Melville Incomplete

Abstract

Abstract The final volume of Melville’s unfinished writings by the Northwestern-Newberry edition is a monumental achievement. Monumental but also vexed, and vexing. Melville’s unfinished poetry and especially his unfinished novella Billy Budd challenge traditional editorial theories of eclectic editing that have guided the NN editions for decades. The final volume remains beholden to a theory of critical editing that is less suited to the purpose of editing unfinished manuscripts than of works that exist solely in print versions. This dilemma makes the volume a fascinating instance of the choices editors must make in the era of digital editions. The edition, while mainly improving upon previous editions of Billy Budd and making available reliable texts of unpublished poems, also takes some perplexing liberties with Melville’s unfinished manuscripts. Aloof to new and enormously useful electronic resources, the edition’s diplomatic transcriptions also represent a huge amount of duplicated effort, and a lost opportunity for collaboration with existing digital projects. This edition is a valuable resource, but the debatable emendations of unfinished manuscripts, coupled with the dismissal of the currently available digital resources for manuscript study, shows that the reading texts should be consulted with some skepticism and with recourse to the surviving manuscripts.