W. W. Greg, Postmodernist

Abstract

W. W. Greg has often been seen as a chief upholder of the dated orthodoxy of the "New Bibliography". I suggest in this paper that under a formal adherence to its idiom, Greg was actually questioning and even subverting that orthodoxy, especially in his denial, in "The Rationale of Copy-Text", that any single version can provide uniform authority for substantive readings. He explicitly questions the possibility of a single definitive text, and anticipates the postmodern concept of the text as process. He therefore admits a measure of subjectivity not only in editorial practice but also in editorial principle, advancing beyond the "critical" to a "metacritical" plane of the "imaginative, intuitional, and creative". Authenticating new editorial practices like the validation of parallel or alternative texts of the same work, Greg contributions to editorial theory anticipate many premises of contemporary postmodern thought.