The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship

As more and more of our cultural heritage migrates into digital form and as increasing amounts of literature and art are created within digital environments, it becomes more important than ever before for us to understand how the medium affects the text. The expert contributors to this volume provide a clear, engrossing and accessible insight into how the texts we read and study are created, shaped and transmitted to us. They outline the theory behind studying texts in many different forms and offer case studies demonstrating key methodologies underlying the vital processes of editing and presenting texts. Through their multiple perspectives they demonstrate the centrality of textual scholarship to current literary studies of all kinds and express the sheer intellectual excitement of a crucial scholarly discipline entering a new phase of its existence.

Introduction: textual scholarship in the age of media consciousness Neil Fraistat and Julia Flanders; 1. A history of textual scholarship David Greetham; 2. Anglo-American editorial theory Kathryn Sutherland; 3. Continental editorial theory Geert Lernout; 4. Late twentieth-century Shakespeares Hans Walter Gabler; 5. Apparatus, text, interface: how to read a printed critical edition Paul Eggert; 6. The politics of textual scholarship Michelle R. Warren; 7. Fearful asymmetry Random Cloud; 8. What is a book? Roger Chartier and Peter Stallybrass; 9. Orality John D. Niles; 10. Manuscript textuality Michael Sargent; 11. Picture criticism: textual studies and the image Kari Kraus; 12. Track changes: textual scholarship and the challenge of the born digital Matthew G. Kirschenbaum and Doug Reside; Coda: why digital textual scholarship matters Jerome J. McGann; Further reading; Index.

Neil Fraistat is Professor of English and Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland.
Julia Flanders is Director of the Women Writers Project in the Center for Digital Scholarship at Brown University Library.