The Book as Artefact: Text and Border (Variants 4)

The Book as Artefact. Books do not just contain texts: books themselves are cultural artefacts, which convey many meanings in their own right, meanings which interact with the texts they contain. Awareness of the many significances of books as cultural and textual objects reshapes the traditional disciplines of textual theory, analytic bibliography, codicology and palaeography, while the advent of electronic books, and digital methods for representing print books, is introducing a new dimension to our understanding. Seven essays in this volume, ranging over medieval Portuguese and Swedish manuscripts, eighteenth-century Icelandic editions, Australian playtexts, Thackeray and Anita Brookner, and Stefan George, consider these questions from the broad perspective of textual scholarship. Text and Border. Texts may exist on the borderland of word and not-word; or they may spring from borderlands of nation or culture; or they may be considered from the margins of neighbouring disciplines. So readers must set the texts within contexts, to see the play of text against border. Essays in this volume explore different texts againts varying backgrounds — Pound’s Cantos, Joyce’s Ulysses, Trollope’s An Eye for an Eye, Woolf’s The Waves — while essays by McGann and Lernout argue the dimensionality of text on the intersection of print and digital media. Implicit in all these essays is the contention, that textual scholarship must influence literary interpretation. Two final essays focus directly on this, in the cases of Melville’s Moby-Dick and Emily Dickinson’s late fragments. An extensive reviews section completes this volume. Contents: The Book as Artefact Edited by Anne Mette Hansen Paul EGGERT: Version — Agency — Intention: The Cross-fertilising of German and Anglo-American Editorial Traditions Peter L. SHILLINGSBURG: Practical Editions of Literary Texts Ragnheithur MOSESDOTTIR: “Good white paper, with a new, clear and elegant typeface”: Early Arnamagnaean Editions Eva Nilsson NYLANDER: To the Glory of Mary: Liber Scole Virginis at Lund University Library Joao DIONISIO: Tables of Contents in Portuguese Late Medieval Manuscripts Rüdiger NUTT-KOFOTH: The Book in the Poetological Concept of Stefan George: Some Remarks on the Physical and Iconic Side of the Published Text — with an Editorial Conclusion Dirk VAN HULLE: The Limited Edition Unlimited: Samuel Beckett’s Fugal Artefact Text and Border: The Borders of the Text Edited by Roger Lüdeke, Wolfgang Streit and Cristina Urchueguía George BORNSTEIN: The Book as Artefact: Historicizing Ezra Pound’s First Thirty Cantos Julia BRIGGS: Writing by Numbers: An Aspect of Woolf ’s Revisionary Practice Michael GRODEN: Proceeding Energetically From the Unknown to the Known: Looking Again at the Genetic Texts and Documents for Joyce’s Ulysses Geert LERNOUT: The Dimension of the Text John MCCOURT: Writing on the Edge: Trollope’s An Eye for An Eye Jerome MCGANN: From Text to Work: Digital Tools and the Emergence of the Social Text Fritz SENN: The Potency of Error (exemplified in Joyce’s Ulysses) The Interpretive Consequences of Textual Criticism Edited by Peter Shillingsburg John BRYANT: Versions of Moby-Dick: Plagiarism, Censorship, and Some Notes toward an Ethics of the Fluid Text Marta L. WERNER: Emily Dickinson’s Futures: “Unqualified — to Scan” Reviews and Book Notices Notes on Contributors