Textual Editing and Criticism: An Introduction - Hardcover

This book introduces undergraduate and beginning graduate students to the field and provides them with a broad range of examples and materials for hands-on practice. Textual Editing and Criticism: An Introduction is concerned with both the history of the text and the aesthetic and political choices made in textual transmission. It is intended for courses concerned with questions of literary interpretation and value.

Praise for Textual Editing and Criticism: An IntroductionI welcome with particular enthusiasm the publication of Erick Kelemen’s Textual Editing and Criticism. Textual criticism is a much needed discipline for undergraduate and graduate students, unduly neglected in our current curricular offerings. It imparts to students the essential awareness that texts are not pristine, ahistorical objects; that they suffer alteration through use, decay or editorial tampering; that they bear the imprint of their creation, production, duplication and reception in different cultures and by various audiences, and that the varying forms of texts cannot be separated from the meanings they convey. Kelemen’s book promises to promote this awareness by offering a lucid and accessible introduction to main concepts in textual criticism, the technologies of textual production that have affected the transmission and alteration of texts, the variety of editorial practices and major theoretical debates in the field. I whole-heatedly concur with the perspective of the author that textual criticism is a skill that can be taught and learned and not the privilege of a few scholars with an innate ‘sensitivity to the text’. This volume will go a long way in helping students acquire this sensitivity and appreciate the practice of textual criticism. --Raimonda Modiano, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Director of Textual Studies, University of WashingtonThis is truly a most timely book, perhaps an example of the old adage of what’s old being made new again. For Kelemen, after Jerome McGann, is absolutely correct in predicting that, in the digital age, we are at the dawn of a vast project of creating new editions of every text that matters. Sadly, as they both note, today’s graduate programs, for the most part, have abandoned the training of a new generation of editors that we will all badly need. Kelemen’s book promises to be a very teachable text, introducing advanced undergraduates and graduate students to what has become a lost art. Textual Editing and Criticism has therefore the potential of making an invaluable contribution to the way humanities departments, particularly English departments, train their students. --Stephen Watt, Professor of English, Indiana University, BloomingtonErick Kelemen’s book shows, through hands-on practice and study, the critical importance of textual and editorial practices. No longer the objective methods of rarefied specialists, Textual Editing and Criticism brings these activities into the classroom as ethical imperatives. It integrates cogently for students of all levels the practices of textual and interpretive thinking. The documentary materials included in the book, particularly the alphabets showing different medieval scribal hands, will be central to my teaching for both graduates and undergraduates alike. --Elizabeth Scala, Associate Professor, Director, English Honors Program and Oxford Summer Program, Editor, Exemplaria, University of Texas at AustinErick Kelemen's Textual Editing and Criticism is timely, important, smart, and engaging. Those of us who teach textual studies have long needed an introductory textbook like this one. Obviously written by an experienced and gifted teacher, Kelemen's volume offers a lucid and wide-ranging presentation of editorial theory and practice that is suitable for undergraduates as well as beginning graduate students, for whom textual editing and criticism is often unfamiliar territory. In addition to Kelemen's valuable survey of the field, Textual Editing and Criticism offers a treasure-trove of supplementary materials: a selection of theoretical statements by leading scholars and a set of example texts and editions that will be especially useful in the classroom. The combination of these crucial materials with Kelemen's overview of the field's history, methods, and theoretical debates will make this textbook indispensable for students and faculty. --Maura Ives, Associate Professor of English, Texas A&M University