Re-constructing the Book
Literary Texts in Transmission
Ashgate Publishing Limited
Published on 11. July 2001
Book
Hardback
252 pages
978-0-7546-0360-3 (ISBN)
Description
Literary critics, textual editors and bibliographers, and historians of publishing have hitherto tended to publish their research as if in separate fields of enquiry. The purpose of this volume is to bring together contributions from these fields in a dialogue rooted in the transmission of texts. The book is intended as both an argument for and demonstration of the potential of this realignment of literary criticism, textual criticism and the history of the book. Arranged chronologically, so as to allow the use of individual sections relevant to period literature courses, the book offers students and teachers a set of essays designed to reflect these approaches and to signal their potential for fruitful integration. Some of the essays answer the demand "Show me what literary critics (or textual editor; or book historians) do and how they do it", and stand as examples of the different concerns, methodologies and strategies employed. Others draw attention to the potential of the approaches in combination. All are concerned not simply with literary texts per se, but with the way in which the transmission of those texts is itself a process productive of meaning.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
bibliography, index
Dimensions
Height: 159 mm
Width: 223 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-7546-0360-3 (9780754603603)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Editor
University of Birmingham
University of Leeds
University of Reading
Pennsylvania State University, USA
Content
Introduction - the material text, Maureen Bell; why has Q4 "Romeo and Juliet" such an intelligent editor?, Lynette Hunter; Marvell's coy mistresses, Paul Hammond; Congreve and the integrity of the text, D.F. McKenzie; the economics of the 18th-century provincial book trade - the case of Ward and Chandler, C.Y. Ferdinand; Thomas Gray, David Hume and John Home's "Douglas", Roger Lonsdale; texts in conversation - Coleridge's "Sonnets from Various Authors" (1796), David Fairer; reading the Brontes abroad - a study in the transmission of Victorian novels in continental Europe, Inga-Stina Ewbank; Sir Walter, sex and the SoA, Simon Eliot; making (pre-)history - Mycenae, Pausanias, Frazer, David Richards; editing private papers - three examples from Dreiser, James L.W. West III; coercive suggestion - rhetoric and community in revaluation, Martin Dodsworth; re-reading Elizabeth Bowen, Hermione Lee; "drastic reductions" - partial disclosures and displace authorities in Muriel Spark's "The Driver's Seat", Alistair Stead; "not undesirable" - J.M. Coetzee and the burdens of censorship, Peter D. McDonald; Prospero in cyberspace, Martin Butler; texts and worlds in Amitav Ghosh's "In an Antique Land", Shirley Chew; congratulations, Christopher Ricks.