‘To Fame Unknown’: Familiar Verse Epistles of the Spring-Yelverton Coterie

Forum Introduction:The New Eighteenth-Century Ireland Rebecca Anne Barr (bio) In the decade following Ian McBride's Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves (2009), the study of what was once "Ascendancy" Ireland has been diversified, expanded, and revitalized. McBride's ambitious work was in many ways the product of two decades of historical revisionism, acting to concretize objections to the ideological restrictions of the New History of Ireland school.1 His work has helped dislodge orthodox and restrictive narratives about Ireland in the 1700s, replacing the image of Protestant hegemony with a vivid sense of the flux, tension, and incipient instability of this island of co-existing and competing cultures, creeds, and languages. As history "from the outside in" McBride's work evaded the ideological pitfalls of Irish Studies as a relatively immature field and one that had somewhat uncritically adopted the ideology of postcolonialism in the service of nationalist politics.2 As Sarah McKibben has noted, eighteenth-century Irish literature displays the pains and the profits of a "mutual transformation of socio-cultural forms," even as that transformation was marked by violence, subjugation, and resistance.3 Due to such historical complexity and complicities, eighteenth-century scholarship has been somewhat marginalized by the state apparatuses (both North and South). Both jurisdictions are currently marking their twentieth-century foundations in the so-called decade of centenaries, providing a funding bonanza for historians and academics. By contrast, both the 1798 rebellion and the rich [End Page 331] Georgian built heritage in Ireland is comparatively neglected, partly due to the ideological dissonance of Protestant republicanism and persistent ambivalence about the national status of the so-called Anglo-Irish (a term coined in the 1920s to distinguish between the supposedly "genuine" Catholic, Irish-speaking Irish, and the Protestant, sometimes-Unionist gentry).4 Academic research thrives, then, against a backdrop of relative disregard.5 Yet, in the context of Brexit's dramatic reshaping of political and intellectual boundaries, eighteenth-century Ireland offers a provocative case study for reassessing the interconnections of nations, literature, and political history. The constitutional flux of the period offers salutary analogues for our own time. As governments increasingly insist on the imperviousness of their borders and value the homogeneity of their citizenry, it behoves academics to recall the contested origins of permeable states. These conceptual and political borders are still shifting, still uneasy. This forum on the new eighteenth-century Ireland at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 2018 sought to examine how recent work on eighteenth-century Ireland reshapes our understanding of the period and place and to reflect upon how new research offers to transform our sense of the cultural and political landscape of the time. Over the past decade, scholarship has re-examined Ireland's canon. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift is a signal example, bringing together bibliographers, intellectual historians, and literary critics to illuminate a multifaceted Irish author attuned to both English and Irish readerships and whose Dublin editions attest to a sophisticated audience with a taste for controversy, typographic inventiveness, and wit. Such revisionary projects are not confined to the behemoths of Irish literature but extend to once-unfashionable figures such as Oliver Goldsmith. Beyond the familiar figures, however, Irish literature of the period is too often overlooked by scholars outside the island as a kind of special interest category with little perceived relevance to those interested in broader trends in eighteenth-century studies. Indeed, despite English Short Title Catalogue listings, Dublin editions are frequently overlooked by scholars, presuming them to be mere reprints, though many make substantive editorial alterations and revisions. Work is underway to change this situation. Series such as Early Irish Fiction, c. 1680–1820 and The Literature of Early Modern Ireland have made rich and innovative Irish works available to readers in outstanding critical editions. Ian Campbell Ross's edition of History of Jack Connor (1752), by Irish-Huguenot author William Chaigneau, for instance, presents this novel in a revised and accessible form.6 Jack Connor's generic playfulness, self-conscious handling of picaresque, and thoroughly engaging narrative make it an ideal text for undergraduate studies of prose fiction in [End Page 332] English, not...

Reviewed by: Autos sacramentales completos de Lope de Vega by Lope de Vega Hilaire Kallendorf Lope de Vega. Autos sacramentales completos de Lope de Vega. Edición crítica de J. Enrique Duarte (vol. 1) y Juan Manuel Escudero Baztán (vol. 2). edition reichenberger, 2017, 2 vols. 282 pp. (vol. 1) y 231 pp. (vol. 2). these are the initial two volumes of a planned six-volume series of critical editions of Lope de Vega's autos sacramentales, or sacramental plays; the other four volumes have already been assigned to specific editors. Perhaps reflective of the amount of work involved in preparing a critical edition, the other four volumes will each contain two plays apiece, as do these volumes; but most of the future plays will be edited by two different scholars. In the case of these first two installments, a single scholar prepared both critical editions within each separate book. Volume 1, edited by J. Enrique Duarte, contains Las bodas entre el Alma y el Amor divino along with El hijo pródigo; volume 2, edited by Juan Manuel Escudero Baztán, contains La Maya and El viaje del alma. Escudero Baztán is also the coordinator for the series, whose chief editor is Ignacio Arellano. These projects have been developed under the auspices of GRISO (Grupo de Investigación Siglo de Oro), based at the University of navarra in Pamplona and funded by a grant from Spain's Ministerio de Economía, Industria y competividad. A presentation note at the outset of the first volume indicates that this is only the first phase of a project that may later double in size to include editions of all twenty-four of Lope de Vega's autos sacramentales that do not pose problems of dubious authorship. This number in itself is astoundingly small, given that at various points through the centuries since [End Page 201] the death of this author, scholars have estimated that Lope de Vega might possibly have written as many as one hundred, two hundred, or even six hundred autos sacramentales (the true number of comedias attributable to him is likewise debated). In modern times, this number has been reduced to a corpus of some forty-four sacramental plays, with only about half of those attributable to Lope with any stable degree of certainty. Presumably, the same research team will solicit another, similar grant from the spanish government to finance the preparation of the next dozen editions. It should be noted that this is the same scholarly network responsible for producing scholarly editions of the complete autos sacramentales of Pedro calderón de la Barca, one of Lope's seventeenth-century literary successors and by far the most famous cultivator of this dramatic genre. The reasons to review these two books together are multiple. Not only were they published in the same year, together forming the first fruits of a multiyear collaborative endeavor, but these four autos sacramentales also appeared together when they were first published in the seventeenth century, namely, as intercalated dramatic pieces appearing at the end of each of the first four books within Lope de Vega's Byzantine novel El peregrino en su patria (Seville, 1604). Given that they were originally incorporated into a larger work, the decision to publish them separately might seem debatable, especially in light of what historians of the book as artifact have taught us about the inseparability of a book's form from its content. However—especially since at least one of the plays, namely, Las bodas entre el Alma y el Amor divino, boasts a documented performance history apart from the novel—the option of lifting them out of their original context to place them alongside Lope de Vega's other, similar autos is at least justifiable. At least two complete editions of this novel have been released by reputable academic university or commercial presses within the past two years: in April of 2016 Cátedra published a version with notes in Spanish edited by Julián González Barrera, while in 2017 there appeared in the north carolina studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures series a new six hundred-page critical annotated edition and...

In 2005, the Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen began digitizing its collection of medieval manuscripts. The creation of such virtual libraries available via the Internet is gaining in popularity with libraries, a trend that will radically ease the logistical constraints of studying medieval texts in their original context. While critical editions will continue to be an important tool for certain types of research, virtual libraries enable a wider community of scholars to engage with texts that are not amenable to critical editions or to ask questions that critical editions obscure. This article reviews the range of research that has centered around the study of manuscripts held at St. Gall, including school books, liturgical books, and patristic authors, and outlines the kinds of questions and insights that manuscript studies can provide for medieval history.

Hermeneutical confrontations. The scientific edition of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte The reissue by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Munich/Berlin) of Mein Kampf caused a short but heated international debate. This new confrontation with Adolf Hitler’s text was a hermeneutical challenge for the publishers, a work in which so many historical layers of meaning, such as the original context or the hagiographical position between 1933 and 1945, were present. A conventional and neutral historical edition was an impossible goal. The scientific edition had to navigate between source criticism, textual criticism, and ideological criticism. The choice was made for a normative hermeneutic in which Hitler’s arguments were contradicted as much as possible, but combined with a profound source and text criticism. This ‘critical edition’ is a great achievement of contemporary historical science in Germany. It can also be seen as the conclusion of a long cycle of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Germany.

Reviewed by: The Craft of a Chinese Commentator: Wang Bi on the Laozi, and: A Chinese Reading of the Daodejing: Wang Bi’s Commentary on the Laozi with Critical Text and Translation, and: Language, Ontology, and Political Philosophy in China: Wang Bi’s Scholarly Exploration of the Dark (Xuanxue) Jay Goulding (bio) Rudolf G. Wagner. The Craft of a Chinese Commentator: Wang Bi on the Laozi. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. ix, 361 pp. Hardcover $66.50, ISBN 0–7914–4395–7. Paperback $27.50, ISBN 0–7914–4396–5. Rudolf G. Wagner. A Chinese Reading of the Daodejing: Wang Bi’s Commentary on the Laozi with Critical Text and Translation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. viii, 531 pp. Hardcover $98.50, ISBN 0–7914–5181–X. Paperback $34.95, ISBN 0–7914–5182–8. Rudolf G. Wagner. Language, Ontology, and Political Philosophy in China: Wang Bi’s Scholarly Exploration of the Dark (Xuanxue). Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. viii, 261 pp. Hardcover $81.50, ISBN 0–7914–5331–6. Paperback $29.95, ISBN 0–9714–5332–4. Over a twenty-three-year span—the same duration as Wang Bi’s life (226–249 c.e.)—Rudolf G. Wagner composed three separate but intimately linked volumes: The Craft of a Chinese Commentator: Wang Bi on the Laozi (hereafter vol. 1); A Chinese Reading of the Daodejing: Wang Bi’s Commentary on the Laozi with Critical Text and Translation (hereafter vol. 2); and Language, Ontology, and Political Philosophy in China: Wang Bi’s Scholarly Exploration of the Dark (Xuanxue) (hereafter vol. 3). Taken together, these three volumes represent one of the most provocative and intriguing explorations of the Laozi commentaries to date. These volumes are not for the faint of heart but rather are designed for specialists and scholars of Chinese philosophy who are willing to engage in close textual analysis. What is most outstanding and unique is Wagner’s use of hermeneutics in his analysis and reconstruction of texts and commentaries. In this regard, he was influenced by Rudolf Bultmann’s philological and interpretative work on religious texts as well as Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics. For several years, Wagner studied with Gadamer at the University of Heidelberg. Wagner sets out to rectify a European Reformation and Renaissance prejudice that led to the privileging of the Ur-text (the original manuscript and the author’s original views) over and above exegetical commentaries that were often dismissed as self-serving and subjectivist (vol. 1, p. 2). Yet Wagner reminds the reader that since the second century c.e., classical Chinese texts were read through commentaries. While some texts were upheld as those of Sages, others were revered because “. . . the interpretation of their coded messages became the privileged access to truth” (vol. 1, p. 3). As a public act, reading was responsible to a community of exegetical inquirers. With the destruction of manuscripts under the Qin , there were no more “original” texts, hence the reliance on state-directed [End Page 61] commentaries. With the collapse of the Han , the new Zhengshi (240–249 c.e.) era emerged as an “interstice” whereby scholars could explore philosophical nuances of texts. Wang Bi was the brightest light of this time period. In an immaculately detailed chapter on Wang Bi’s biography, Wagner begins with a story about Martin Heidegger’s response to students’ queries concerning Aristotle’s life. In response, Heidegger began the following lecture with “Aristotle was born, worked, and died” (quoted in vol. 1, p. 9). Heidegger then carried on with an analysis of Aristotle’s ideas. Wagner points out that this seemingly flippant action held some merit: “Heidegger’s attitude talks back to a fashion of reducing intellectual to social history and philosophical pursuits to higher register articulations of particular economic, political, or personal interests” (vol. 1, p. 9). Heidegger’s insistence that in a philosopher only the philosophy counts is an important point. A philosopher’s thought should not be reduced to a particular school or to certain political or economic conditions of history. Thence, Wagner explains succinctly that Wang Bi “was born, worked, and died very young” (vol...

This chapter considers the spread of print in eighteenth-century Ireland and its possible consequences. Increased annual output can be quantified, together with the spread of printing from Dublin into the Irish provinces, and a greater diversity of genres such as novels, essays, newspapers, reviews and journals. The steady and largely predictable growth can be connected with the increases in modest prosperity and literacy, especially in Dublin and larger towns. Consequences may include a growing politicisation, linking with the emergence of something that can be called a ‘public sphere’, and the increased militancy of radicals and conservatives especially from the 1770s onwards. Also, the growing availability of print in Ireland deepened the integration of Ireland into the British cultural, linguistic and (arguably) political orbits. At the same time, Ireland responded to fashions — intellectual and cultural — originating in continental Europe, many of which were spread through books.

Freud and His Manuscripts: A Critical Edition of Beyond the Pleasure Principle G.W. Pigman III (bio) “Jenseits des Lustprinzips”: Neu-Edition, Erstabdruck der Urfassung (1919) und Kommentar. Sigmund Freud. Edited by Ulrike May and Michael Schröter. In Luzifer-Amor: Zeitschrift zur Geschichte der Psychoanalyse 51 (2013), 7–169. This edition of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is the first edition of any work by Freud to include complete variants. Ulrike May and Michael Schröter reproduce the text in the Gesammelte Schriften (1925), the last print supervised by Freud, and report variants from the first (1920), second (1921), and third (1923) editions, as well as from the pre-publication versions. In addition, they provide a diplomatic transcription of the first of these versions. To these scrupulously edited texts May has added a long, valuable essay on the genesis of Beyond the Pleasure Principle and proposes a new interpretation of this controversial work. Taken together, the edition and commentary represent a milestone in the study of Freud’s methods of composition—a worthy successor to the pathbreaking book by Ilse Grubrich-Simitis (1993), in which she announced her discovery of the pre-publication versions in the Sigmund Freud Archives of the Library of Congress and discussed some of their essential features (pp. 234–244). The first of these versions of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, probably written between the middle of March and the middle of April 1919, is an autograph fair copy with corrections. The second, composed between July 1919 and July 1920, is a type-script of the first with extensive additions and corrections in Freud’s hand. The second version is forty percent longer than the first; it adds what is now chapter six (almost a third of the whole book) and several other important passages. In their edition, May and Schröter indicate when passages entered the [End Page 85] manuscript in a way that avoids cluttering the critical apparatus with ‘not in such and such’ notes. They have facilitated the identification of the layers of composition by printing in gray the copy-text’s departures from the original manuscript; a siglum indicates the first appearance of the variant. Two other shades of gray indicate changes within changes. Although this method may sound complicated, in reality it takes very little time to get used to. The editors have fulfilled the two divergent goals they set themselves: provide an accurate designation of the layers of the text, while at the same time allowing for smooth and continuous readability. The transcription and reporting of variants appear to be extremely accurate. My only disappointment was that the editors did not state when Freud used a different ink or pencil in his additions and corrections to the typescript. Grubrich-Simitis inferred from the different inks that Freud reworked the end of the final chapter on different occasions (1993, pp. 243–244). May and Schröter describe their work as a “critical edition,” yet they have stopped one step short: they do not make substantive changes to their copy-text. Even when it is clear that a reading in the original manuscript is superior, they content themselves only with noting that there was probably an error in transcription or in typesetting. To take perhaps the most obvious example: in the book’s sixth chapter, even though Freud quoted extensively without using quotation marks (pp. 160–163), it is hard to believe that he would have intentionally removed the manuscript’s quotation marks from his citation of Weismann (p. 46). When a note indicates, as is often the case, that a later variant was probably a mistake, one can assume that the editors would have placed the reading from the manuscript in the text if they had not regarded that procedure as inappropriate in a critical edition. Several times, however, the notes simply question, for example, “slip of the pen?” As suggested by the etymology of the word critical, editors of a critical edition must exercise their judgment and make the hard choices. Is the reading subsequent to the manuscript a mistake or a reading that Freud preferred? Readers are entitled to the opinion of the scholars who have devoted so much time...

MLR, 100.2, 2005 469 Peter Ainsworth's two chapters are different from the rest in that they are not genre-specific. Both are concerned with more abstract questions of historicity. The firstfocuses on the rise of the eyewitness in the later Middle Ages, both historians who claimed to have seen events themselves, and others who had researched their material by interviewing participants. This raises interesting questions about the status of oral reports. Ainsworth's second chapter explores Isidore's tags historia and fabula, intended here not as text types but as qualitative evaluations of claims to veracity, a distinction not unlike the modern one between 'history' and 'story'. Noting that even modern French does not automatically make this distinction, Ainsworth leads us through some of the issues connected to factuality and fictionality,showing that medieval writers were aware of these concepts or something akin to them, but were not as absorbed by them as the modern historian must be. This chapter has a good postscript on the use of prose and verse. With this volume, Deborah Deliyannis has compiled an extremely valuable resource for anyone seeking to find their bearings in a vast and complex field. If I have an argument with the conception, itlies in a wish that she had in her preface attempted a definition ofthe keyword in her title. If she had, the volume might have had a more theoretical flavour. 'Historiography' is extremely useful as a technical term, meaning the philosophy or theology of history, meta-historical theory?that is, the system? atic and conscious working out of 'patterns in history'. To use it loosely as a vague synonym for 'historical writing' robs us of precision. Thus, a chronicle as a work is not an example of medieval historiography; its internal structure, the self-reflection in its prologue, or the invisible assumptions which have shaped its world-view may well be. And certainly, the questions of genre which interest Deliyannis so much are historiographical questions in the most demanding sense of the word. University of Regensburg Graeme Dunphy Studiesin Bibliography, 54 (2001). Ed. by David L. VanderMeulen. Charlottesville, VA: The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia. 2003 for 2001. vi + 335pp. ISBN 0-8139-2262-3. Perhaps it is partly the effectof the familiar thick annual volume, but the 2001 issue of Studies in Bibliography effortlesslyconfirms the title's position among the world's leading English-language bibliographical journals, and as top of the tree in respect of textual and literary approaches. The bias towards textual criticism is as strong as ever, and not only in G. Thomas Tanselle's latest authoritative survey, 'Textual Criticism at the Millennium', eighty pages long, in which he dispenses detailed praise and criticism on those who contributed to the subject as the twentieth century was closing. Tanselle is also the author of the short 'Thoughts on the Authenticity of Elec? tronic Texts', which sits happily alongside Michael Hancher's much longer 'Littera scripta manet: Blackstone and Electronic Texts', an essay that discusses the future of such texts in the light of William Blackstone's eighteenth-century concerns about the durability and security of the written word. Hancher concentrates on the latter?the problem of textual integrity?with the result that the longevity of electronic texts is taken too much for granted. (The problem with paper, as he points out, is different: it is harder to tamper with, because less durable.) In terms oftraditional bibliographical scholarship?studies oftextual transmission, printing history, and editing?the core of the volume is provided by four important essays: William McCarthy's 'What Did Anna Barbauld Do to Samuel Richardson's Correspondence? A Study of her Editing' (which vindicates many of her editorial practices, showing her to have been a responsible editor, given her working circum? stances); Marcus Walsh's 'Form and Function in the English Eighteenth-Century 47? Reviews Literary Edition: The Case of Edward Capell' (an excellent and profusely illustrated account of Capell's editorial activity,especially his 1768 Shakespeare, in terms of the physical forms in which he chose to embody his editions); R. Carter Hailey's ' "This instance will not do": George Steevens and the Revision(s) of Johnson's...

Reviewed by: Djamileh: opéra-comique en un acte: op. 24 by George Bizet Ralph P. Locke George Bizet. Djamileh: opéra-comique en un acte: op. 24. Critical edition by Hugh Macdonald. Norwich, England: Fishergate Music, 2020. (Bizet’s Other Operas; v. 1) [Preface and critical report in English. Paperback. ISMN 97909002245403. £95 ($132.75).] THE SERIES Georges Bizet is a composer whom, until recently, the music-publishing industry has largely failed. One of his operas (La maison du docteur) has never been published, and the others have often circulated in editions that are seriously flawed (and, in most cases, were released solely as piano-vocal scores). In the 1960s, Carmen was treated to a supposed critical edition by Fritz Oeser that, confusingly, inserted into the main text certain passages that Bizet himself demonstrably rejected. (To its credit, Oeser’s edition helped many opera companies reinstate the work’s spoken dialogues and remove the recitatives. The latter were composed by Ernest Guiraud—after Bizet’s early death—for the benefit of international opera houses where spoken dialogue was never used, such as in Vienna or indeed at the Paris Opéra. Still, the recitatives are effective and helpful because singers know them and can often sing more convincingly than speak. As a result, the recitatives are still widely used today, in whole or part.) Similarly, The Pearl Fishers is widely published and often performed in a version whose final trio may not be by Bizet and whose most famous duet (for Nadir and Zurga) uses an inauthentic ending. This ending, which is still heard at the Met and elsewhere, brings back a tune one final time that all opera lovers rightly adore. In the process, it sacrifices the dramatically more appropriate let-us-be-friends-again cabalette with which Bizet himself (and his quite capable librettists) closed the number. The Carmen situation has been alleviated in recent years by more capable critical editions from the hands of Robert Didion (1992), Richard Lang-ham Smith (1999, with a revision in progress; full score currently available only on rental), and Michel Rot (2009; it includes, like Oeser, some rejected material). And I hear that Bärenreiter is preparing its own critical edition. The Pearl Fishers situation is stymied by the fact that the original manuscript remains in private hands and inaccessible. Still, Hugh J. Macdonald, the renowned authority on nineteenth-century French music, has made a [End Page 122] critical edition that comes much closer to what Bizet intended. The score and parts that he prepared can be rented, and have been used by numerous opera houses (though some still insist on ending the men’s duet by bringing back that gorgeous big tune). Macdonald has now undertaken to make critical editions of the six other operas by Bizet that survive in a form complete enough to be staged. Two of the operas are short enough to be included in a single volume, making five volumes in all. Macdonald wittily (ruefully? invitingly?) entitles the series “Bizet’s Other Operas.” Here we have the first of the five volumes: Macdonald’s edition of the one-act Djamileh, on a delightful text by Louis Gallet. Djamileh (the character’s name is roughly equivalent to Jamila in English spelling) was first performed, with mixed success, at the Opéra-Comique in 1872. This was nine years after The Pearl Fishers and a scarce three years before Carmen. So we are dealing here with a work by a fully mature master. (Bizet would die at thirty-six, three months after the Carmen premiere.) The subsequent volumes are to include: vol. 2: Don Procopio (on an Italian libretto), vol. 3: La jolie fille de Perth (of which there is a fine recording with June Anderson), vol. 4: La maison du docteur and Le docteur Miracle, and vol. 5: Ivan IV (which Bizet completed except for the orchestration of the final two numbers; several recordings exist, featuring such major singers as tenor Henri Legay). THE WORK The fullest and most up-to-date accounts of Djamileh and its history are to be found in Hervé Lacombe’s magisterial biography, Bizet (Paris: Fayard, 2000), and Macdonald’s recent...

Book Review| October 01 1970 Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs: A Critical Edition by Ray Lewis White Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs: A Critical Edition. Newly edited from the original manuscripts by White, Ray Lewis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969. Pp. xxxix, 579. $15.00. Charles Child Walcutt Charles Child Walcutt Queens College of the City University of New York Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1970) 69 (4): 546–547. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-69-4-546 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Charles Child Walcutt; Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs: A Critical Edition by Ray Lewis White. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 October 1970; 69 (4): 546–547. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-69-4-546 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsSouth Atlantic Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1970 by Duke University Press1970 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Introduction Donna Landry and William J. Christmas When Raymond Williams wrote of the democratizing of print culture that began in the early modern period as a "long revolution," he sounded a celebratory note. He did not, however, suggest that the transformation would be an easy one.1 Recovery work in literary history has enriched our understanding of the many writers of laboring background who achieved some success in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Many of these writers for whom the epithets "humble," "uneducated," or "labouring" appeared as essential labels—credentials as necessary for entering the literary marketplace as press cards for press conferences—were poets. Their struggles often strike modern readers as heroic, and their careers may seem miraculous. Touched by the numinous hand of celebrity, their sweaty and poorly paid day jobs now put behind them, they emerge in authorial splendor, possessed of slim volumes of verse. The emergence of these writers into historical view as laborers as well as poets, however, is accompanied by certain critical consequences. As representatives of the working class, the downtrodden and exploited, they are often scrutinized for their political awareness and critical capacities as much as for their mastery of verse forms or ingenuity of poetic innovation. Ideology critique and political-contextual reading have been the dominant forms of critical analysis brought to bear upon these poets. Yet this emphasis might be said to contradict the animating purpose of these writers, in so far as they were first and foremost poets. Whatever their political alignments, poets have traditionally engaged with intoxicated or metaphysical inspiration, if not bardic prophecy; they have committed themselves to demanding forms and to technical expertise, whether they were writing for Ottoman courtiers, city artisans, fellow drinkers at taverns and alehouses, or country gentry, and whether their chosen medium was the broadside ballad or the epic. The most common question elicited by endeavors to bring neglected writers to light has always been "But were they any good?" Pious answers have often [End Page 413] been given to this question: intrinsic historical interest, history from below, righting the historical record with regard to the actual contributions of working-class men and women, challenges to bourgeois aesthetics. Analyzing laboring-class poetry according to strictly formal criteria without some obeisance to the ideological or political stakes involved has rarely been undertaken, if at all. It remains an open question as to whether or not the aesthetic as a category of analysis can ever float entirely free of political or ideological determinants. Yet to subordinate, if not bury entirely, formal and aesthetic questions in favor of social and political ones is to be once again complicit in tying laboring-class writers so tightly to their social difference from polite culture that their achievements cannot be appreciated artistically, but only sociologically. In raising such aesthetic matters, we hope this special issue of Criticism might go some way toward rectifying previous critical imbalances between history and the literary, or politics and aesthetics, with regard to laboring-class writing. There has now been a sufficient body of textual recovery work done on British laboring-class poets for their collective literary achievement to begin to appear to public view. Laboring-class poets could be glimpsed in revisionist anthologies like Roger Lonsdale's influential Oxford pair or Andrew Carpenter's Verse in English from Eighteenth-Century Ireland, but in order to engage in a serious reading of these poets, a good archive or a penchant (and patience) for microfilm was essential.2 In just the last few years, however, a wide range of laboring-class poetry has appeared in edited editions both large and small. Noteworthy volumes include Robert Bloomfield's Selected Poems, Isabella Lickbarrow's Collected Poems, the last installment of the magisterial Clarendon edition of John Clare's complete poems, and The Works of Mary Leapor, the first critical edition of a laboring-class poet not named Clare to appear since the late nineteenth century.3 The publication of the monumental Pickering and Chatto edition of poetry by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century laboring-class writers marks a watershed in terms of public accessibility and potential knowledge.4 Here, over its six volumes and some twenty-five...

‘Provides a global approach to the world of the book and is, in every way, a monumental achievement’ – CHOICEThe Oxford Companion to the Book is a unique work of reference, covering the book, broadly conceived, throughout the world from ancient to modern times. It includes traditional subjects such as bibliography, palaeography, the history of printing, editorial theory and practice, textual criticism, book collecting, and libraries, but it also engages with newer disciplines such as the history of the book and the electronic book. It pays particular attention to how different societies shape books and how books shape societies.The work includes a substantial series of introductory essays alongside an A-Z section of over 5,000 entries, all linked by thorough cross-referencing and served by a classified index of entries.The essays provide histories of the subject ranging from writing systems, the ancient and the medieval book, through central aspects of book production, to editorial theory and textual criticism, the economics of print, and the sacred book, as well as 29 surveys of the history of the book around the world, including the Muslim world, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa (these can be found under ‘Essay’).The entries cover every aspect of this exceptionally rich and diverse subject, ranging from brief definitions and biographical entries to more extensive treatments. The text is illustrated throughout with reproductions, diagrams, and examples of various typographical features.The Companion is the only reference book of its kind in the field, and has been written by 400 of the world’s best scholars in bibliography and book history.

The relevance of the study was determined by the need to analyse how, throughout the eighteenth-twentieth centuries, approaches to recording, classifying, and interpreting the pre-Christian beliefs of the Slavs changed under the influence of political, confessional, and scientific transformations. The aim of the work was to trace the full sequence of transformations – from field recording to archival classification and public representation – and to determine which methodological and ideological factors determined the final structure of the sources. The methodology was based on a comparative analysis of handwritten corpora, censorship prescriptions, and mass publications using the concepts of the history of knowledge, critical archival studies, textual criticism, and sociolinguistic hermeneutics. It was established that in the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries, field records were created mainly by descriptive intuitive methods, and the criterion of authenticity was defined by the aesthetic and ethnopolitical expectations of collectors, which led to the systematic exclusion of syncretic and everyday forms of ritual practice. The analysis of archival classifications showed that administrative-territorial and genre rubrics separated ritual data from functional context, while standardised questionnaires, editorial reductions, and self-censorship transformed multilayered descriptions into unified statistical units. The comparison of handwritten sources with lubok publications and early cinematographic plots demonstrated that at the turn of the nineteenth-twentieth centuries, religious motifs of demonology and agrarian magic were represented mainly as decorative ethnographic markers consistent with the Enlightenment canons of the era. The generalisation of the results confirmed that multilevel selection, classification, and editorial processing stabilised certain interpretative models, while simultaneously marginalising contextual variations and situational practices of the bearers of tradition. The practical value of the study lay in the creation of a set of criteria for reconstructing the original ritual context from fragmentary and conceptually altered sources, contributing to a deeper understanding of ethnographic materials within archival and scholarly practices

The article announces the first exclusively scholarly edition of Goldoni’s works in Russian, which is being prepared by A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the RAS. The Year of Sixteen Comedies [God shestnadtsati komediy] constitutes an important milestone in Goldoni’s oeuvre: the playwright experiments with new genre variants and challenges French comedy to an artistic competition, as well as produces a play completely free from masked characters. As if to underscore the significance of the new theatrical season, Goldoni opens with a manifesto drama The Comical Theatre. Interestingly, The Year of Sixteen Comedies has never been published as an entire collection, even in Italian editions of Goldoni’s complete works. As none of Goldoni’s original manuscripts have survived and the scholars’ textual criticism is based on printed works, the author discusses the history of the plays’ authorized editions and explains why, of any two possible versions of the text, the translator chooses the one that meets the dramatist’s final instructions. Concluding the article is a characteristic of existing translations and arguments in favour of their replacement.

<i>Cosmas Pragensis Chronica Bohemorum</i>