This roundtable considers the role of “unfinished” texts—in the broadest possible sense—in early modern English literature and life writing. 

Participants are invited to ponder incompletion in any its incarnations, from works broken off by the literal death of the author (ie, The New Arcadia) and poem-parts presumably lost in transmission or stuck at a brainstorming phase (ie, John Donne’s “Resurrection, Imperfect” or Hester Pulter’s poem addressed to “Somnus”) to mysteriously abandoned epics (ie, The Faerie Queene) and alleged first installments whose promised sequels never materialize (ie, Love’s Labour’s Lost, with a question mark?). We encourage contributions on texts across the whole spectrum of canonicity and in any genre: midsentence breakaways in prose romance; abrupt dramatic denouements; sonnet sequences that end over and over again; and autobiographical forms that can never quite arrive at their fatal conclusions are all fair game. These lists of examples are, of course, incomplete! Contributors are more than welcome to pick unfinished texts that exceed their bounds. 

Each discussant will speak for five to seven minutes on an unfinished text of their choice. We will then use these presentations as a starting point to think through the stylistic and relational affordances of incompletion writ large. How do discourses of incompletion tie into discourses of rewriting—can revision render an earlier draft of a work retroactively unfinished? What might early modern metaphors for unfinished texts tell us about how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers dealt with literary abruption? And how might we theorize the affective dimensions of our own scholarly encounters with unfinished texts at the remove of four centuries? 

For consideration, please send an abstract of no more than 200 words to Arya Sureshbabu (aryasureshbabu@berkeley.edu) by July 20th, 2026. All applicants will be notified by July 30th.