Auden in Austria Digital

The British-American poet, essayist, and librettist W. H. Auden (1907-1973) counts among the most influential writers in the English language in the twentieth century. His poetry was at the centre of a politically committed modernist avant-garde in 1930s England. In 1939, Auden moved to the United States, where he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1948 for his long poem The Age of Anxiety. From 1958 until his death in 1973, Auden divided his years between New York City and the Lower Austrian village of Kirchstetten, where he wrote most of his late poetry. While the poets English and American periods have been extensively researched, his life and work in Austria are still under-investigated and have only recently attracted increased scholarly attention. Within the last ten years, a vibrant field of Austrian Auden Studies has emerged. Building on the Auden Musulin Papers project (FWF P33754, 2021-2024), Auden in Austria Digital (AAD) aims to collect, investigate, and make openly available all archival papers by Auden in Austria, thus providing a unique resource for studying the poets later life and work. The project will result in an open-access scholarly digital edition that is guided by the following main objectives. (1) The edition will make accessible hitherto unpublished literary papers including early versions of Audens late poetry, which will shed fresh light onto his practices of composition and revision. (2) Furthermore, the new biographical information obtained from the documents (e.g. correspondence, legal papers, photographs) will contribute to an alternative biographical cartography of Audens Austrian years: it will reveal networks of artistic collaboration and social interaction that also include peripheral figures and their previously overlooked role in Audens creative activities. (3) AAD will also spotlight underexplored aspects of Austrian history after 1945, with a particular focus on queer history and neglected players in the Austrian literary scenes of the 1960s and 1970s. (4) Finally, the project strives to render fully transparent scholarly research and interpretation both in human- and machine-readable formats and will thus empower both specialist and non- specialist users in their productive engagement with aspects of uncertainty (with regard to textual, historical, and biographical information). Such an approach will contribute to a vibrant current strand of research addressing uncertainty-awareness in the Digital Humanities.