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Scholarly Editing in Perspective offers a critical reflection on the theory and methods of textual editing, as a contribution to a wider, comparative understanding of editorial practice. The analysis, written in a cogent, concise and accessible manner, offers an insight into the textual-philosophical principles and foundations of scholarly editing from the beginning of the twentieth century to the new opportunities offered by digital technologies in the twenty-first. Scholarly editing is presented as a process that makes an intervention in the text whereby the editor mediates between competing versions of textuality, authorship, and authority. In analysing the assumptions, beliefs, and critical underpinnings of scholarly editing, this Element provides a new perspective on the standard editorial models within the English tradition, how they have evolved, and how they are adapted for the digital age.
Slote’s chapter addresses the issue of the multitude of new editions of Joyce’s works using an intersection of translation studies and editorial theory, understanding various translations as new textual entities. Slote draws on Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, “The Task of the Translator,” in which the mission of the translator is presented as a mimetic one in that it requires both creation and imitation. Translation, according to Benjamin, aims not at fidelity but at strangeness, not at singularity but as the mapping of a maximum of possibilities. Likewise, editing is a mimetic activity in that – as with translation – it involves transposition from one textual instantiation into a different and new textual instantiation in order to further propagate the text in a new manner, to a new audience. The chapter then looks at various translations of Joyce’s works as new textual entities that also happen to be in different languages. The burgeoning library of Joyce editions will be thus examined not as a continuum of more-or-less precise versions but as an exploration and multiplication of possibilities.
By the late 1980s the concept of the work had slipped out of sight, consigned to its last refuge in the library catalogue as concepts of discourse and text took its place. Scholarly editors, who depended on it, found no grounding in literary theory for their practice. But fundamental ideas do not go away, and the work is proving to be one of them. New interest in the activity of the reader in the work has broadened the concept, extending it historically and sweeping away its once-supposed aesthetic objecthood. Concurrently, the advent of digital scholarly editions is recasting the editorial endeavour. The Work and The Reader in Literary Studies tests its argument against a range of book-historically inflected case-studies from Hamlet editions to Romantic poetry archives to the writing practices of Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence. It newly justifies the practice of close reading in the digital age.
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