism and in Modernism. Landmark publications were Sean Burke’s The Death and Return of the Author (1992, now in its third edition), and the sourcebook, Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, edited by Vassiliki Kolocotroni, et al (1998).
Step-by-step growth
The list has grown organically, step-by-step, as the Press has also expanded, into areas such as Gothic Studies, Postcolonial Studies and Feminist Literary Criticism, as well as Shakespeare and Renaissance Studies, Romanticism, Victorian Studies and American Studies, all with an emphasis on researching the literary in its widest contexts and connotations. More recently the Press has expanded its collections in Contemporary Literature and World Literature, publishing innovative and forward-thinking monographs, edited collections and textbooks that foreground both well-known and underrepresented authors and cultures from across the contemporary period.
Prize winning monographs
Our list includes a range of recent prize-winning monographs including The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) and the Making of Literary History by Jennie Batchelor winner of the Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize 2023; Dialectics of Improvement: Scottish Romanticism, 1786-1831 by Gerrard McKeever winner of BARS First Book Prize 2021; Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture by Kevin A. Morrison winner of the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars 2020; Modernism Edited: Marianne Moore and the Dial Magazine by Victoria Bazin winner of the Research Society for American Periodicals 2019-2020.
Pioneering collections, anthologies and companions
We also continue to publish a range of pioneering collections and anthologies with teaching and pedagogy at their core, including Transatlantic Anglophone Literatures, 1776–1920: An Anthology (2022) and Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now (2019).
EUP’s commitment to library reference publishing has also seen a series of Companions grow from the inaugural volume, The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, edited by Maggie Humm (2010), to a 50-book series, expanding into contemporary subjects such as Queer Reading, Critical Animal Studies and Vegan Literary Studies (Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities).
Looking to the future
The future looks bright as we continue to seek out books of distinction and work to support authors and progressive critical thinking.
About the editors
Jackie Jones, Publisher for Literary Studies
Modernism & 20th-century British Literature; Literary Theory; Modern Critical Editions; Reference
Emily Sharp, Senior Commissioning Editor for Literary Studies
Pre 20th-century Literature; Contemporary Literature; Scottish Literature & Scottish Critical Editions; American & Transatlantic Literature; Gender and Literature; Postcolonial Studies
