Theories of the Text

Theories of the Text is the first comprehensive account of the changing practice of bibliography, textual criticism, and scholarly editing in the light of the diverse currents of contemporary critical theory.

D.C. Greetham's ground-breaking book examines the conventions of textual study from the perspectives of formalism, modernism and post-modernism, intentionality, phenomenology, reception theory, structuralism and post-structuralism, gender studies, and cultural criticism. It offers both a much-needed introduction to the history of scholarly debate over text and a timely account of the current hotly contested debates over such issues as authorial intention, textual organicism, the socialization of the text, and intertextuality. While analysing the positivist, technical claims of earlier paradigms for textual study, the book is driven by the conviction that the `critical' component of the term `textual criticism' is a serious one, and that all textual editions and bibliographical work (even the most apparently objective and empirical) is a hermeneutic activity taking place within certain (usually unacknowledged) social and cultural conceptual constraints. It thus situates textual work within the broad territory of contemporary theory, and presents and series of reading of the most significant editions and the writings of textual critics, placing textual speculation and practice firmly within the ambit of the current critical wars.

A major intervention in the debate over textual criticism, Theories of the Text will be invaluable reading both for textual scholars and editors requiring an account of the theoretical alternatives that migh guide their practical decisions and for literary theorists unfamiliar with the implications of present textual debate for such common critical concepts as `text', `work', `author', `reader', `interpretation', `culture', and `gender'.