From 1958 to 1973, the British-American poet Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) spent up to six months a year in the Lower Austrian village of Kirchstetten. Although Auden wrote the biggest part of his late poetry there, the central importance of this Austrian creative period in the poet's life and work has only recently received scholarly attention. This interdisciplinary project at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences is making a significant contribution to the reassessment of the “Austrian Auden” in the emergent field of Austrian Auden studies.
The digital edition of Auden‘s “working correspondence” with Welsh-Austrian writer Stella Musulin (1915-1996) not only sheds light on one of the most productive literary creative periods in W. H. Auden‘s life, but also adds new facets to Austria‘s social and cultural history of the 1960s and 70s. The scholarly digital edition is aimed at specialist academic audiences as well as the general public and is openly accessible.
The project follows the highest standards of digital editing. All research data generated in the process have been made transparent in line with the principles of FAIR Open Research Data (https://github.com/Auden-Musulin-Papers). In collaboration with TU Wien, the project also applies innovative methods and technologies: at the Computer Vision Lab, 3D surfaces of twentieth-century literary typescripts have been reconstructed for the first time in order to visualize material traces of poetic work (https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqad037). The insights thus gained into writing practices and creative processes provide fascinating glimpses into the poet‘s workshop in Kirchstetten.
