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.
This dramatic shift has produced some benefits, but it has not been an unmixed blessing. Both the turn away from the author and the emphasis on textual instability reflect trends in literary and cultural criticism and thus are evidence of the growing interconnections between fields that for too long had little influence on each other. Furthermore, the attention that has now been directed toward the nonauthorial contributions to textual constitution (and hence toward the effect of design features on readers' responses) is long overdue. That authors do not generally act alone to bring their works to the public has of course always been understood, as has the fact that publicly available texts—however much they may have departed from their authors' intentions—are the texts that were historically influential. But far less had been written on these matters than on the importance of what authors intended, and it was high time that this imbalance be redressed.
These welcome developments, however, came at a price. One is that the prose of many textual critics has been infiltrated with the fashionable buzz-words of literary theory and with a style of writing that often substitutes complexity of expression for careful thought. Another is the notion that recognizing the importance of socially produced texts involves rejecting the study of authorial intentions. Those who, quite correctly, have called attention to the value of studying social texts have unfortunately often undercut their accomplishment by denying the historical significance of the earliest stages in the history of every text and by persisting in the belief that labeling authorial intention "Romantic" and "idealistic" effectively suggests its unworthiness. Still another problem is that the emphasis on documentary texts has led to a considerable amount of unfounded criticism of the activity of critical editing and the "mediation" practiced by scholarly editors. I shall illustrate these points here by examining in some detail many of the theoretical writings on textual criticism and scholarly editing published in the English language during the last five years or so of the twentieth century—writings that form an index to the state of textual criticism at the millennium.[1]
There is no shortage of material to look at, for the quantity of books and essays in this field has shown no decline from the high level it reached during the preceding several decades. Books have of course appeared from a variety of publishers, but one publishing effort worth singling out is the University of Michigan Press series "Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism," begun in 1993 under the general editorship of George Bornstein. Now numbering more than a dozen volumes, it includes some of the most important books in the field during this period, such as Joseph Grigely's Textualterity (1995) and Peter L. Shillingsburg's
Resisting Texts (1997).[2] Essays on textual criticism also come out regularly both in periodicals and, increasingly, in anthologies. As always, the bibliographical-society journals are a more likely outlet than the journals of literary criticism and theory; and since 1984 the annual volume of the Society for Textual Scholarship, Text, has been a major venue. Although it has usefully tried to be interdisciplinary from the
start, its importance increased markedly with the sixth volume (1994), when a book-review section, edited by Peter L. Shillingsburg, was introduced. Shillingsburg generally matches books and reviewers with skill and allows reviewers to write substantial essays; the result is that
Text is now the premier English-language book-reviewing medium in the textual field.
[3]
There were probably, however, more essays published in anthologies than in periodicals. The explosion of anthologies of original essays in this field in the early 1990s did not abate in the later part of the decade, with an average of about five appearing each year, some of them deriving from conferences.[4] The Michigan series alone added six anthologies during this period;[5] the long-running University of Toronto "Conference on Editorial Problems" series was also augmented by six;[6] and the series of Beihefte published by the German journal Editio included one anthology entirely in English.[7] Another series was created by W. Speed Hill's publication in 1998 of a second volume of papers delivered at the Renaissance English Text Society meetings. Two other scholars who had previously edited anthologies on textual matters, Philip Cohen and Paul Eggert, brought out second ones, and D. C. Greetham was responsible for two during this period.[8] A few volumes were focused on specific areas,
such as classics, Old and Middle English, Shakespeare, stemmatics, and electronic editions.
[9] But most had a vaguer kind of unity, with the contributions being related more or less directly to a broad conceptual title.
[10] Several anthologies were published as special numbers of journals,
[11] and several others were mini-anthologies that formed designated groupings within numbers of journals.
[12]
It also happens that during the second half of the 1990s several contributions were made to three basic genres of scholarly publication that support textual scholarship. One introductory textbook was brought out in a revised edition;[13] four cumulated specialized checklists of scholarship were published;[14] and four guides to the transcription of manuscripts appeared.[15] Another feature of this period was the mounting criticism directed at librarians for their willingness to allow microfilms and digitizations to be substituted for originals. This matter is vital to textual scholars, who must have access to original physical evidence no matter
what approach to editing they take, since it is necessary for studying both production and reception history. A wide audience became acquainted with the problem when the novelist Nicholson Baker published an article in
The New Yorker detailing the British Library's disposal of the last surviving great collection of post-1850 American newspapers ("Deadline," 24 July 2000, pp. 42-61).
[16] (One may note parenthetically that textual criticism itself reached a larger audience than usual in the late 1990s through the staging and publication of Tom Stoppard's
The Invention of Love [1998], in which A. E. Housman appears as a character and speaks some of the wittiest passages from his editorial prefaces.)
[17] Three of the recurring themes during this period were the application of textual criticism to nonverbal works, the editorial traditions of nonEnglish-speaking countries, and the role of the computer in editing. I shall take up each of these before turning to some of the more general studies of textual issues.
