| | 1 | Author: | Edited by
DAVID L. VANDER MEULEN | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Studies in Bibliography  | | | | Published: | 2005 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Modern English collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | Textual criticism is one of the few scholarly fields that
can be talked about in terms of millennia, for it has been
practiced in an organized fashion for at least twenty-three
hundred years. A millennial year is a natural point for retrospection
and stock-taking, and the most recent one, marking the turn to
the twenty-first century, came at a moment fundamentally unlike any
other in the long history of the field. Although differing approaches to
perennial issues might have been in the ascendent at whatever past moments
one chooses to look at, all those moments—before the last decade
or two of the twentieth century— would have shared a dominant concern
for authorial intention as the basis for editing. During the last part of
the twentieth century, however, a focus on texts as social products came
to characterize the bulk of the discussion of textual theory, if not editions
themselves. For the first time, the majority of writings on textual matters
expressed a lack of interest in, and often active disapproval of, approaching
texts as the products of individual creators; and it promoted instead
the forms of texts that emerged from the social process leading to public
distribution, forms that were therefore accessible to readers. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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