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Ross K. Tangedal interrogates a particular textual controversy that grew into an editorial controversy—the endings to Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing. In “Clad in the Beautiful Dress One Expects: Editing and Curating the Harlem Renaissance Text,” Tangedal surveys five editorial notes that accompanied five versions of Larsen’s novel, spanning over twenty years, in order to show the urgent need for greater bibliographical and editorial attention when investigating the Harlem Renaissance. Working without a complete textual record, a sound bibliographical foundation, or within the confines of a scholarly edition, the scholars who edited these versions present a case study in editorial controversy by virtue of their personal choices. Though an editor does, and must, make choices when preparing a text for publication, these scholars (rather than editors) made choices without the benefit of sound bibliographical evidence; all the more reason to demand a more thorough textual examination of the Harlem Renaissance. At the heart of this essay are issues of audience, reception, market dynamics, and access, as Tangedal argues for a more rigorous investigation into the dynamic relationship between the textuality and the materiality of Harlem Renaissance texts and the writers who created them.

Because African American literature, in any time period, would contend with infrastructural barriers to its production, circulation, preservation, and accessibility, not only recognizing but also articulating that value would be essential to the project of African American literary study. To attend (in any number of ways) to Harlem Renaissance writing is to swing the pendulum of history back toward that era and to carry forward the work of a people whose literary history, productivity, and value have often needed to be established and reestablished as a prerequisite for their consideration. The chapters in Editing the Harlem Renaissance ask us to consider Harlem Renaissance literature with an eye toward not only the individual authors of this literary movement, but also the attendant efforts that have made this movement legible as a body. The essays in this volume explore how the Harlem Renaissance has been, and continues to be, brought into existence through the work of many hands. It helps us to gain a more complex understanding of the avenues through which we continue to encounter expressions of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as of what constitutes editing itself.

This chapter provides a brief overview of sources most relevant to teachers and their students as they select works to teach or research, prepare lessons on Welty’s artistry and the biographical and cultural contexts of her work, and navigate the wide range of critical resources on Welty. After summing up Welty’s publications and recommended editions, the chapter discusses the best material available for teaching the biographical and historical contexts of Welty’s works: scholarly articles, websites, and virtual tours of the Welty House. Teaching aids including films of Welty’s works, maps, and other multimedia are now available. An overview of Welty scholarship points readers to some of the most significant work on Welty since the 1980s and cites useful bibliographical sources.

The Bibliographical Essay outlines and briefly summarizes all of Fisher’s primary works and significant secondary works. Fisher’s 37 books are divided into regional fiction, Western Americana, Testament of Man series, and other fiction and nonfiction that does not fit one of the three categories. The essay also catalogs Fisher’s short fiction, poetry, occasional writings, drama, and newspaper columns, and it points to major archives of Fisher’s letters and unpublished works. Secondary works considered include three comprehensive bibliographies, all known books of which Fisher is the subject, and selected articles and book chapters of interest to those studying Fisher in a Mormon context.

This chapter reports a meditation on the problem of authorship as it was provoked at the turn of the last century, of how historical scholarship intervened in a technological and legal turmoil. It highlights Graham Pollard's idée fixe in order to remark the attunement of the New Bibliography to disturbances in contemporary legal culture. The new reproductive technologies were crucial to the New Bibliography. Photography had played an important role in determining the types and ornaments of the Pavier quartos. Widening interest in historical bibliography was stimulated by a rare-book market quickened and shaped by single-author enumerative bibliographies. John Carter and Pollard would multiply the bibliographic tests available to discredit the forgeries—precisely the tests that Pollard and Greg had applied in 1907 to the Pavier quartos.

The introduction describes the original survey of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century playbook typography on which the book’s arguments are based. It makes a case for typography as worthy of study by showing that printed plays were considered viable and profitable reading matter in their own time. It engages with recent field-shaping scholarship in book history and theatre studies to explain why playbook typography has not yet been taken up on its own terms. The introduction contends that early modern playbook typography yields a new way of understanding the surviving corpus of early modern playbooks: as reading texts that permitted readerly access to contemporary forms of theatricality rather than foreclosing the chance to experience their effects. In other words, the idiosyncrasies of early modern playbook mise-en-page offer a wealth of untapped evidence about the active—and necessary—creativity involved in the tricky business of making plays into books and books into plays.

This chapter may be seen as a companion to chapter one, which proposes an overview of language economics in the form of a “mental map”. It is devoted to a bibliography which provides an extensive set of references to all the categories of literature in language economics featured in the mental map. This bibliography list consolidates the respective literature lists used by the authors of this chapter in their research and teaching.

The introduction explores the strange sonic and material qualities of early sound recordings and outlines a methodology for the critical study of early spoken recordings as literary artifacts. It defines concepts that are at the core of the book, including the meaning of “literary recording”, “sound”, “signal”, “audiotextual genres” and “sound media formats.” In outlining a sound-based approach to literary studies, and in considering the synergies between textual criticism and literary sound recordings, it provides a schema for the pursuit of audiotextual criticism, that is, the formal and historical study of literary sound recordings.