Studies in the Novel articles from September 1995

Studies in the Novel archives from September 1995

A few last words, first. (an overview of this special issue on editing novels and novelists in the '90s)
September 22, 1995... In the fall of 1975, this journal published a special issue entitled "Textual Studies in the Novel," edited by James T. Cox and Warner Barnes. O M Brack, Jr., like Hershel Parker a contributor to the earlier number as well as the present one,...

Smollett's 'Peregrine Pickle' revisited.
September 22, 1995... Twenty years ago, in a similar special number of this journal, "Textual Studies in the Novel," appeared "Toward a Critical Edition of Smollett's Peregrine Pickle," in which I presented the considerable problems facing the textual editor of The...

Editing women.
September 22, 1995... It is not only a laborious but a very humble office to correct the writings of another. R. L. Edgeworth(1) Until the 1970s, few academics in most English-speaking universities expected to teach more than a handful of women writers, virtually...

Editing for the classroom: texts in contexts.
September 22, 1995... Texts are not what they used to be, in theory or in practice. For all the basic stability in editing theory from early Fredson Bowers to the present, scholarly editions continue to reflect the changing concerns of literary criticism and literary...

The scholarly editor as biographer.
September 22, 1995... Of the sub-disciplines practiced in and around departments of literature, scholarly editing looks to be one of the few with an empirical foundation. To some extent this is true: scholarly editors do gather and analyze physical evidence, and they...

"Pursue that way of fooling, and be damn'd": editing Aphra Behn.
September 22, 1995... There is some shame in editing which is perhaps why there is so much abuse among editors. To be discovered doing it now is like being found with the cross-word puzzle rather than the news section of literature. The shame makes many of us...

Coleridge on the semi-colon in 'Robinson Crusoe': problems in editing Defoe.
September 22, 1995... Samuel Taylor Coleridge praises the episode in Robinson Crusoe in which Crusoe laments the futility of money. Crusoe, having returned to the shipwreck for the twelfth and, probably, last time, seeks to recover whatever he has not been able to...

Composed in tears: the 'Clarissa' Project.
September 22, 1995... The Clarissa Project began as a series of chance encounters in the mid-and late 1980s among a group of scholars who had a like-minded sense that Richardson's Clarissa deserved a better modern text than the one most readers use. In a conversation,...

Toward the production of a text: time, space and 'David Balfour.'
September 22, 1995... Kidnapped (1886) is in essence an unfinished story. After David Balfour's adventures at sea and across the highlands of Scotland, he returns to the town of Queensferry, near the site of his original kidnapping, and recovers his rightful estate...

Editing Thackeray: a history.
September 22, 1995... When I entered the profession as "a trained scholarly editor," I thought I knew what was the proper, rational, most useful way to produce scholarly editions. Surely a high standard of accuracy and what A. E. Housman called the "application of...

Conrad in print and on disk.
September 22, 1995... An Oxford doctorate in hand, a scholar has just taken her first teaching position in a South American country, where amidst all sorts of conflicting demands she is trying to complete a book on Joseph Conrad's style. Her chief focus is the...

Editing Cather.
September 22, 1995... The challenge of editing Cather has been to take nothing for granted - a lesson three decades of discoveries about her have prepared us for well. Fiction once assumed to be transparent and artless is now recognized for its depth and complexity. A...

Notes toward editing a contemporary writer's letters.
September 22, 1995... Surely one of the outstanding accomplishments of the late twentieth century is its highly sophisticated technology. However, the advent of the fax machine and electronic mail, ostensibly miraculous and utterly convenient modes of communication,...

The auteur-author paradox: how critics of the cinema and the novel talk about flawed or even "mutilated" texts.
September 22, 1995... Critics of the novel and critics of movies behave in strangely diverse ways when confronted with mutilated or merely flawed texts. In cinema, a quintessentially collaborative medium, critics bow to the power of a single controlling vision,...

If that was then, is this now? (critical editing in the 1990s)
September 22, 1995... It is now twenty years since the last survey of editing the novel was published in this journal. In the making of texts, twenty years did not use to be a long time. Scholarly editing was a discipline famous for its slow and steady attention to...