The Monastery

Reviews / Votes

Willl certainly be the definitive scholarly edition of Scott for the foreseeable future. The notes and emendation lists ! evince years of thorough, diligent research into manuscripts, editions, sources, references, and allusions. The information will give the serious reader inestimable help in understanding Scott. These latest volumes in the Edinburgh Edition afford fascinating insights into Scott's career as a novelist in the 1820s. The Edinburgh Edition is always alert to Scott's working practices and circumstances of the author and his publishers at the time of the genesis, composition, and production of the individual novels. These volumes are no exception. The editors describe with lucidity and eloquence the significance of these works within Scott's career, the processes of their composition and production, and the historical context of the novels. The Edinburgh Edition respects Scott the artist by 'restoring' versions of the novels that are not quite what his first readers saw. Indeed, it returns to manuscripts that the printers never handled, as Scott's fiction before 1827 was transcribed before it reached the printshop. Each volume of the Edinburgh edition presents an uncluttered text of one work, followed by an Essay on the Text by the editor of the work, a list of the emendations that have been made to the first edition, explanatory notes and a glossary ! The editorial essays are histories of the respective texts. Some of them are almost 100 pages long; when they are put together they constitute a fascinating and lucid account of Scott's methods of compostion and his financial manoeuvres. This edition is for anyone who takes Scott seriously. The best and most thoroughly pioneering textual editing project in the history of Scottish literary scholarship ! In the Edinburgh Edition, the specifics of the various transmissional layers are dealt with in an "Essay on the Text", particular to each novel, and each essay would make for an excellent primer in modern, rigorously empirical practices of textual editing. These essays uncover the archaeology of Scott's compositional practice based upon an exhaustive trawl through letters to and by Scott, James Ballantyne, Robert Cadell and others. They also make as much sense as possible of the transition between manuscript and first edition and between the significant printed editions of each text. Along with emendation lists much more extensive than any before in editions of Scott, this extensive apparati represents many hundreds of hours of work by the volume editor, by research assistants and by the general editor!It is the transparency, consistency and boldness of the Edinburgh edition in creating a kind of hyper-socialised text (where so much which was manifestly designed for inclusion and demonstrably lost through error first time around is recovered) which makes it such a courageous example of empirical text editing!.these volumes continue the process of the Edinburgh Edition in providing the best textual and annotational maps of Scott-land. Penny Fielding's new edition of Scott's second departure from his recent Scottish history, The Monastry, contains a facinating account of how this novel came into being before the success of Ivahoe was assured, and for this alone it would be a valuable resource for the serious student of Scott's work. Yet it is also an impressive work of textual scholarship, while being the first fully-annotated edition of one of the moe critically neglected of the Waverly series. Scott enthusiasts ! owe a debt of gratitude to Penny Fielding for making the novel available in such a helpful, scholarly, but still thoroughly readable form. Willl certainly be the definitive scholarly edition of Scott for the foreseeable future. The notes and emendation lists ! evince years of thorough, diligent research into manuscripts, editions, sources, references, and allusions. The information will give the serious reader inestimable help in understanding Scott. These latest volumes in the Edinburgh Edition afford fascinating insights into Scott's career as a novelist in the 1820s. The Edinburgh Edition is always alert to Scott's working practices and circumstances of the author and his publishers at the time of the genesis, composition, and production of the individual novels. These volumes are no exception. The editors describe with lucidity and eloquence the significance of these works within Scott's career, the processes of their composition and production, and the historical context of the novels. The Edinburgh Edition respects Scott the artist by 'restoring' versions of the novels that are not quite what his first readers saw. Indeed, it returns to manuscripts that the printers never handled, as Scott's fiction before 1827 was transcribed before it reached the printshop. Each volume of the Edinburgh edition presents an uncluttered text of one work, followed by an Essay on the Text by the editor of the work, a list of the emendations that have been made to the first edition, explanatory notes and a glossary ! The editorial essays are histories of the respective texts. Some of them are almost 100 pages long; when they are put together they constitute a fascinating and lucid account of Scott's methods of compostion and his financial manoeuvres. This edition is for anyone who takes Scott seriously. The best and most thoroughly pioneering textual editing project in the history of Scottish literary scholarship ! In the Edinburgh Edition, the specifics of the various transmissional layers are dealt with in an "Essay on the Text", particular to each novel, and each essay would make for an excellent primer in modern, rigorously empirical practices of textual editing. These essays uncover the archaeology of Scott's compositional practice based upon an exhaustive trawl through letters to and by Scott, James Ballantyne, Robert Cadell and others. They also make as much sense as possible of the transition between manuscript and first edition and between the significant printed editions of each text. Along with emendation lists much more extensive than any before in editions of Scott, this extensive apparati represents many hundreds of hours of work by the volume editor, by research assistants and by the general editor!It is the transparency, consistency and boldness of the Edinburgh edition in creating a kind of hyper-socialised text (where so much which was manifestly designed for inclusion and demonstrably lost through error first time around is recovered) which makes it such a courageous example of empirical text editing!.these volumes continue the process of the Edinburgh Edition in providing the best textual and annotational maps of Scott-land. Penny Fielding's new edition of Scott's second departure from his recent Scottish history, The Monastry, contains a facinating account of how this novel came into being before the success of Ivahoe was assured, and for this alone it would be a valuable resource for the serious student of Scott's work. Yet it is also an impressive work of textual scholarship, while being the first fully-annotated edition of one of the moe critically neglected of the Waverly series. Scott enthusiasts ! owe a debt of gratitude to Penny Fielding for making the novel available in such a helpful, scholarly, but still thoroughly readable form.