Search Results

Chapter 6 draws the consideration of Romantic literary manuscripts forward to the present moment, examining their shifting cultural status from the late eighteenth century onward, including their preservation and dissemination in print and now in digital form. Significant changes to the treatment and valuation of literary manuscripts began in the late eighteenth century, as they began to be preserved and collected as never before. The attention to contemporary manuscripts arose from a growing scholarly and public interest in ancient scripts and manuscripts, and a new devotion to handwriting and to handwritten manuscripts. The second half of this chapter turns to critical treatments of the period’s manuscripts in its textual scholarship, to ask how the privileging of the textual has impacted our engagements with the period’s literary manuscripts. It investigates the major scholarly critical editions of the last five decades to understand how editorial practice has grappled with the period’s literary manuscripts and the literary culture in which they were embedded. It examines how recent digital editions of the period’s manuscripts have improved our access to and revived our interest in literary manuscripts as bearers of cultural meaning beyond the textual.

This chapter describes how digital critical edition supposes a mastery of markup systems, providing an overview in the form of an inventory of standards, and of markup, presentation, and archiving techniques. It discusses the state of the art while focusing on key architectures and techniques considered as the basis of digital critical edition. The chapter introduces some aspects of markup technology that are particularly relevant to textual scholarship, such as the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), and considers some of their limitations, possibilities, and future potential. Since there is no need to be conversant with all aspects and details of the markup technology, most of what is covered here is of a general nature, albeit focusing on issues assumed to be of particular relevance for textual scholarship.

This chapter is divided into three parts. The first focuses on the first two parts of Varro’s definition of the role of the grammarian: lectio and enarratio. It shows how Badius used figurative language to conceptualize these roles, paying particular attention to the symbolism of initiation and sacred mystery, and to concepts of copia and excess. The second looks at emendatio and iudicium. This section incorporates an account of Badius’s attitudes towards textual scholarship and editing, and examines the medical and bodily metaphors he used to characterize this work. The third part considers the ways in which Badius presented and conceptualized the various aspects of the printing process: from patronage and the acquisition of exemplars to the issuing of privileges. In this domain Badius used figurative language grounded in concepts of property and theft, friendship and sociability, and familial relations.

Chapter 1 supplies an essential description of manuscript and print cultures in the Romantic period. It probes the attempts by book historians, manuscript scholars, and textual editors to establish guidelines for understanding modern literary manuscripts, that is, manuscripts created in the age of print. It questions conceptions of scribal culture that rest upon the scholar’s capacity to discern authorial intention, and that exclude from consideration those manuscripts intended for print. Donald Reiman, in his categorisation of modern manuscripts into three groups – private, confidential or social, and public – relies upon an editor’s ability to determine the intended audience of any given manuscript. However, as this chapter demonstrates, intention is rarely discernible. This chapter grounds its theoretical analysis in a detailed survey of the literary writing and material practices of Charlotte Smith and Dorothy Wordsworth, two authors who have long been regarded as belonging, respectively and exclusively, to the divided worlds of print and script.

With what kind of academic research can a Leavisite feel comfortable± Ellis describes here his own difficulties with library work and how one simple way of solving them — choosing to edit a text — had become impossible for him given what Mrs Leavis had to say about that activity. If most traditional forms of literary scholarship had to be ignored, this was not the case for cultural studies. In many of these, literary texts function as illustration yet this is chiefly their role in the proposals Leavis made for reforming the Cambridge English Tripos, and whereas in The Great Tradition his main focus is on the literary strengths and weaknesses of George Eliot, Conrad and James, in his later work on Dickens he is much more concerned to bring out what Dombey and Son and Little Dorrit have to say to us about their times.

This chapter examines the connection between modernism and close reading with reference to one major modernist writer, James Joyce. It examines a small number of examples of the close reading of Joyce’s fiction, trying to identify what happens at the level of interpretation, and also to describe what happens in the language of the critic. A premise of this discussion is that what we think of as close reading, when communicated to us, also implies a practice of writing. As Hugh Kenner, one of the readers under discussion, once remarked: ‘Criticism is nothing but explicit reading, reading articulating its themes and processes in the presence of more minds than one.’ The chapter seeks to discern how the writing of the critic, in thus making reading ‘explicit’, inflects our sense of the literary work.

A most successful Cambridge don at Trinity College, Tutor and (at the age of 25) Regius Professor of Greek – but also a churchman, made Dean of Peterborough in 1822, and in 1830 both Canon of Westminster and Bishop of Gloucester, a see he administered with great fairness and generosity. His conventional Latin editions of Euripides’ Hippolytus (1811) and Alcestis (1816) were modest and sound, work he later developed in two much later English editions of the two Iphigenia-plays (1840's). With his Trinity friend Charles Blomfield (also a ‘Greek play bishop’) Monk early founded and conducted the important journal Museum Criticum, and edited Porson's Adversaria (1812); and it was to Blomfield that Monk dedicated his authoritative Life of Bentley (1830), the great 17^th Century Trinity Master.