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Over the past decade and a half there has been a notable shift of emphasis in the writing about textual matters, from a concern with authorial intention to an interest in the collaborative or social aspects of text-production. As the discussion has evolved, there has come to be an increased concern with textual instability and the significance of versions. All these concepts are naturally linked: for if texts are social products, then texts will take different shapes as they pass from one social milieu to another; and if authors are not the only source of validity in the constitution of texts, then all these variant texts carry their own authority as products of history. This attention to textual multiplicity extends backward into the initial creative process and forward into audience response (which is also a creative activity). Authorial versions — obvious emblems of textual instability — are studied both as products of particular moments and as parts of an endless process, which does not cease with the author's death; and readers, both during an author's lifetime and afterward, participate in this process by creating their own versions of the texts they encounter.
These ideas are obviously related to the anti-foundationalist tendencies of philosophy and literary theory in the past generation. Their presence in recent textual theory is to be applauded as a sign — too often lacking in the past — that textual and literary theory and criticism share the same concerns; it also serves to focus textual critics' attention on topics they had previously neglected. There is no reason, of course, why these new interests should involve a banishment of authorial intention as a subject of study: it is clearly a part of the total textual process, and any comprehensive approach would have to include it. Many of the recent discussions, however, have denigrated it and have presented a distorted picture of intentionalist editors' attitudes. A number of stock elements reappear in essay after essay: intentionalist editors in the "Greg-Bowers tradition," so the standard argument goes, unrealistically think of a literary work as the isolated product of a single individual, and they seek to replace textual instability with fixity by conflating variant texts
In the pages that follow I shall survey the general theoretical writings that have appeared in English during the first half of the 1990s, trying to sort out what remains valuable after the distortions, oversimplifications, and loose arguments are removed. Because the field of textual study is attracting more interest as its connections with literary theory are more widely noticed, the body of writing from this five-year period is extraordinarily large. I have necessarily been selective, omitting, for example, most of the articles dealing with particular authors or editions.[2] Introductions to textual study are a similar category in that they do not normally aim to break theoretical ground, but I should note in passing that both D. C. Greetham and I produced new introductions during the past several years. Greetham's Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (1992; reprinted with an expanded checklist in 1994) takes the opposite approach, quantitatively, from my A Rationale of Textual Criticism, published three years earlier. His book is a long one, attempting
An event during these years that will not have gone unnoticed by anyone connected with textual scholarship was the death of Fredson Bowers on 11 April 1991. His dominance of the field for much of the second half of the twentieth century naturally made his death seem symbolic, coming at a time when the kind of edition he championed was under attack.[7] His view of the writings surveyed here might not have been very favorable, but the reason would not have been their frequent criticisms of intentionalist editing, for he was always open — as his editorship of Studies in Bibliography showed — to points of view that were not his own. What would probably have bothered him is the emphasis on theory, since his own preference was to concentrate on the practical problems of dealing with particular situations.[8] Theory is, I believe,
This is one of the phenomena illustrated by the writings discussed below. I shall first examine two books, one by Jack Stillinger and the other by Jerome J. McGann, that exemplify the kinds of arguments being made and provide the opportunity for demonstrating the kinds of responses that seem to me appropriate. Dealing with these books in some detail will establish the framework within which one can respond to other writings and will, I trust, make it appropriate to comment more briefly on the other main contributors to the current debate. The second section below takes up the anthologies that were a notable feature of the early 1990s, and the third discusses some of the other essays, not in anthologies, that try to clarify the meanings of, and the distinctions among, concepts like work, text, and version. (Such discussions form a genre that looms large in the recent literature.) The final section tries to assess where all this commentary leaves us and how we can proceed.
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