Variants – Serie

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.

Textual scholarship has always been closely linked to questions of canonicity, both in terms of what texts are edited and how they are edited. As attitudes towards the canon have altered over the last decade, textual scholarship too has changed, both in practice and theory. The essays in this collection examine the connections between textual scholarship and the canon, and the implications for textual scholarship of changing attitudes to the canon within the wider academic environment. As is now characteristic of Variants, essays range widely over time and space in their focus, reflecting the breadth of the Society’s membership and interests. Two essays focus on different aspects of the distinctive Lithuanian experience of the canon. Other essays trace the influence of the concept in Sweden, the problematic nature of the canon when dealing with unstable medieval texts, the debate within the German scholarly community about modes of editing, developments in the canon outside the academic world in the last decades, and an account of the problems of editing a very non-canonical text. Three essays not linked to the theme of the volume close the collection: an account of the galley proofs of Pynchon’s V., a survey of developments in book design for scholarly editions through print and beyond, and an account of the reception of Ossian, which fuses book history, textual scholarship and intellectual history.

Until recently, writings of a private nature have been neglected in literary and textual studies. There are two main reasons for this: the scarcity of pre-modern witnesses of this type of textual production and, in contrast, the over-abundance of material in contemporary writers’ archives. Although in more recent times there has been a marked shift towards the study of private and personal writings, important issues remain to be studied. In the light of genetic criticism and in the context of the broadening attention of textual scholarship to all matters relating to textual production, these texts have acquired a new status, but the legal, philological and historical questions they raise have not been systematically addressed.The new interest of textual scholarship in the processes of creation and dissemination of texts offers an opportunity to reflect more thoroughly on the nature of these documents: on the role they play as witnesses to specific literary or para-literary genres (e.g. letters, diaries), on their significance in circumstances of political repression, and as part of the textual genetic process. This collection of essays includes articles that deal, through heterogeneous approaches, with different aspects of Dutch, English, French, Lithuanian, Portuguese and Spanish written cultures.

Contacts between languages, especially translations, have always played a crucial role in the making of European culture, from Antiquity until today. Bilingual or multilingual documents, literary works created in another language than their creators’ mother tongue, translations and translated texts are special textual objects, which require appropriate editorial treatment. This volume explores how textual scholarship responds to multilingualism in its various forms; how important multilingualism can be in creative processes; how textual scholarship can make multilingual texts available and accessible; and how it can contribute to their interpretation.

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.