Editing and the Discipline of English

Abstract

HtfUVl'EWmpICLT, 'Editingandthe‘ DiscipCineof'Engdsh ROBERT MILES University of Stirling Mary Wollstonecraft. The Vindications: The Rights of Men, The Rights of Woman. Ed. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1997. 488. $12.95 paper. Malcolm Lowry. Satan in a Barrel and other early stories. Ed. Sherrill Grace. Edmonton: Juvenilia Press, 1999. 53. Victor A. Neufeldt, ed. The Works of Patrick Branwell Bronte. Vol. 2: 1834-1836. New York: Garland, 1999. 697. Beatrice Culleton Mosionier. In Search of April Raintree. Ed. Cheryl Suzack. Winnipeg: Portage & Main Press, 1999. 343. $14.95 paper. I AM AWARE THAT EVERY WORD of my title is contentious, including “and” and “the.” At one time my title might have seemed merely strange — to refer to what we do as a discipline has not always been a common reflex — but there would have been a general concurrence that what we did involved a sta­ ble body of writing, and that editing it was an activity crucial to its health. Thus, throughout the last century, we had the cumulatively heroic enterprise of the standard canonical works being issued by prestigious university presses, each with a mas­ sive scholarly apparatus devoted to the task of establishing a definitive text. Such monuments to scholarship do not look like quaint anachronisms — yet, but the ground under them has cer­ tainly changed. For a start, in our post-colonial, postmodern age, “English” is an undoubtedly peculiar description of the ESC 27 (2001): 241-50 ESC 27, 2001 field. “World literature” might have to be resisted as an unwise concession to globalisation, but some other designation seems necessary to indicate the multicultural range of writing studied in our departments. If a discipline is, as Stanley Fish suggests, what it is we do, when we do what it is we do, then, clearly, we are no longer all doing the same thing, and this includes what it is we do when we do editing. The appearance of new writing; the changing canon; the emergence of “print culture” as a new literary historical critical paradigm— these, together with the differing contexts in which we analyse writing, have all had their impact on editing. The four texts sent to me, and reviewed here, were intended as a more or less random snap­ shot of the current state of editing, and therefore the discipline. Their diversity precludes a specialist discussion of each (I have expertise in only one of the four fields); but the very fact that they are diverse and unfamiliar makes for a stimulating point of departure for considering what is, after all, still a core activity of “English.” O f the four books, the Branwell Bronte volume is the most traditional. Garland has, of course, been long involved in what has become an essential aspect of the print culture project, the recuperation of obscure or marginal books. The Bronte vol­ ume, however, only superficially falls into this category, for the texts collected in it were never, properly speaking, books in the print culture sense. They were, rather, manuscript works that only found their way into print via the interest in the Bronte sisters, either through early works of Brontéphilia, or through modern scholarly editions, such as this one. As such, they have no place in the larger enterprise of understanding the material realities of the trade in novels and poems during the early Victorian period. In presenting his material, Victor Neufeldt tells us that “None of the previous published prose texts retain Branwell’s original spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, and paragraphing” (xiii). Neufeldt has taken great pains to present an authentic text, solecisms and all. It is, I think, instructive to ask: W hy? Neufeldt appears to be work­ ing in a tradition where the answer is taken for granted. An articulation of that answer might go like this: Because it is only through an accurate transcription of a manuscript that we can precisely grasp what Schopenhauer refers to as the “silhouette 242 REVIEW ARTICLE of the writer’s mind,” his/her “style.” An authentic text helps us see that silhouette with the starkest possible definition. At­ tacks on “intention” have helped erode the foundations of this answer and altered attitudes...