Special Issue: ‘Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-First Century’– A Conclusion

Special Issue: ‘Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-FirstCentury’ – A Conclusion

Laura Mandell*Miami University

Abstract

This piece is a conclusion to the Literature Compass special issue on ‘Scholarly Editing in theTwenty-First Century’.

The special issue is made up of the following pieces:

‘Special Issue: ‘‘Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-First Century’’ – Preface’, Regenia Gagnier,Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 33–34, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00672.x.

‘Special Issue: ‘‘Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-First Century’’ – Introduction’, Arthur F.Marotti, Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 35–36, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00673.x.

‘Electronic Archives and Critical Editing’, Jerome McGann, Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 37–42,doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00674.x.

‘Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition’, Hans Walter Gabler, Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 43–56, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00675.x.

‘Editing Without Walls’, Peter Robinson, Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 57–61, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00676.x.

‘Our Affection for Books’, Susan J. Wolfson, Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 62–71, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00677.x.

‘His Days Among the Dead Are No Longer Passed: Editing Robert Southey’, Lynda Pratt,Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 72–81, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00678.x.

‘Different Demands, Different Priorities: Electronic and Print Editions’, Stuart Curran, LiteratureCompass 7.2 (2010): 82–88, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00679.x.

‘Editing Manuscripts in Print and Digital Forms’, Arthur F. Marotti, Literature Compass 7.2 (2010):89–94, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00680.x.

‘All of the Above: The Importance of Multiple Editions of Renaissance Manuscripts’, Steven W.May, Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 95–101, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00681.x.

‘Editing Early Modern Women’s Manuscripts: Theory, Electronic Editions, and the AccidentalCopy-Text’, Margaret J.M. Ezell, Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 102–109, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00682.x.

‘Different Strokes, Same Folk: Designing the Multi-form Digital Edition’, Daniel Paul O’Donnell,Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 110–119, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00683.x.

‘Special Issue: ‘‘Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-First Century’’ – A Conclusion’, Laura Mandell,Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 120–133, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00684.x.

‘Special Issue: ‘‘Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-First Century’’ – Combined Bibliography’,Marotti et al., Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 134–144, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00685.x.

The contributors to this special issue were asked to evaluate, in Arthur Marotti’s words,‘where we are in textual studies now’ for the sake of trying to imagine what kind ofscholarly edition hails from the 21st century. Do digital media offer anything new?

Literature Compass 7/2 (2010): 120–133, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00684.x

ª 2010 The AuthorJournal Compilation ª 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Advocates of digital scholarly environments insist that they excel print in interactivity,whereas love-songs to the book such as David Pearson’s recent Books as History (2008)insist that only the book absorbs our individual imprint in the form of marginalia. Butpitting books and digital media against each other as values (‘more’ or ‘less’, ‘better’ or‘worse’) is reminiscent in my view of the Painting-versus-Photography debates of theearly 19th century: scholars of the future will find it difficult to fathom why we see thesetwo things even as comparable, let alone as enemies. Confronting the Book-versus-EBook opposition, Gabler’s ‘Theorizing the Scholarly Edition’, which frames this issue,rightly reminds us that the book is an irreplaceable technology:

Hence, my contention is this: we read texts in their native print medium, that is, in books; butwe study texts and works in editions – in editions that live in the digital medium… . Themigration of the scholarly edition into the digital medium that we are experiencing in our daymeans that we may encounter scholarly editions in an autonomous environment innovativelysuited to the study of these transmissions. Editions may in that environment be set up as com-plex instruments for exploration (‘machines’ for research, they might have been called in the18th century). So set up, they can offer us – offer us as critics, historians, philosophers, culturalhistorians and analysts of texts, works and oeuvres – the novel opportunity of interlinked textualand contextual study in the multi-connectable virtuality of the digital medium. (Gabler 46)

We need books to be books, and digital scholarly editions to do something else. Theproblem we confront, then, is not that digital media need to be proven equal or superiorto books. This special issue is decidedly not bent upon forcing a throw-away techno-culture’s notion of history as ‘obsolescence’ onto humanities disciplines by nature dedi-cated to preserving the past (Liu, Laws 306–9). We DO need to know, however, theextent to which the guiding principles of editorial theory as it now stands limit ourcapacity to imagine and build the best possible 21st century scholarly edition.

This special issue presents clearly to our view three oppositions structuring the field ofscholarly editing and beyond that textual criticism itself: the opposition between thenotion of a literary ‘work’, an abstraction, and the text as materially instantiated; theopposition between author and editor; and finally, the opposition between two notionsof authorship. The first two oppositions – work ⁄ text, author ⁄editor – are co-implicatedand tied to the book as medium. As to the two kinds of authorship described at the endof this essay – author as Bard versus author as creative resource – both were possible out-comes of the battle over copyright, and both will certainly condition the various possibledigital futures for literature and scholarship.

I. ‘The Work’ versus Material Text

Daniel Paul O’Donnell, currently chair of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium(http://www.tei-c.org), argues that one can focus on the content of a work independentlyof any particular edition and the way it looks. He privileges linguistic codes over thebibliographic: ‘print is a communications technology rather than, primarily, a tool forcomposition and thinking about data’, he says here (113). Pearson’s beautiful pictorialargument for the value of books, an Oak Knoll production, protests against seeing ‘thephysical format of the book [as merely] equipment’ (15): ‘If [its] rationale is purely textual,[its] obsolescence seems guaranteed’ (21). One can agree with Gabler that the printedcodex in fact provides the best technology for reading – a pleasurable activity of ‘unappro-priated bliss’ as Wolfson calls it (quoting Wordsworth, 65), which, moreover, doesn’t needbatteries – whereas digital environments are the best technology for studying literature, as

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ª 2010 The Author Literature Compass 7/2 (2010): 120–133, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00684.xJournal Compilation ª 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Wolfson’s own use of ECCO and LION to track usage of the adjective ‘unappropriated’in poetry clearly shows. But even if books are a good technology, one can still agree withPearson’s reinforcement of the argument launched by McGann and D. F. McKenzie inthe eighties that they are in fact ways of thinking, that books ‘have not been passive con-duits’ of information (22). The triple-decker is more than mere hardware. The novel, quabook and text, medium and genre, is a kind of software, Nancy Armstrong has beautifullyargued (‘Introduction: How Novels Think’, 1–27).

To be fair to O’Donnell, he argues that typeface and codex are not ‘primarily a tool forcomposition and thinking about data’ (my emphasis). Yet he does here intone a bias thattroubles the important work of the TEI as it formulates standards for encoding digitaleditions of texts, a problem that will be addressed at the next meeting of the TEI thisNovember 2009, in Ann Arbor, Michigan: we need ways of describing in code the lookand feel of books, the bibliographic codes that inflect the meaning of its linguistic codes.McGann’s The Textual Condition of 1991 first promulgated the phrase ‘bibliographic code’(56). McGann’s prime example of an author’s attention to the look of books is a usualsuspect, William Blake. In creating his own literature in all its aspects and controlling itsprinted form, Blake obviously played with the meanings producible through textualmateriality. Less obvious but still visibly significant is Matthew Arnold’s reordering of hispoems for various editions (McGann, Textual 48–51). ‘[T]he material form in which textsare transmitted influences their meaning’, Pearson says, by way of defining the field estab-lished by McGann and McKenzie, ‘the sociology of texts’ (22). McGann puts it this way:

Because literary works are fundamentally social rather than personal or psychological products,they do not even acquire an artistic form of being until their engagement with the audience hasbeen determined. (A Critique 44)

Without interface, there is no art, and interfaces are the result of social negotiations.

II. Author versus Editor

One part of the ‘audience’ with which any author engages is his or her editor, and,despite much evidence to the contrary, we persist in seeing editors as purely objectiveconveyors of authorial inscription. If print editors are far from passive, scholarly editorshearken not simply to their authors but to their own principles and theories for recon-structing authorial intent. The mandate to create a unified vision of the Author’s Workaugments editorial agency, as Gabler suggests:

Authors, as authors, would normally not dream of going public with texts or works under thetutelage of scholarly editors. Such editorial tutelage would claim too extensive an autonomy foran author’s comfort; for the scholarly editor always critically enters in between author, transmis-sion and reader and always modifies the given texts as transmitted according to editorially self-defined principles, rules of procedure and practices… . [T]he edition text in a scholarly editionis always the editor’s text. (Gabler 45)

I now offer an example of Gabler’s contention, drawing out the implications of his argu-ment.

It seems that Blake avoided the social relations of print by creating his own plates,printing them, coloring them, and gathering his printed pages into his own ‘canon’ ofilluminated manuscripts. But not even Blake can escape the editor’s (re)constructive ener-gies, visible even in David Erdman’s ‘Newly Revised Edition’ of The Complete Poetry &Prose of William Blake which seems to slavishly adhere to the texts that Blake printed:

122 Conclusion: Scholarly Editing in 21st Century


a previous editorial intervention, regularized punctuation, was ‘revised’ out of this ‘new’edition, so that the edition now displays Blake’s wildly idiosyncratic punctuation marksand capitalizations. And yet, even here, in Blake’s engraved, illuminated work, Jerusalem,we find evidence of massive scholarly intervention in the slightest of alterations:

The innumerable Chariots of the Almighty appeard in HeavenAnd Bacon & Newton & Locke, & Milton & Shakespear & ChaucerA Sun of blood red wrath surrounding heaven on all sides aroundGlorious incompreh[en]sible by Mortal Man & each Chariot wasSexual ThreefoldAnd every Man stood Fourfold. (Jerusalem, Plate 98, Erdman 257)

If one examines the plate closely, as one can now do using the award-winning electronicscholarly edition, the William Blake Archive (http://www.blakearchive.org), the punctua-tion between Locke and Milton is a period, not a comma (Jersualem Plate 98). Here thedifference between a comma and a period is crucial, a period rendering virtually imperme-able the boundary between natural philosophers and literary Bards provided by the poeticline’s caesura, a comma suggesting instead that science and literature are analogous orapposite. An interpretation has obviously here dictated a change, which is precisely whatGabler means when he says that ‘the emendation apparatus thus argues the edited text’ (45).

Changes in Blake’s punctuation are unmarked in the text itself – I have copied thatpage exactly, above – and Erdman’s explanations of such changes appear 550-odd pageslater. The textual notes themselves are far too brief to offer a full argument, as for exam-ple in a note given about Plate 91: ‘I have inserted the apostrophe called for by thesyntax and context; it is the thunder of Los that utters Plate 91’ (812). Absence ofmarkings in the text, distance of apparatus from it, and brevity of comments conspire toconjure Blake’s Jerusalem by editorial ‘fiat’. Editors complain that editorial work goesunrecognized by our profession, all the while that many of the bibliographic codes struc-turing editions obscure the fact that editing is an interpretive and argumentative process.Gabler hopes that the hypertextual format will make changes transparent and reversibleby users who actively orchestrate the editions that they encounter:

The editor, and the edition of the editor’s responsibility, will no longer decree a text. Editionand editor will instead, to the best of their rationale and ability, propose a solution to editorialproblems inherent in a text ... . (Gabler 47)

Electronic editions CAN make clear that any edition of a text is only a proposed solu-tion, but so can books – and they do, they just don’t make it easy or obvious. But noamount of ease or heightened visibility will help if creators and users of electroniceditions do not see what is fundamentally implied in Gabler’s statement, that proposingsolutions to editorial problems is indiscernibly an act of reading, or writing, or both. Thethreat posed by the collapse of the author ⁄ editor distinction cannot be underestimated,breaching as it does bardic authority.

Blake most clearly articulates his role as ‘Bard’ (‘A Descriptive Catalogue’ 545):

not a line is drawn without intention & that most discriminate & particular <as Poetry admitsnot a Letter that is Insignificant so Painting admits not a Grain of Sand or a Blade of Grass<Insignificant> much less an Insignificant Blur or Mark> (‘[A Vision of the Last Judgment]’,560; angle brackets indicate Blake’s additions to the manuscript)

In this Romantic notion,1 the Author is pure consciousness. In contrast, compositors,editors, and printers suffer from lapses in attention. Their ‘accidentals’ occlude Bardic



intentions, and it is the editor’s job to separate significance from dross, to (re-)create allthe significant blurs and marks into an ideal text. Paradoxically, however, we here havethe least likely Bard to need such correction – no intervening textual mediation exceptBlake’s own – and nevertheless Erdman changes a mark. Despite Blake’s articulation of‘romantic authority’, sometimes supposed to be the origin of the monumental authorsubject to bardolatry, he like anyone else could have a bad day and might, consequently,need Erdman’s apostrophe. Now the opposition between creative authority and mechani-cal printing threatens to collapse.

Any admission that an editor might know better what an author should have meantthan the author himself seemingly opens up the task of scholarly editing to ‘anythinggoes’. But it’s time to let go of that straw-man once and for all: Erdman’s ‘NewlyRevised Edition’ is meticulous. Erdman notes that ‘Sexual Twofold’ was emended byBlake himself into ‘Sexual Threefold’ (as is visible on the plate, Jerusalem Plate 98),indicating either a prior moment of inattention on Blake’s part, as he was engraving,or a revision as he thought harder. Couldn’t Erdman’s proffered apostrophe compen-sate for a similar lapse, or mightn’t it be an extraordinarily congenial suggestion forrevision? Had Erdman lived next door and been a perpetual interlocutor, friend, andreader, he might have offered Blake the apostrophe, and we might see it ‘mended’on the plate like ‘Twofold.’ Readers and authors as ‘townsmen’ and deeply readauthors as ‘next neighbors’ is what Thoreau imagines in Walden (104). The expertiseof scholarly editors consists in habitual companionship, ‘geniality’, Coleridge wouldhave called it.

Opposing Bard to editor instead of recognizing their relationship as congenial (theinteraction of two co-geniuses) is one way of denying that scholarly editions are sociallyproduced. So, for instance, Margaret Ezell argues here that the way scholarly editions arecurrently conceptualized might prejudice editors against working on women writers wholeave one or two handwritten manuscripts. Typically, as Steven May argues, up until1640, ‘our ancestors produced 200 surviving manuscripts for every extant printed title’(100). That means, as Ezell insists, that women wrote manuscripts not to themselves butto others: they participated in ‘the social conventions of handwritten culture’ which weas editors need to learn, articulate, and represent (108). Too often women writers are nottreated like authors because their output was never printed. At the inception of the femi-nist project for re-finding early women writers, Ezell rightly demonstrated the unwilling-ness of feminists to recognize women as ‘authors’ who were not professional writers inthe mode of Virginia Woolf when in fact the 19th-century writing profession emergedwith mass print (Writing Women’s Literary History 4–5, 54–5). Here and now, Ezell repeatsher argument that writers not be denominated as such based on their participation inprint literary history, pointing out that the communicative materiality ofsingle-manuscript documents

challenge[s] editorial belief that meaning relies in the selection of the appropriate word, and[that] the editor’s task is to distinguish in a coherent fashion between variants, errors, slips ofthe pen, and additions enhancing meaning. (Ezell 107)

Current editorial practices benefit from refusing to recognize the authors of singlemanuscripts as authors, from denying that handwriting on paper is indeed a mode of pro-duction, of communication, one that involves another field of social relations, past andpresent. As May’s, Marotti’s, and Ezell’s essays taken together clearly demonstrate, ourcurrent editorial theory does not accommodate manuscript transmission, does not fullyrecognize its alternative modes of authorship, and editorial intervention.



The disciplinary roles ‘Author’ and ‘scholarly editor’ arising from the print canon arereally roles in a ‘game’, as Gabler puts it (47). What are the stakes of the editing game?

III. Monumental Works versus Knowledge Sites

The game of scholarly editing was arguably first introduced by Lewis Theobald’s Shake-speare Restored (1726). Theobald attacks Alexander Pope for botching his edition ofShakespeare and offers his own book as a corrective that will make ‘our Author comeout as perfect, as the want of Manuscripts and original Copies could give us a Possibility ofhoping’. Theobald chastises Pope for having ‘so very sparingly thin’d’ of errors the textof Hamlet which is, like Denmark, ‘an unweeded Garden grown to Seed’ (ii). Theobald’sbook consists of a line-by-line commentary on errors found in Pope’s Hamlet: it is thefirst textual apparatus, but much larger and more prominent – the book’s sole componentbesides a preface – than textual comments became later with the evolution of the biblio-graphic codes for scholarly editions. Throughout this fully articulated apparatus, Theobaldasserts his editorial reasonings, all of which operate in scholarly editing today: he discernsthe word that Shakespeare ‘intended’ (direct quotation!) based upon Shakespeare’s habit-ual usage, and then shows that the variant he debunks makes no logical sense in terms ofusage at that historical moment (16–17); he argues that certain lines are accidentals,describing how the compositor got confused while setting the type (75); he argues forkeeping certain lines by attributing to Shakespeare an authority – sprung from his avowed‘Idolatry’ of this author (iii) – who in the game played by Theobald’s text is always self-consistent and self-aware, fully conscious. Theobald provides an apparatus for revisingPope’s edition to create out of it an ideal text from which all lapses, be they intentionlessor malevolent errors, have been excised. Of course, Pope makes Theobald the epony-mous hero of the first version of the Dunciad (May, 1728; 1729; Variorum Editions 1732,1738) to repay him for his efforts, after ‘cheerfully adopting nearly a hundred of hisantagonist’s readings’ in Pope’s own subsequent edition of Hamlet.2

The rise of the modern cult of the author around Shakespeare has been well studied.3

Perhaps as much as or more than the bibliophilia discussed by Wolfson or the addictionto books described by Lynda Pratt, this idolatry of the author motivated scholars toreconstruct the ‘ideal’ text by compiling an ‘eclectic text’ made up of manuscripts,editions, etc., each ‘reading’ selected from a ‘witness’ based on the editor’s beliefs andarguments about authorial intentions. McGann early argued that this attempt to create anabstract text corresponding to authorial intention came from mapping classical and Shake-speare textual scholarship, in which, as Theobald says, ‘Manuscripts and original Copies’ aresadly lacking, onto the editing process for texts in which such documents are available.The abstraction transformed from being a real missing document into an ideal composite(‘Critique’ 57). What is an ideal composite but a thing fully composed, of sound mind?Imagining a fully cognizant text – compiled without any lapses in attention, on anyone’spart – obviously contributes to anyone’s national monuments and national heroes, thestuff of national scriptures (McGann’s name for the literary canon, Scholar’s Art 3). Butone need not attribute this enhanced consciousness to a lone authority, nor see it as aproject that could ever be finally achieved in one frozen moment of time.

One can imagine Hamlet and the Dunciad, each, as what Peter Shillingsburg in FromGutenberg to Google (2006) calls a ‘knowledge site’ (see esp. 100–2), a phrase quotedfrequently in the essays appearing here. In this case, the process of editing wouldresemble more the pre-print literary game as described by Marotti (90), or correspondmore closely to Alexander Pope’s moment, the 1720s.4 He translates classical authors,



in the freest sense of the word, and, in lieu of ‘restoring’ Shakespeare’s text by‘weeding the garden’, he repairs Shakespeare’s text based on his own knowledge ofmeter and general expertise as a poet. To Pope, Hamlet is not a monument to berestored, but a playground. This text is malleable, Shakespeare having offered the occa-sion for other writers to try their hand at improving his text, much in the way, in fact,that Shakespeare treats his sources. Pope sees his own Dunciad similarly as such a play-ground: in 1741, a fourth book of it is published as its own work, and then isabsorbed into the poem in a four-book edition of 1743 that changes the hero fromTheobald to Cibber, Pope’s scapegoat of the moment. He would offer a vitriolicresponse if possible, but he’d expect others to try their hand at imitations of theDunciad, and the winning improver would be whoever offers thoughts ‘dressed’ in thebest expression, which, ‘like th’unchanging sun, ⁄Clears and improves whate’er it shinesupon’ (‘Essay on Criticism’, lines 315–16) – not simply the person who has Pope’sname. The 1710 copyright law of Anne gave publishers 14 years copyright, renewableonce, on the model of a patent. If patentable, literary texts could be seen as machineswhich, once the patent expires, others could adapt and remodel. Yet for another50 years, until 1774 Donaldson versus Becket, all the booksellers and printers in thebusiness continued to buy and sell copyrights as if they were perpetual, operatingaccording to the model of literature as property rather than patent (Rose). Writing inthis liminal moment, Pope could in fact see his own work more as a patented machinethan territory staked out in perpetuity. His Dunciad evolves, its instantiation in defini-tive editions and several ‘variorums’ being in fact a joke, a swift kick at pedants likeWilliam Bentley and their absurd contextualizing, scholarly notes.

IV. Two Models of Authorship

Two models of authorship can be seen at work in the print era and our own moment.One involves bardolatry. It requires editors to ‘find’ (really create) an ideal text out of thetoo too sullied flesh of actual editions and manuscripts. Most US scholarly editions avowthis model of authorship, building editions that are monuments to authors seen as ownersof literary property. It is this kind of authorship that Barthes celebrates as passing in ‘TheDeath of the Author’, but it survives and even still thrives in the field of scholarly editing– it makes no difference whether an edition is digital or not if it pays homage to this kindof author. The other model of authorship is that adumbrated by Michel Foucault in‘What is an Author?’ In this case, the model is not of author as owner but author asinventor – copyright here would have no place; issuing patents for literary works wouldbe more appropriate. Here different versions, each distinctly located in time and place, allcompete for attention and use. The text itself is something that can be appropriated,re-purposed, although authors could angrily assert their right to credit, to payment forusing what they have patented – perhaps in the manner of Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, a webof interconnected writing spaces that automatically transfers money to whoever authoredre-used texts, paragraphs, sentences, and words. Foucault’s author hasn’t built a monu-ment but rather invented a language, a particular way of writing and thinking, whichothers can use. In a sense, this patent space is like the space of criticism, but instead ofwriting in author’s words with the aid of quotation marks as literary critics now do, thisspace of authorship as springboard would involve encoding traces that take one back tothe original ‘inventor’ of any specific expression now seen as a particularly useful interfaceto or algorithm for generating a particular kind of thought.



But why other than a love for books might the author-monument appeal to editors?Stuart Curran rightly envisions the payoff in his fantasy of creating an electronic editionof Frankenstein that includes with it all the works Shelley alludes to or draws from, intheir entirety. In this case, instead of

supplying references at the bottom of the page or the back of the book, [the editor] establish[es]a comprehensive library in which to insert a novel like Frankenstein… . [Providing a library tocontextualize] accentuates the notion of magisterial editorial control [an editor has] over its con-tents. The reader is presumed free to pick and choose among those contents, but the editor isthe one with actual dictatorial control who has done the prior picking and choosing. Thereader is, whether aware of the condition or not, in a paranoid environment where someoneelse has made every decision in advance and then offers the illusion of free will… . The ulti-mate paradox in this process is that, richly intertextual as it is, such an edition is the very quin-tessence of a top-down editorial project. (Curran 85)

It’s difficult to imagine ANY environment, print or digital, that would IN EFFECTcreate this paranoid environment. I sit at my desk or on my bed reading Susan Wolfson’sLongman Cultural Edition of Frankenstein, and read only and all the excerpts of Miltonthere? I don’t reach for my own copy of Milton, just over there on the shelf, wherethings are underlined and easier to find? If I’m reading in the stacks, I don’t set down thisedition and look at another one, and another? I could see being on an airplane with onlya CD Rom and nothing else on my computer, or only a Kindle that has just this editionon it and nothing else ... . I helped mount Stuart’s Frankenstein edition on RomanticCircles, and I know from staff meetings that people are dropping into Romantic Circlesvery often via Frankenstein as it comes up in Google searches. They stay on a page for afew minutes, and they are off. Is it true in this environment that no edition of ParadiseLost accompanies this Frankenstein edition because we did not put it up? No. Literallyhundreds of editions of Paradise Lost accompany it, all available with a click – not on aprefab link made by an editor with ‘magisterial editorial control,’ but in an ever-readyGoogle or Yahoo or MSE search box helpfully located on the browser frame, in a ‘morelike this’ sidebar that comes up along with any electronic edition if I search for Curran’sRomantic Circles Frankenstein edition in my library’s Drupal interface, in the Google adsappearing in my gmail account if I send a message to a friend about Frankenstein’s relationto Paradise Lost.

The ‘paranoid environment’ is an editorial dream: it doesn’t exist on the Internet.Electronic editions have no covers, no walls: nothing blocks off passages to and from thetext – nothing ever even takes people through the front door of an electronic edition.They might come to a page of Political Justice, read a few sentences, and zip off back intocyberspace without ever knowing that this text provided context for Mary Shelley’s Fran-kenstein in an edition peer-reviewed by Romantic Circles and edited by Stuart Curranand Jack Lynch in the early days of its existence, with Laura Mandell as a technical editorand Dave Rettenmeier ⁄Mike Quilligan to email if they have any questions. RomanticCircles puts at least some of this information on every page, in the form of breadcrumbs,precisely because you never know which door a user enters. But still, the user wouldhave to stay long enough on the page to read those breadcrumbs – or care to read them.

The first email I ever received about the Romantic Chronology was from Bulgariabefore the overthrow of the communist regime: ‘How can Locke say that property isprivate?’ it asked. What response should any scholarly editor have given? ‘Sorry, this is achronology – it lists dates of when things happened for people who are interested inRomantic literature, and Locke’s Two Treatises is an important precursor text’. And right



now, here I am, at the dinner table in the evening, writing this conclusion to the specialissue, trying to quote Pope’s ‘Essay on Criticism’: do I drive to my office to get myAubrey Williams Riverside edition of Pope, companion in grad classes? To the library toget the definitive edition? Simply surf to ECCO to get Tonson’s, Gilliver’s, Warton’sWorks, where word searches are a trial given the ‘dirty OCR’ running behind the images,and of course spelling itself a complete guessing game (‘th’unchanging sun’)? No, I navi-gate through Google returns until I find a reliable copy with line numbers: it turns outto be Jack Lynch’s, and so I know it will correspond to a print edition’s numbers.Moreover, as a visitor to this electronic edition of an ‘Essay on Criticism’, who am ‘I’,typically? Am I a member of Pope’s Facebook page?

This slice of virtual life is meant to show that no digital edition COULD have ‘themassive editorial control’ that Curran imagines to be possible through selection of accom-panying texts: electronic editions have no front or back door, no beginning nor ending.Any text’s context is the whole Internet, each item of which becomes a flickering sun –any contextual element is THE text, the center around which all texts available on theInternet orbit as context, if and only if one is on that page, that is, in the sun-center ofthat universe.

With his worry about the desire for ‘magisterial editorial control’, Curran may notexplain how electronic editions really work, but he does beautifully illustrate what is atstake in Barthes’ model of authorship – in bardolatry, ‘restored’, ideal text-monuments.In ‘The Death of the Author’, Barthes makes clear that ‘the author’ is invoked by literarycritics as a reason why one would limit the meaning of a passage to precisely this, shear-ing away other meanings made possible by ambiguity. That is precisely what editors likeTheobald do: Shakespeare meant this, not that, Theobald says; I know because I am anexpert bardolator, because I have read everything he ever wrote. Barthes is not simplyassaulting traditional scholars here. Barthes censures any reason for closing down the playof meaning invoked by literary theories: socio-economic history, for instance. In otherwords, Terry Eagleton is as much his target as Walter Jackson Bate. Barthes’ ‘The Deathof the Author’, read properly, indicts not only the whole ‘validity of interpretation’movement spearheaded by E. D. Hirsch, where one reading is selected over anotherbecause of the author’s typical ways of thinking and writing. It also indicts piles and pilesof readings deployed during the last three decades that fall under the category of whatDavid Simpson calls ‘parodic’ literary history (par. 4): capitalism ⁄ sexism ⁄ racism ⁄ classism –in any event, ‘the bad past’ – made the meaning of this passage, and that meaning is‘objectify and hate the other’. What’s wrong with such readings, according to Barthes?They offer the editor critic a moment of complete triumph: ‘Victory to the critic!’ (147).The critic stands holding a flag in the field littered with the dead bodies of other possiblemeanings: reading, editing, interpreting can offer the rush of a magisterial moment oftriumph. (This sense of being absolutely right may be necessary for graduate students: Iremember when in graduate school being told by the affable Harry Shaw that, for mycomprehensive exams on 18th-century literature, all I had to say in response to any ques-tion was, ‘the rise of the middle class’.) For the scholarly editors who fit Barthes’s pictureas well as for the literary critics who fit into it, the motivation for ‘spending our time andour lives this way’, as Shillingsburg puts it (‘Hagiolatry’ 412), may indeed partly beaddiction to this rush.

Isn’t this gratification something we all feel whenever we achieve a compellingreading? The difference has to do with the dead bodies of shorn meanings. When oneaccomplishes a reading with the backing of an unassailable authority, be it the Author,the Economy, or History-capital-H, that reading allegedly offers The Meaning that is



absolutely true for all eternity, not just here and now. Thus, there is added to thegratification one feels for a job well done the promise of immortality – that basic lure,Bourdieu insists, of prestige culture.

Implicit in the descriptions of electronic editions offered here by, Hans Walter Gabler,and Peter Robinson, is an alternate model of authorship that falls roughly under Fou-cault’s notion of the author as creator of a language, or, from a parallel history to befound in Nelson’s Xanadu, the author as owner of a patent. Is the Internet Xanadu? Canit transform editing, interpretation, reading from the lethal act of shoring up one’s ownprestige into something else? Of course not – to believe that, would be to subscribe totechnological determinism, and to join the voices of those who at the outsethailed hypertext as a new utopia. But we can choose to create electronic editions thatfocus on their interoperability, their reusability and repurposing, the focus of the essayoffered here by Steven May; that draw on the expertise of crowds and random visitors;that make transparent and optional every act of interpretive editing; that offer linenumbers, so that someone searching for line numbers comes into our universe and takesoff her coat.

Electronic communities of interest such as NINES (http://www.nines.org), as McGannpoints out (39), gather together scholarly electronic editions and encourage those whowould create digital archives to maximize the interoperability of their work. I searched inNINES for ‘unappropriated’, wishing to compare the results I got with those that Wolf-son received from ECCO and Lion. Imagine my surprise when a poem was returnedfrom a Romantic Circles edition that I designed technically, using TEI (we expose thecode on every page), specifically to make possible sharing it via NINES which allows forfull-text search. Robert Bloomfield’s heretofore unpublished poem ‘To Immagination’,edited by Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt, came up, and it is fascinating, offering a kind of‘nutting’ episode or Prelude moment. There is no question of influence here – Bloom-field’s poem exists only in manuscript. But at the moment he wrote it, so did most ofWordsworth’s Prelude, only a few pieces of it published during his lifetime.

Whatever else they describe, these vast tracts of unpublished preliminaries alsorenounce the desire to appropriate ‘a common spot of land’ at the expense of editorialfinality, and they enact that refusal by remaining unpublished. For the process of becom-ing literary property means placing one’s own personal flag on a mound of the Englishlanguage, proclaiming oneself ruler of it for all time.

Precisely because so much of it was not printed throughout Wordsworth’s lifetime, thePrelude is indeed a site for processing knowledge for him and his interlocutors: it wasduring Wordsworth’s life called ‘A Poem Title not yet fixed upon by William Words-worth Addressed to S. T. Coleridge’.5 The Prelude’s language offers ‘dresses’ or expres-sions that are put on and taken off, altered and temporally replaced, throughout his life,changing as he moves with this set of writings through history (Liu, Wordsworth’s Sense ofHistory 395–9). This poem is much more a knowledge site than the hypostases of thosetexts invented by editors6 including his wife who named it posthumously. Historicallymost of its life has existed in manuscript, nonetheless engaged in social production andreproduction, as is attested by the elaborate embellishments for this handwritten title pagedesigned for manuscript B (see Owen, facing p. 1).

What would the Prelude look like if it were the electronic resource imagined byMcGann in his essay here?

Could one develop a model for exposing and comparing relationships between phenomena thatare radically discontinuous: different authors and their authorized texts, say, as well as the



relations between various agents – individual as well as institutional – in an eventual field dis-posing more than just textual or bibliographical things? Could the model expose and examinerelationships between phenomena – various works and their various agents – located in fieldsdiscontinuous in social time and space? Finally, could such machines be designed and actuallybuilt, the way the critical editions we inherit were designed and built?

One might suppose that McGann here describes the digital edition’s capacity for present-ing material instantiations of texts while locating them in a field delineating their histori-cal, social relations, the phenomena of their meaning-laden lives. The ‘From Goslar toGrasmere’ site, peer-reviewed by NINES, is perhaps one attempt in that direction,although it is at this stage only a proof of concept (Bushell <http://collections.words-worth.org.uk/GtoG/home.asp?page=Overview2Pilot>).

But McGann actually proposes here to go beyond ‘a model for editing texts in theircontexts,’ operating with a definition of context as the historical life of one text, oreven one author’s texts (39). I say this because for McGann the Rossetti Archive is notwhat he imagines here, whereas NINES is. What McGann actually imagines is, I think,this: there would be digital archives that present ‘multiple authorities, publication ven-ues, and textual versions’ (40) of particular authors, and those would be woven into aweb, so that ‘readers’ could call up views of interrelatedness among all these things, bethey in the form of literal mappings or tabulated data, tags or digital essays, visualizationsor snippets of text. In other words, the machine he looks for is the web itself with aset of interfaces – we’re going beyond tools here – that allows for the dynamic con-struction of a rigorously documented literary history – that is, myriad and perhaps eveninfinite views of cultural fields of relation, bounded by some delimiter of scholarly rela-tionships such as historical period, but nonetheless infinite because the user selects allthe objects that will enter the field in any particular instance. User-generated editions offield relations could be organized as ‘curated exhibits’ using the NINES Exhibit Builder,or, in 3D, the forthcoming Stanford Digital Humanities Lab’s Sirikata; other forthcom-ing interpretive workspaces include Shillingsburg’s Humanities Research Infrastructureand Johanna Drucker’s I.nterpret (‘Blindspots’). Although needing much development,exhibit tools and interpretive workspaces are a potential that need to be explored. Theywould provide ways of filtering the whole Internet of texts into various sites for pro-cessing information into knowledge. The concern among the essays gathered togetherhere is that editing theory as it now stands resists the interactive and interpretive powersof digital registration.

V. Conclusion

Can humanities-directed interdisciplinarity consolidate institutionally around the 21st-century scholarly edition, with ‘the electronic medium ... its original medium’, asGabler reiterates it (46)? The congeniality and brevity of Robinson’s contribution tothis discussion, ‘Editing without Walls’, will not obscure for readers, I hope, themomentousness of its message: ‘the digital world is changing the way we work witheach other, and it is changing who ‘‘we’’ are’ (58). Does that mean we all have tobecome technological experts first, literary critics second? That would be to misreadRobinson’s statement: he doesn’t say that the digital world is changing ‘who we are’but rather that it is changing ‘who we are’. ‘We’ are no longer ‘the gatekeepers andguides’ (58) for a mass public, literate but desiring expert guidance from those who liveand breathe habitually in a library. What are we? What’s the new game? A related



question is McGann’s, ‘Can it be built?’ We already have a partial answer to that ques-tion, an answer resembling Robinson’s answer to the question ‘who will read a millionbooks?’ (60). It is being built, by hundreds of thousands of people. We need choreog-raphy here for this wild dance of information, and scholarly editorial theory must riseto that challenge.

Short Biography

Laura Mandell, Professor of English Literature at Miami University of Ohio has publishedMisogynous Economies: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1999), aLongman Cultural Edition of The Castle of Otranto and Man of Feeling, and numerous arti-cles primarily about eighteenth-century women writers. Her recent article in New LiteraryHistory describes how digital work can be used to conduct research into conceptionsinforming the writing and printing of eighteenth-century poetry. She is Editor of thePoetess Archive, an online scholarly edition and database of women poets, 1750–1900(http://unixgen.muohio.edu/�poetess); Associate Director of NINES (http://www.nines.org); and is currently participating in the development of 18th Connect, a similar onlinenetwork for eighteenth-century scholars. Her current research involves developing newmethods for visualizing poetry (http://miamichat.muohio.edu), developing software thatwill allow all scholars to deep-code documents for datamining, and improving OCR soft-ware for early modern and 18th-c. texts via high performance and cluster computing.

Notes

* Correspondence: Department of English, Miami University, 356 Bachelor Hall, Oxford, OH 45056, USA.Email: [email protected]

1 McGann explicitly identifies ‘the ideology of final intentions’, bugbear of American editorial theory, with Blakein his Critique of Modern Textuality (44–7), a view that he reiterates fully in 2006 (‘Romanticism, Post-Romanticism,and the Afterlife of Cultural Authority’, in Scholar’s Art 35–49). Yet, D. C. Greetham questions locating this ideol-ogy in Romantic practices of authorship, at least (169–70), relying upon Stillinger’s Multiple Authorship.2 Freeman, Preface i, in Theobald.3 For an important intervention in the field, see de Grazia.4 My understanding of the difference between notions of authorship during the early and late 18th century comefrom a very important article by Roger Lonsdale on Thomas Gray in which Lonsdale argues that Gray’s outputdeclined severely because, during the 1750s, notions of the free play of intertextuality (allusion, imitation, transla-tion) were starting to be seen as ‘plagiarism’ (‘Poet as Debtor’).5 This title page of the manuscript is in elaborate calligraphy, as one can see here: <http://www.wordsworthcentre.co.uk/Cornell/images/Prel-B.jpg>.6 I’m thinking especially of the Norton edition of The Prelude, edited by Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams,and Stephen Gill, which solidifies a much more fluid manuscript variation into three Preludes: 1799, 1805, 1850, asits title attests. Note how creative the editors had to be, as can be seen in Bushell, ed., <http://collections.wordsworth.org.uk/GtoG/home.asp?page=MSJJ3JonathanWordsworth>. 13 October 2009.

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Special Issue: ‘Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-First Century’– A Conclusion