In the last decades, the emphasis in textual scholarship has moved onto creation, production, process, collaboration; onto the material manifestations of a work; onto multiple rather than single versions; onto reception and book history. Textual scholarship now includes not only textual editing, but any form of scholarship that looks at the materiality of text, of writing, of reading, and of the book. The essays in this collection explore many questions, about methodology and theory, arising from this widening scope of textual scholarship. The range of texts discussed, from Sanskrit epic via Medieval Latin commentary through English and Scottish Ballads to the plays of Samuel Beckett and the stories of Guimarães Rosa, testifies to the vigour of the discipline. The range of texts is matched by a range of approach: from theoretical discussion of how text 'happens', to analysis of issues of book design and censorship, the connections between literary and textual studies, exploration of the links between reception and commodification in George Eliot, and between information theory and paratext. Through this diversity of subject and approach, a common theme emerges: the need to look further for common ground from which to continue the debate from a comparative perspective.

An introduction to studying and editing texts in all forms, from manuscript to digital.

This volume presents the state of the art in digital scholarly editing. Drawing together the work of established and emerging researchers, it gives pause at a crucial moment in the history of technology in order to offer a sustained reflection on the practices involved in producing, editing and reading digital scholarly editions—and the theories that underpin them. The unrelenting progress of computer technology has changed the nature of textual scholarship at the most fundamental level: the way editors and scholars work, the tools they use to do such work and the research questions they attempt to answer have all been affected. Each of the essays in Digital Scholarly Editing approaches these changes with a different methodological consideration in mind. Together, they make a compelling case for re-evaluating the foundation of the discipline—one that tests its assertions against manuscripts and printed works from across literary history, and the globe. The sheer breadth of Digital Scholarly Editing, along with its successful integration of theory and practice, help redefine a rapidly-changing field, as its firm grounding and future-looking ambit ensure the work will be an indispensable starting point for further scholarship. This collection is essential reading for editors, scholars, students and readers who are invested in the future of textual scholarship and the digital humanities.

This volume is the 10th issue of Variants. In keeping with the mission of the European Society for Textual Scholarship, the articles are richly interdisciplinary and transnational. They bring to bear a wide range of topics and disciplines on the field of textual scholarship: historical linguistics, digital scholarly editing, classical philology, Dutch, English, Finnish and Swedish Literature, publishing traditions in Japan, book history, cultural history and folklore. The questions that are explored — what texts are worth editing? what is the nature of the relationship between text, work, document and book? what is a critical digital edition? — all return to fundamental issues that have been at the heart of the editorial discipline for decades. With refreshing insight they assess the increasingly hybrid nature of the theoretical considerations and practical methodologies employed by textual scholars, while reasserting the relevance and need for producing scholarly editions, whether in print or digital, and continuing advanced research in bibliographical codes, textual transmissions, genetic dossiers, the fluidity of texts and other such Subjects that connect textual scholarship with broader investigations into our nations’ literary culture and written heritage.

Kabbalistic Manuscripts and Textual Theory uncovers the unstated assumptions and expectations of scribes and scholars who fashioned editions from manuscripts of Jewish mystical literature. This study offers a theory of kabbalistic textuality in which the material book the printed page no less than handwritten manuscripts serves as the site for textual dialogue between Jewish mystics of different periods and locations. The refashioning of the text through the process of reading and commenting that takes place on the page in the margins and between the lines blurs the boundaries between the traditionally defined roles of author, reader, commentator and editor. This study shows that kabbalists and academic editors reinvented the text in their own image, as part of a fluid textual process that was nothing short of transformative. This book is certainly monumental, offering in its seven hundred pages a wealth of documentation and distilled argument that manages to be both comprehensive in its materials and transparent in its critical insights. It is rare indeed that a work of such formidable scholarship can actually be a pleasure to read and convincing in its elucidation of what are often extremely complex documentary circumstances and editorial traditions. From the foreword by David Greetham

The book is going through its biggest revolution since Gutenberg. Thanks to computer tools and electronic publication, the concept and realisation of critical editions are being rethought. David C. Parker looks at how new methodology changes what an edition is for and how we use it, using the example of the New Testament texts.

In Bitstreams, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum distills twenty years of thinking about the intersection of digital media, textual studies, and literary archives to argue that bits—the ubiquitous ones and zeros of computing— always depend on the material world that surrounds them to form the bulwark for preserving the future of literary heritage.

This collection of essays from world-renowned scholar Hans Walter Gabler contains writings from a decade and a half of retirement spent exploring textual criticism, genetic criticism, and literary criticism. In these sixteen stimulating contributions, he develops theories of textual criticism and editing that are inflected by our advance into the digital era; structurally analyses arts of composition in literature and music; and traces the cultural implications discernible in book design, and in the canonisation of works of literature and their authors. Distinctive and ambitious, these essays move beyond the concerns of the community of critics and scholars. Gabler responds innovatively to the issues involved and often endeavours to re-think their urgencies by bringing together the orthodox tenets of different schools of textual criticism. He moves between a variety of topics, ranging from fresh genetic approaches to the work of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, to significant contributions to the theorisation of scholarly editing in the digital age. Written in Gabler’s fluent style, these rich and elegant compositions are essential reading for literary and textual critics, scholarly editors, readers of James Joyce, New Modernism specialists, and all those interested in textual scholarship and digital editing under the umbrella of Digital Humanities.

This unique work takes a method of textual analysis commonly used in studies of ancient Western and Eastern manuscripts and applies it to twenty-one early Qur'an manuscripts. Keith Small analyzes a defined portion of text from the Qur'an with two aims in view: to recover the earliest form of text for this portion, and to trace the historical development of this portion to the current form of the text of the Qur'an. Small concludes that though a significantly early edited form of the consonantal text of the Qur'an can be recovered, its original forms of text cannot be obtained. He also documents the further editing that was required to record the Arabic text of the Qur'an in a complete phonetic script, as well as providing an explanation for much of the development of various recitation systems of the Qur'an. This controversial, thought-provoking book provides a rigorous examination into the history of the Qur'an and will be of great interest to Quranic Studies scholars.

What happens when, in the wake of postmodernism, the old enterprise of bibliography, textual criticism, or scholarly editing crosses paths and processes with visual and cultural studies? In Reimagining Textuality, major scholars map out in this volume a new discipline, drawing on and redirecting a host of subfields concerned with the production, distribution, reproduction, consumption, reception, archiving, editing, and sociology of texts.