The Theory and Practice of Text-Editing

The modern published editions in which we read the great literary works of the distant and recent past almost invariably embody the work of a textual editor. Recent literary theory has called into question most of the assumptions on which the practice of textual editing has historically depended. This volume of essays written by practicing textual editors and scholars addresses the practical implications of these theoretical issues taking a variety of texts as examples for the particular editorial problems they pose. The works of authors as various as Shakespeare and John Clare Samuel Johnson and D. H. Lawrence Milton and Oscar Wilde are invoked to demonstrate the practical basis of an editorial discipline that requires theoretical sophistication but resists reduction to any single theory.