 | Studies in bibliography |  |
V
If misconceptions about copy-text and Greg's rationale have "mesmerized"
(to borrow a term of Greg's) author-focused and society-focused
editors alike, it is the latter group alone that has, mistakenly, criticized
the authorially intended text as ideal in the philosophical or aesthetic
sense. Accordingly, eclectic texts are seen as manifestations of the idealistic
philosophical views of those taking the Greg-Bowers approach,
views which cause them to pursue a phantom, perfect form of the works
they edit. Tanselle has shown that this criticism is not really new: in his
entertaining biography of Fredson Bowers, he recorded what must be
its earliest appearance, in remarks made by Leo Kirschbaum at an MLA
conference in 1959. Kirschbaum believed that an editorial focus on the
author's text was out of place in works designed for theatrical performance,
and he saw a "Platonic bias" in Bowers's application of Greg-based
eclecticism.[55]
Kirschbaum was reacting to the very first practical demonstration
volumes (1953, 1955, 1958) of his four-volume edition, The Dramatic
Works of Thomas Dekker. A quarter-century later, McGann expressed
concerns similar to Kirschbaum's:
The idea of a finally intended text corresponds to the "lost original"
which the textual critics of classical works sought to reconstruct by recension.
Both are "ideal texts"—that is to say, they do not exist in fact—but in
each case the critics use this ideal text heuristically, as a focussing device for
studying the extant documents. Both classical and modern editors work toward
their ideal text by a process of recension that aims to approximate the Ideal
as closely as possible. Both are termini ad quem which, though not strictly
reachable, enable the critic to isolate and remove accumulated error.
For the critic of modern texts, the classical model upon which his own
procedures are based frequently does not suit the materials he is studying,
and has often served, in the end, to confuse his procedures. Because this
textual critic actually possesses the "lost originals" which the classical critic
is forced to hypothesize, his concept of an ideal text reveals itself to be—
paradoxically—a pure abstraction, whereas the classical critic's ideal text
remains, if "lost," historically actual.[56]
Critical texts of course do exist. By saying that "they do not exist in
fact," McGann presumably meant that they do not exist until scholars
perform the necessary historical research and create them. In other
words, critical texts do not present the text of any single preexisting
document. When speaking of older works, however, it must be recognized
that for the most part, the preexisting documents may themselves
be described as critical editions. That is, the scribes who made them
ordinarily attempted to correct errors that they perceived in their
sources, and not infrequently ventured ambitious emendations, whether
by conjecture or by consulting manuscripts other than the one they were
immediately copying. Many manuscripts are, furthermore, the products
of a more thoroughgoing conflation of multiple sources. Most editors,
whether they are editing older or more recent works, rather than working
"toward their ideal text," seek to reconstruct, according to the limits
of the evidence, texts that can be said to have existed "in fact," as long
as factual existence is granted to the intentions of the author, whether
or not these were ever accurately recorded. In the course of reconstructing
the last surviving common ancestor of the extant witnesses, for example,
the editor of a classical work may discover that this text—the
"archetype"—contained errors. If the editor corrects them, then he or
wanted—whether or not he or she ever got it. The same holds true for
the editor of a modern work who finds that the author's wishes were
contravened by the publisher, typesetter, or even his or her own hand, in
the process of writing down the words formed in the mind. Factual existence,
that is, can also be assumed of Mark Twain's intentions to write
"Becky" and "Rebecca" where he referred, mistakenly and in different
books, to Judge Thatcher's daughter as "Bessie" and to the heroine of
Scott's Ivanhoe as "Rachel."
Tanselle raised the important conceptual points relevant to this
issue in "Textual Instability and Editorial Idealism," the 1996 essay
(see note 55) that ought permanently to have dispelled the mistaken
notion that editors, acting as editors in exercising their judgment, are
idealists. He noted that the preoccupation of editors concerned with
authorial intention is hardly as McGann has it—with a "pure" artistic
form, poorly reflected in the material world—but rather with the more
pedestrian problem of "the difficulty of getting words transferred accurately
to a physical surface" (p. 12). McGann's misreading partly stems
from "his failure to consider intentions as historical events" (p. 13).
Furthermore, Tanselle points out, editors create critical texts reflecting
authors' intentions not to serve as perfect, stable, or definitive versions
of their works, but more basically "because intended texts are not available
in documents and therefore cannot be studied without the exercise
of critical judgment, leading to attempted reconstructions" (p. 13).
For McGann, the idealism manifest in the eclecticism of the author-centered
editor goes hand-in-hand with a quixotic desire to fix a "single
`text' of a particular work . . . as the `correct' one." If this were true, then
his purported counter-emphasis on the "indeterminacy of the textual situation"
would be justified.[57]
In his 1994 essay "The Rationale of Hyper-Text,"
in the context of an argument against printed forms of scholarship
and in favor of electronic forms, McGann expressed his distaste for scholarly
editions of the Bowers type as "infamously difficult to read and use."[58]
editors present the critical text as the only "correct" text. Yet what is "difficult"
to understand is not the scholarly edition (assuming it is competently
constructed), but the "indeterminacy of the textual situation" itself,
at least for some works. A scholarly edition allows readers to view a work
in its development, by presenting the essentials of its history in the apparatus.
The presentation is made mainly by recording the variants,
rather than printing multiple versions of the work, but this form is convenient
for study, since it focuses attention efficiently, on the changes. If
the edition is well-organized, the difficulties inherent in grasping a remote
and complex history are minimized with no oversimplification of
the evidence.[59]
The introduction of philosophical language into any discussion ought
to signal the deepening of understanding, but the casual laying on of the
term "idealist" to author-centered texts and editing has not been helpful.
Those who have used it have, most basically, failed to recognize that all
scholarly editions present "ideal," or hypothetical, re-creations of past
moments in the life of literary works. This is true whether the main
purpose of the edition is to present the unaltered text of a document, or
an authorially intended critical text.[60]
Either way, a moment from the
past is resurrected by a scholar or group of scholars, who collect and
evaluate the surviving materials and decide how best to present them, in
a process involving human judgment from beginning to end (even when
the choices are not explicitly acknowledged as choices).
Editors preparing an edition of a work of modern literature must
often first decide which moment or moments in the life of that work to
present—since sufficient documentary evidence for re-creating several
may have survived. As has been discussed, a Greg-Bowers-style scholarly
edition usually offers a critical text reflecting one more or less discrete
level of an author's intentions for his or her work, while supplying in
errors, and of alterations made by persons other than the author, such as
those that yielded the first published text.
A social textual editor constructing a scholarly edition around a
socialized text must also make a series of decisions. The first and most
important of these involves choosing the fundamental conception of
socialization that shall govern the text. Two distinct conceptions seem
possible: the social text can be viewed either as the outcome of the collaborative
intentions of all who took part in the process of publishing a
work, or simply as the published text received by its first readers. These
two different forms of socialization correspond to different moments in
the history of a work, and though these moments may have followed
closely on each other, it is unlikely that the same text, nor even the same
kind of text, could accurately represent both moments. The earlier
moment, the "collaborative" social text, probably cannot be adequately
represented by reproducing the text of any one preexisting document,
and so an eclectic critical text is here indicated. The later moment, the
"received" social text, is by definition the text of a particular document,
and to represent it, an essentially noncritical presentation is called for.[61]
To re-create the collaborative social text, the editor must deal with the
problem of errors, since, presumably, all involved in the publication
process intended for the text to be without errors. Of course once social
textual editors admit that human intentions are historical facts, then
they are, despite their different goal, operating within the same concept
of history as author-focused editors. The decision to correct errors, furthermore,
means that social textual editors are sharing a concern with
their author-centered counterparts. Here they must resist the temptation,
apparently felt by some with social textual interests, to limit their
corrections to obvious errors. The reader does not really need a scholarly
editor to find obvious errors; however, obviousness is not an essential
characteristic of errors. There are also errors that are not obvious,
and to correct these, access to original documents and specialized knowledge
is needed. For scholars to restrict their own editorial judgment
artificially just at this point, where it might be of help to readers, is, it
must be said, intellectually irresponsible. On the other hand, an editor
presenting a "received" social text would not correct original errors,
early readers, and the errors were, of course, part of that experience.
A further issue concerning the nature of texts is worth remarking
upon at this point, as it helps further reveal the inadequacy of the idea
that author-centered critical texts are idealistic abstractions, while preexisting
texts are faithful expressions of material reality. It is the observation,
made briefly by Tanselle in "Editing without a Copy-Text"
and discussed more expansively by him elsewhere, that the texts of documents
are not literary works in themselves, but rather sets of instructions
for the re-creation of these works.[62]
Readers of A Rationale of Textual
Criticism, the slightly revised published version of Tanselle's 1987 series
of Rosenbach lectures, will be especially familiar with this insight,
which memorably relates literary works to works of music or dance,
while distinguishing them from works of painting or sculpture. In the
former grouping are works conveyed in "intangible" media—language,
sound, movement. Their "tangible" artistic compositions—documentary
linguistic texts, musical scores, dance notations—are unlike the tangible
creations of painters or sculptors in that they are not the works themselves,
but rather the forms into which intangible works must be converted
so that they may be reconstituted and experienced. These forms
consist of complex series of marks—as many (for a novel, for example)
as a million or more letterforms, symbols, and spaces. Being highly complex,
texts of documents are therefore also potentially highly unstable,
prone to heavy levels of accidental alteration every time they are copied.
While scholars might agree on what constitutes the text of a particular
document, they will likely come up with different answers to the question
of how accurately it records the instructions of the author. By
embracing the roles of those who worked with the author, social textual
editors might expect the problem of the textual fidelity of documents to
diminish. Where, for example, the author-centered editor would find
infidelity, the social textual editor would presumably endorse a text in
which a publisher's copy-editor has regularized an author's punctuation
or toned down his or her colorful language. Yet for an editor interested
in the collaborative social text, there remain the questions of how accurately
the text as first published reflects the intentions of the copy-editor,
where alterations were desired, and also of the author, where his or her
text was allowed to stand. As for the editor desiring to present a received
text to modern readers, he or she faces a number of questions about how
decide which of several early published forms of the work to re-create,
and whether the chosen text—say it is the first book edition of a novel—
should be reproduced in an exact transcription or in photographic facsimile.
The text of the chosen edition will have to be investigated by
comparing numerous copies. If press variants are discovered, these
should, of course, be recorded in the scholarly edition, but their presence
would require a basic textual decision, about whether the scholarly
text should reflect a particular variant state or the edition as a whole.[63]
Answering the questions inherent in a social textual undertaking might
easily demand as much critical thinking as is expended in author-centered
editing, and whether social textual editors seek to present
critical or essentially noncritical texts, they should find the author-centered
editorial past full of useful lessons (both positive and negative)
on the construction of scholarly editions—especially in the matter of
scholarly apparatus.
Opposition to the concept of authorial intention and the belief that
the eclectic text is an ahistorical, idealistic abstraction turn out to be
counterproductive of thoughtful editing, no matter what editorial goal
is being pursued. By accepting instead of rejecting historically determined
eclecticism, social textual editors not only would avoid falling
into logical contradictions, they would find themselves able to correct
unintended errors more efficiently, by making optimum use not only of
their own powers of observation but also of the ascertainable knowledge
of the habits and activities of those originally engaged in the publication
process. In discarding logically untenable objections to the Greg-Bowers
tradition, furthermore, social textual editors might better appreciate the
revealing textual histories available in editions whose critical texts reflect
"final intention" has sometimes meant that the contributions of an
author's welcome collaborators have been admitted to the critical text,
since its aim may be to reflect the text the author wanted, whether or
not these wants were influenced by others. Author-centered editing is,
of course, also sensitive to what authors did not want. From this sensitivity
too comes much that should be of absorbing interest to the social
textual editor. Scholars interested in the social text would hardly want
to limit their understanding of printing-house styles, for example, by
remaining in the dark about the author's competing preferences, if
those can be known; nor, when faced with expurgated texts, would they
want to investigate the differences between authors' and publishers'
texts (as well as the causes of the differences) any less thoroughly than do
author-focused editors. The pressures brought by others upon the author
to alter his or her text are evaluated with care by the author-centered
editor, to determine whether the resulting changes were accepted in the
spirit of willing collaboration, or were forced upon an author who had
little choice in the matter. While social textual editors may not be interested
in a critical text that remakes this result in the author's favor, they
should nonetheless welcome the presentation in the apparatus of the
evidence of how the author's text was forcibly socialized (if this was the
case), and find ways to match or improve on such presentations in their
own editions.
Such typical editorial problems help reveal that the social and authorial
focuses in editing have many concerns in common. What they
do not have in common, however, is a history. All of that—the experience,
the insight, the technical skill—has been gained in pursuit of the author's
text, which is why it is imprudent, to say the least, for those interested in
the social text to continue denying the validity of the Greg-Bowers approach.
Many benefits would consist in accepting its validity and absorbing
the lessons of its historical experience, including, most obviously for
the social textual editor, how best to identify and account for non-authorial
contributions to the development and production of texts.
In the compelling final pages of "Editing without a Copy-Text," the
author conveys the essence of his recommendations by calling the reader's
attention to the proven editorial conception of radiating texts. The
advantages to reading and scholarship of having more than one independent
documentary witness of the same lost text are self-evident. That
a critical reconstruction of the lost common ancestor, and its accompanying
apparatus of rejected variants, do not practically require a base- or
copy-text has been proven. The designation of a copy-text in such situations,
clouds the editor's judgment. Once it is established that a group
of sources descend independently from the lost ancestor, then any text
in the group may be right against the others at any point of variance.
All editorial choices must therefore be active choices; none can be made
by default, by resorting, thoughtlessly, to a copy-text. At points where
variants "seem `indifferent,' " Tanselle writes,
an editor may of course choose a reading from the text that supplies the
largest number of other reeadings; but the decision is still an active one, in
which one of the factors taken into account is the apparent general reliability
of a particular text. The process remains one of building up a new text rather
than making changes in an old one. (p. 19)
This is the approach that Tanselle proposes be taken to all textual situations,
not only those involving radiating multiple authorities.[64]
If critical
editing has permanent scholarly value—and the foregoing discussions
have attempted to show that it has, no matter what editorial goal is being
pursued—then editorial judgment must not be unreasonably restricted.
As we have seen, even the most thoughtful editors have fallen victim to
the "tyranny of the copy-text"—despite Greg's warning about it. Accordingly,
Tanselle, rather than issuing a stronger warning, has proposed
that the truest way to stay clear of unreasoned results is to remove the
copy-text from the editing process, since it has proven after all to impede
serious thinking about the wording of critical texts.
Tanselle's recommendation may be said to consist of two parts: 1) as
explained in his essay, the concept of editing without a copy-text, and
its practice, modeled on the experience with radiating texts; and 2) the
many lessons of a long editorial past, on which his concept depends and
which he assumes will have been understood by its practitioners. These
lessons contain both negative messages (such as warnings about the potential
deceptiveness of facsimiles, the tyranny of the copy-text, or the
limitations of mathematical schemes for evaluating variants), as well as
many positive ones. The lessons of the New Bibliography, the observations
of Greg and others about textual genealogy, the insight about the
potential superiority of difficult or unusual variants, paleographic analysis—all
editorial and wider historical knowledge, that is—retain their
value within Tanselle's framework. To edit without a copy-text, editors
knowledge obtainable. This knowledge aids, rather than substitutes for,
editorial judgment. Judgment is "clearly in the dominant position" (p.
20). The distinctiveness of Tanselle's approach is emphasized in his assessment
of the likelihood that an editor employing Greg's rationale but
without recourse to a copy-text might "select" some of the same readings
that would have been "retained" had a copy-text been designated. Here
Tanselle rightly insists that the distinction between the two approaches
is nonetheless essential:
the difference between these two justifications for the same decision is not
superficial: it goes to the heart of what critical editing is. The key point is
not whether an editor would make the same decision by following Greg's
rationale or by designating no copy-text but still following Greg's argument
for the presumptive authority of the text closest to an authorial manuscript.
. . . The important point is that the former approach places a rule above
reason (as any recourse to a fall-back position must do), whereas the latter
restructures the problem so that the editor's decision (even if it is the same
decision) results from the positive step of taking a reasoned action (p. 19)
Tanselle has taken care that his recommendation embraces all critical-historical
editorial goals, including the author's "finally intended" text,
earlier or later authorially intended texts, and socialized texts emphasizing
the contributions of the publisher's staff. His plan for "constructive
critical editing" (p. 22) is therefore "a framework that liberates
editorial judgment from the concept of copy-text while being neutral in
itself as to the goal toward which that judgment should be directed"
(p. 21).
Perhaps, as it becomes widely adopted, every truly important editorial
insight, such as Lachmann's or Greg's, is fated to go through a
period of overwork. Stemmatics was worked very hard for about fifty
years, before Housman and others pointed out the uselessness of much
of its product and reminded those who were listening that no mechanism
can rightly substitute for an editor's good judgment and expert knowledge
of his or her subject. As the writings of Giorgio Pasquali, Sebastiano
Timpanaro, L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, E. J. Kenney, Bruce M.
Metzger, and many others reveal, the best scholars of literature from
the remote past have long since recommended a thoughtful approach to
editing, appreciating the limitations as well as the benefits of methodologies
and formulaic analyses, drawing upon them as needed, to aid,
rather than override, thought. Fraught as the editorial outlook for more
recent literature now appears, here too it seems inevitable that the most
thoughtful scholars will move in a similar direction, if they haven't already
a while longer, since divisive, extraneous prejudices against author-centered
editing, which have needlessly accompanied the appearance of
social textual concerns, have yet to fade from the scene. But sooner or
later, the characteristically generous and inviting spirit of G. Thomas
Tanselle's profound essay will attract to it the best editorial minds of
all orientations.
Quoted in "The Life and Work of Fredson Bowers," Studies in Bibliography 46
(1993): 1-154, see p. 105; the persistence of the charge of aesthetic idealism made against
"eclectic" editors is partly recorded in Tanselle's later essays, "Textual Instability and
Editorial Idealism," SB 49 (1996): 1-60, and "Textual Criticism at the Millennium," SB 54
(2001): 1-80.
Text 9 (1996): 11-32, quotation from p. 13; quotations in this note and the next
are taken from the 1996 version in Text. Additional forms in which McGann's "Rationale"
appeared are recorded in Tanselle, "Textual Criticism at the Millennium," Studies in Bibliography
54 (2001): 35 n. 54. In his essay, McGann slights the advantages of books, while
making exaggerated claims for electronic media. Careful criticism of the "information
revolution" is called for from scholars who understand more than its potential advantages.
A belief in the inevitability and even the omnipotence of computers has characterized
some of the computer advocacy coming from the administrative hierarchies of many
libraries, for example, which is causing fewer scholarly books and journals to be purchased,
and even the "de-accessioning" of collections, to make room for more computers. Secondary
consequences include the depressed state of academic publishing, as scholarly editions of
literary and historical works, which were once assured of finding their way into thousands
of libraries, can now count only on hundreds. The continuing necessity of books and printed
materials from a humanistic standpoint can be demonstrated, in part, by revealing the
comparative—and often hidden—disadvantages of computers and computerized texts: their
elitism, reflected in the great overall expense and complexity of computers; their impermanence,
being subject to, among other inconstancies, the pursuit by their designers,
including the U.S. military and the computer companies, of a radical policy of planned
obsolescence; the lack of privacy that attends their use; and—not least—their lower compatibility,
compared to "hard copies," with human perceptive and cognitive faculties.
McGann emphasizes the inconvenience of the codex form in his "Rationale of
HyperText," the better to assert the "revolutionary" nature of the computer: "The change
from paper-based text to electronic text is one of those elementary shifts—like the change
from manuscript to print—that is so revolutionary we can only glimpse at this point what
it entails" (p. 28). The introduction of printing was not a perfect boon to learning (inferior
manuscripts were sometimes widely printed; valuable ones were sometimes discarded
after serving as printer's copy), but it did make reading easier, or at least no more difficult.
McGann's "hypertextual" alternative to printed scholarly editions is, in theory at least, an
electronic archive of all the substantive texts of a work in their entirety. Where the apparatus
of a print edition traditionally records variants alone, keyed to a single critical text,
McGann's "noncentralized" electronic archive would contain all the texts, arranged so that
none "is privileged over the others" (p. 31). Such an archive, of course, is to be welcomed,
but it must not be regarded as a substitute for original documents or for scholarly books.
"Navigating" through a hypertext archive to arrive at the textual history of a work so presented
is, for example, a fairly complex process, according to McGann's description of it
(p. 31)—and more complex than reading a traditional printed presentation in a book, at
least in that it requires special computing skills and access to expensive machinery and
Internet connections. A further problem may arise in reader reluctance to read through
multiple complete texts of long works, such that this form of presentation could easily
obscure, rather than highlight, textual variation. Finally, and not least important, is that
like earlier claims about the "paperless office," the claim regarding the "change from
paper-based text to electronic text" is in itself misleading. Few readers, that is, will want
to read even one version of a novel on-screen, let alone several. The alternative being bulky,
unbound computer printouts, the electronic text might be seen as a step backward from
the codex, rather than a revolutionary improvement, since for the most elementary purpose—reading—it
must rely on a technically primitive form of the technology it is supposedly
replacing. McGann is obviously sensitive to many of these issues, but, in "The
Rationale of HyperText" at least, he does not clearly separate himself from a kind of
triumphalism characteristic of some computer advocacy, warning dissenters, for example,
that "no real resistance to such developments is possible, even if it were desirable" (p. 11).
It is useful for the discussion that follows to note that Robert Hirst, with his edition
of the letters of Mark Twain, has called into question the assumption that the most satisfactory
way to represent the texts of manuscript documents is by means traditionally regarded
as "noncritical," such as photographic or type facsimiles, or systems of "genetic"
transcription. The disadvantages of these alternatives are well known. Photographs unaccompanied
by transcriptions force the reader to decipher unfamiliar handwriting (including
details of revision) at one remove (or more) from the original; type facsimiles can
demand complex feats of typesetting, and at points the principle of visual identity must be
abandoned altogether, and some hybrid system developed. Genetic transcription conveys
manuscript details through editorial commentary (whether in verbal or symbolic form)
inserted into the author's text. That the result is frequently illegible, more closely resembling
a textual apparatus than the text of the original document, accounts for why most
scholarly editions of letters have opted to make critical presentations in "clear text." Here
the editor presents the reader with the text as revised, as if for publication, with the details
of revision reported in the apparatus. Legibility is no longer a problem, but fidelity is. For
Mark Twain's Letters, Hirst devised a middle way, according to his view that the distinction
between noncritical and critical is basically important for scholarly texts, but more a
matter of emphasis along a continuum rather than a stark division. His compromise, called
"plain text," is a critical text, in that it relegates some manuscript details to an apparatus,
though the text includes more of these details than many professedly noncritical systems.
Hirst achieved his result by deepening his understanding of nineteenth-century letter-writing
and typographic conventions, and by rationalizing the use of symbols and other
typographic equivalents accordingly (including strike through horizontal rules for deletions,
⁁sublinear carets⁁ for insertions, and italics for underlining); see Robert H. Hirst,
"Guide to Editorial Practice" (revised, February 2002), in Mark Twain's Letters Volume 6:
1874-1875, ed. Michael B. Frank and Harriet Elinor Smith (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 2002), pp. 697-725.
Some years ago Tanselle identified and discussed exactly these two possible varieties
of the social text, as "a publisher's intended text" requiring "critical reconstruction" on
the one hand, and an "unaltered reproduction" of "what the publisher in fact did publish"
on the other. Tanselle sees the latter variety as the most useful complement to authorially
intended critical texts; see "The Text of Melville in the Twenty-First Century," his contribution
to Melville's Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays, ed. John Bryant and Robert
Milder (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 332-345, quotations from pp. 337-338.
"Editing without a Copy-Text," see pp. 5-6; the longer discussion appears in A
Rationale of Textual Criticism, A Publication of the A. S. W. Rosenbach Fellowship in
Bibliography (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); see especially chapter 1,
"The Nature of Texts," pp. 11-38.
A view of the "edition as a whole" can be attained with more or less clarity, according
to the number of copies examined proportional to the original total. The concept of
"ideal copy," a bibliographical description of all variations present in the copies of an
edition as they left the control of the publisher, emerges in this context. In the course of
defining this concept more than twenty-five years ago, Tanselle had cause to refer to the
bibliographical responsibility of editors of noncritical editions. These remarks are especially
pertinent: "Just because editors of noncritical editions do not have to make critical
choices among individual variant readings does not absolve them of the responsibility for
knowing what variants exist within the edition they are concerned with; choosing a copy
for reproduction is itself a critical choice, and it should be as informed a choice as possible.
When a descriptive bibliography has sorted out the various states comprising the ideal
copy (or, it might be better to say, the ideal copies) of an issue, the editor of a noncritical
edition can use this information with great profit. But when that bibliographical work has
not been performed, the responsible editor of a noncritical edition has no alternative but to
undertake the task. Editing, even of noncritical editions, cannot be divorced from descriptive
bibliography and from the concept of ideal copy." ("The Concept of Ideal Copy," Studies
in Bibliography 33 [1980]: 18-53, quotation from p. 37.)
That Tanselle's model for constructive critical editing is the approach to radiating
texts already proven by him and Bowers, among others, has implications for the scholarly
apparatus, though these are not spelled out. The author's name alone should, however, be
indication enough that the scholarly standards inherent in editing without a copy-text are
very high, and involve the scrupulous disclosure of bibliographic and textual evidence.
| Studies in bibliography | |