The Prison Notebooks comprise thirty-three fragmented, partially revised notebooks.
Evidence
Gramsci’s prison Quaderni number thirty-three in all, several of them containing notes on a number of different subjects or written over a period of a couple of years. Many of the notes are isolated jottings. Others are so placed in the Quaderno as to make their insertion into the main structure of Gramsci’s arguments at best hypothetical. Longer texts, about whose coherence and general order there can be no doubt, are often partially revised in such a way that it is necessary, in editing the text, to intersperse the revised or rewritten sections with passages of which only an earlier draft exists. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 17
Categorization
- DEFINE: Establishes the textual condition of the Notebooks — isolated jottings alongside multiply-drafted longer pieces — which is why citations from Gramsci must be treated as provisional.
- XREF: Explains editor Howson/Nowell-Smith’s editorial choices, which the reader of this translation inherits — relevant context for how the concepts in this toolkit reach their audience.
Related
- The prison Notebooks’ fragmentary form shapes how his concepts must be read (similarity 0.84)
- Gramsci’s notebooks are too fragmentary for definitive claims about his project. (similarity 0.84)
- Yet the notebooks must be read whole to resist partisan interpretation of Gramsci (similarity 0.84)
- Gramsci’s major theoretical work was written in prison without library access (similarity 0.81)
- Posthumously published works must be read provisionally, not as definitive (similarity 0.80)
- Gramsci wrote the Prison Notebooks during an eleven-year physical death-agony (similarity 0.80)
- Prison censorship forced Gramsci to rewrite his notebooks using veiled language. (similarity 0.80)
- Gramsci conceived the Prison Notebooks as a project for the ages. (similarity 0.80)