Editorial Intervention Research Articles

Preserving on Paper: Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen's Receipt Books ed. by Kristine Kowalchuk

Reviewed by: Preserving on Paper: Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen's Receipt Books ed. by Kristine Kowalchuk Madeline Bassnett Kristine Kowalchuk, ed. Preserving on Paper: Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen's Receipt Books. University of Toronto Press, 2017. 374 pp. $34.95. "To make Surrup of Snailes" (135); "To make a Carrott Pudding" (231); "to mack a venison pasty" (312). These are the types of recipes (or receipts, in the vocabulary of the day) to be found in Kristine Kowalchuk's useful edition of three manuscript recipe books attributed to and owned by seventeenth-century women and held at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. Carefully transcribed, these three books accurately represent their genre. They provide a medley of intermingled instructions for sweet and savoury cookery, medicinal remedies, and the occasional beauty and household product. They assume some previous knowledge of early modern kitchen practices, which makes them challenging for the modern reader, not to mention the aspiring historical chef. The recipe "To Colleer a pigge," from the book of Constance Hall, for instance, not only requires the cook to select a young pig, presumably easily plucked from the property's pig stall, but also to butcher him on the spot: "Take a good fat pigg of a month or fiue weeks old and kill him and dres him fit to rost." Similarly abbreviated instructions continue into the recipe itself, which advises the reader to take "a handfull … a littel … a few" of various herbs and spices, further trusting that the cook will know how to make the "thin water grewell" that serves as a base for further seasoning (216–17). Many of the recipes are attributed to a source—for example, "A Dyett drink, Lady Shirleys" in the book attributed to Lettice Pudsey (288–9); "Mr William ffens receat to make rare Inke" in that of Mary Granville and Anne Granville D'Ewes (104–5). And, despite the books' attachments to individual or family names, they are filled with a multitude of unidentifiable hands that break down our assumptions of authorial design and control. Kowalchuk's edition makes these defamiliarizing seventeenth-century collections available to adventurous modern cooks, but its audience is more likely to include those with an academic (whether theoretical or practical) interest in recipe books, women's writing, and food history and culture. Her semi-diplomatic transcription attempts to retain the distinctiveness of the manuscripts, reproducing original and often haphazard spelling practices, and preserving in-text markings such as the marginal manicules (or little pointing hands) that highlight the unique collection of ink recipes found in the Granville/D'Ewes manuscript. In the mini-introductions to each book, Kowalchuk offers available biographical information (Pudsey is notably difficult to trace), alongside an overview of [End Page 175] the styles and types of recipes. She has chosen to keep the recipe books themselves relatively clear of editorial apparatus but includes some of that apparatus elsewhere. Particularly helpful are the lists of named contributors to the recipe books provided in the introductions, which can help us to locate recipes in time, place, and within community networks. She also provides a detailed glossary for the terms (of which there are many) now unfamiliar to twenty-first-century readers. From "adarme" to "hoxy croxy" to "zedoary," this indispensable section is relevant to the period's recipe books more broadly and serves as a mini-dictionary. In the editions themselves, she is careful to identify the switch from Hand A to Hand B, even though these hands can rarely be tied to a named individual. Although the sparse use of footnotes makes for easier reading, a useful addition to the apparatus would have been a cross-referencing of repeated recipes, which would facilitate further comparative investigation of knowledge transmission and individual practice. Instructions on making "Shrewsbury Cakes," for example, appear in both Granville/D'Ewes and Pudsey (137, 312). In this instance, we have three versions of the recipe, as Pudsey's book provides an editorial intervention by the writer—"as I mack it" (312)—thus highlighting a comparison between standard and personal practice. More detailed editorial guidance would also help to define Kowalchuk's textual selection process: why, out of all the available...

Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. by James M. Dean and Harriet Spiegel

Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde. Edited by James M. Dean and Harriet Spiegel. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2016. Pp. lxviii, 391. ISBN: 978-155481-005-5. $19.95 (paperback); $13.95 (ebook).When I first started teaching medieval literature at the university level, there were no adequate teaching editions of Chaucer's great, yet difficult poem Troilus and Criseyde. It is experientially hard for the 'yonge, fresshe folks, he or she' addressed in the poem's envoi to gain access to it except through feats of the sympathetic imagination. Before we even get there, though, both the poem's language and its imbrication in an increasingly inaccessible literary tradition daunt the fresh young contemporary readers of Middle English. Unlike the Canterbury Tales, for the Troilus there has been little in the way of pedagogical materials that would help bridge the gap between the poem's demands and the skills and experience of its new readers.We are now gifted with two excellent teaching editions of the Troilus: alongside the Norton, edited by Stephen A. Barney and using the same critical text as the standard Riverside Chaucer, Broadview now offers this new edition, whose different textual basis and supplementary choices make it a worthy alternative more suitable in many pedagogical situations. Its text is based on a single manuscript, Corpus Christi College Cambridge, Manuscript 61 (Cp), emended from other manuscripts only where the base manuscript is clearly defective. As the editors note, Cp is an excellent witness from the first quarter of the fifteenth century, easily available in digital format as well as facsimile for anyone who wishes to check a reading. As a consequence of the single-text approach, the notes treat textual considerations more frequently than is usual in teaching editions, and account for every major editorial intervention. For courses in Chaucer or medieval literature, these notes seem directed less toward students than toward instructors, who may be more familiar with the Riverside edition and thus would benefit from the orientation to this text. Otherwise the notes offer clear paraphrases of difficult passages, with relatively few gestures toward other literary works important to the poem's complex intertextuality. Marginal glosses are generous, which makes up partly for the too-brief glossary. Anyone wishing to pay detailed attention to lexis, however, would need to consult other reference works like the Middle English Dictionary or A Chaucer Glossary.The text is accompanied by an up-to-date introduction covering Chaucer's life and times, his literary affiliations, and his professional positions in the king's household; brief treatments of the literary tradition behind Troilus, the poem's characters, structure, philosophical stance, and pagan setting; versification and reception; and a succinct summary of many of the influential interpretations of the poem from the comparatist approach of Lewis, through the debates between patristic exegetes and New Critics; and also attending to feminist, new historicist, postmodern, and queer theory approaches. …

Editorial practice and the progressive in Black South African English

ABSTRACTInnovative linguistic features occur in Outer and Expanding Circle varieties of English, leading to claims that new Englishes and learner Englishes form overlapping sets rather than discrete categories. However, less attention is given to the processes by which innovations acquire conventionalised status, in particular with regards to the role of editing of published written texts. We propose a model that incorporates both the proficiency of the writer and editorial intervention to account for the role of editing in the process of conventionalisation and legitimisation of innovative features, which is applied in a case study of the progressive aspect in Black South African English.

Authors of the Mind

The article is a brief examination of certain issues affecting the allocation of authorship in early modern plays. Such things as spelling variation, transmission and editorial intervention by hands other than the named ‘author’ could potentially alter the text in ways which are undetectable, thus leaving authorship studies with a number of unresolvable issues as regards its relationship to objective verification.

The Inkwell of The Russian Messenger: Editorial Politics and the Serialization of Dostoevsky's Demons and Leskov's At Daggers Drawn

This article suggests a new angle from which we can approach the problem of textual and ideological parallels between Dostoevsky’s novel Demons and Leskov’s novel At Dagger Drawn, which were serialized concurrently in the The Russian Messenger in 1870–72. The installments of these novels are read side‐by‐side as they appeared in The Russian Messenger, with a consideration of the context in which they were created, including the specifics of the serialization culture and the editorial practices at the The Russian Messenger. Particular attention is paid to the history of Leskov’s and Dostoevsky’s collaboration in the journal and to the reevaluation of the claims that the intervention by the The Russian Messenger’s editor, Mikhail Katkov, resulted in the negative reception of these novels. By analyzing a practical example of the manner and effects of Katkov's editorial intervention, looking at the October 1871 issue of the The Russian Messenger, the article demonstrates the ways in which, for the editor of the journal, artistic concerns became secondary while his own ideological and polemical agenda took priority.

Introduction

Introduction Linda C. Mitchell more than a decade ago, several articles on letter writing were accepted for publication in the Huntington Library Quarterly. Susan Green, then the editor of the journal, knew that I was working on the subject, along with some of my colleagues. We proceeded to assemble a group of articles for a double issue of the journal (vol. 66, nos. 3 and 4, now available on JSTOR). Like the articles in the present issue, those in that double issue ranged over about five centuries and examined materials of differing nature and purpose. The earlier issue, published in 2003, reflected a sense that the varying generic contexts of letter writing deserved investigation within the compass of a single volume. The richness of epistolary forms has since been treated in many books and articles, including Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain (2016), edited by James Daybell and Andrew Gordon, reviewed in the current issue by Jason Scott-Warren. Lines of inquiry pursued in literary studies have brought greater attention to letters, as scholars have extensively researched the material aspects of the transmission of manuscripts. In the current issue, essays by Daybell and Graham Williams address these concerns in particular. Many recent studies have called attention to the inter-section of manuscript and print as forms of dissemination in the early modern period. Letters, because they typically originated as manuscripts but were then circulated and collected in a variety of ways, have proved important sources for these investigations. Rachael Scarborough King’s essay on newsletters in this issue is one such study. Yet the articles in both issues lead collectively to an appreciation of epistolary form as a lens through which many other kinds of discourse, in both manuscript and print, can be viewed. The basic rhetorical situation of an exchange between individuals, regardless of how avowedly public or private, shares intriguing boundaries with various genres. In some of the best-known early novels, epistolary form links the rhetorical convention of reliability to persuasive fiction (and both Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson published letter-writing manuals, which Victoria Myers discusses [End Page 343] in the earlier issue). As Daybell notes in the current issue, “the letter acted as a kind of textual or cultural portmanteau, facilitating the broader transmission of other manuscript texts (prose, verse, libels, and recipes) as well as the wider dissemination of news, information, scientific knowledge, and ideas.” One of the most important roles of letters in the early modern period was communication across formidable distances. Bill Sherman, in an essay published in the earlier issue, surveys documents dispatched from the American continent to Europe, but sometimes not recognized as epistolary. Though strongly linked, rhetorically, to reportage, this material was subject to editorial intervention and frequently failed to reach its intended destination. A few examples Sherman points to originated among the Jesuits. Grant Boswell’s article in the same issue urges that, despite the longstanding reputation of Jesuit correspondence among scholars for inaccuracy and inconsistency, the Society’s establishment of hierarchical epistolary networks led to the efficient transmission of news, once the order expanded exponentially. The ars dictaminis derived from classical practice blended literary, political, and juridical modes of discourse, ultimately reflected in the publication of a great many prescriptive letter-writing manuals in the early modern period. The impact on medieval pedagogical practice is exemplified in Martin Camargo’s essay in this issue. Letter-writing manuals included both general instruction and model letters for nearly every social and business purpose, and they linked epistolary norms to proper behavior in surprisingly specific ways. I provide a brief bibliography of letter-writing manuals in my article in the earlier volume, which has been revised for this issue. Full of admonition, and designed to influence behavior even more than to demonstrate letter-writing etiquette, such manuals were highly conventional and quite literally redundant—and they were nearly as popular as Bibles. But despite didactic purposes in common with scripture, the sample letters in these volumes narrate harrowing predicaments in the kind of detail that invites comparison with epistolary fiction. Each of the two issues contains an article focused on a pair of correspondents of whom only one was...

The First Professional String Quartet?: ReExamining an Account Attributed to Giuseppe Maria Cambini

This study examines an 1804 essay about string-quartet performance published in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung , and attributed to the Italian-born and Paris-domiciled composer/violinist Giuseppe Maria Cambini. The essay is frequently cited as evidence of the first professional string quartet, since it includes a detailed account of the rehearsal methods of an ensemble purported to have formed in Tuscany over a six-month period in the mid-1760s, and comprising Boccherini, Nardini, Manfredi, and Cambini as its members. A closer examination of the evidence reveals that this so-called Tuscan Quartet is unlikely to have existed. The essay appears to be a highly embellished translation of a passing remark from Cambini’s earlier Nouvelle méthode théorique et pratique pour le violon (ca. 1795), possibly made at the instigation (and with the editorial intervention of) AmZ editor Johann Friedrich Rochlitz. Although the essay is probably an unreliable source for quartet practices ca. 1765, it offers compelling testimony to an emerging quartet ideology (especially in German-speaking lands) around the time of its publication in the early nineteenth century. It may be among the earliest articulations of several influential ideas about quartets, including (1) the string quartet as an ensemble with stable personnel, (2) string-quartet repertoire as serious concert music demanding detailed rehearsal in advance of a performance for an audience, (3) unity of expression—four players sounding as one—as a goal of such rehearsal, and (4) extensive study and performance of quartets as foundational artistic training for all developing string players.

In such a lonely history, what on earth are we afraid of?: On attempts to imagine being in the past as being in the present and being in the future

Abstract This article presents the text of a paper given by the curator and writer Carol Yinghua Lu and the artist and writer Liu Ding at Shadows: Attempts at Re-examination and Re-evaluation of Socialist Realism in the Practice and Discourse of Art in China from 1950 to the Present, a seminar held at Tate Modern in London on 4 December 2013. The seminar, which was staged as part of Lu’s residence as the first Visiting Fellow at the Tate Research Centre: Asia-Pacific in 2013, was supported by Tate and the Centre for Contemporary East-Asian Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham. Lu and Liu’s paper, which is published without significant editorial intervention, discusses the pair’s struggle to develop a critical, research-led history of contemporary art in China in the face of significant public criticism from established art historians and critics.

The Media Freedom Movement in Malaysia and the Electoral Authoritarian Regime

This article will provide an outline of the Malaysian media freedom movement from reformasi in 1998 until today. Research for this article includes testimony from those journalists and activists who attempted to implement reform in the media industry, including detailing reported instances of direct editorial intervention. This article explains that the advent of new media technologies has pushed journalism in new directions in Malaysia, but rather than accept these changes as part of a media liberalisation process, the government has retaliated through constraints and controls over the media and its practitioners. Seen through the prism of media liberalisation, this article adds to the body of scholarly work which examines Malaysia’s electoral authoritarian regime.

Hockets as Compositional and Scribal Practice in the ars nova Motet—A Letter from Lady Music

The whimsical upper-voice texts of the anonymous fourteenth-century motet Musicalis/Sciencie stage an epistolary exchange between Rhetoric, Music, and a long list of French composers and singers. The letters complain that these musicians, whose ranks include Guillaume de Machaut and Philippe de Vitry, split words with rests when they write hockets. The critical tone of Musicalis/Sciencie implies that some ars nova composers must have regularly split words with hockets, while others—the motet’s composer, for one—held this to be bad practice. But since modern editions and medieval scribes alike are imprecise in the placement of text around hockets, the existence of such opposing camps seems difficult to substantiate. An analysis of text-note alignment in four sources for Apta/Flos reveals that some scribes were prescriptive in their texting of hockets, while others, like the scribe of the important Ivrea codex, were pragmatic. An awareness of these differences can lead to alternate modes of interpreting ambiguous text underlay. In the case of Philippe de Vitry’s Petre/Lugentium, shifting syllables adjacent to hockets can transform the work, highlighting carefully differentiated textural zones that are key to its structure. Such editorial intervention can in turn yield fresh insight into competing compositional approaches.

Independent drug bulletins to promote the prescription of appropriate drugs: a necessary but difficult task

Drug treatments constitute a substantial portion of all health-care interventions. Despite their notable benefits, however, drug treatments are beyond the reach of sizable population groups and in some parts of the world there is little access to safe and effective medications even though new drugs are constantly being developed. The effectiveness and safety of newly developed drugs are often viewed too optimistically.1,2 According to a Cochrane systematic review published recently, new drugs are seldom found to be substantially better than existing treatments.3 However, because of lack of full and transparent access to the protocols of many clinical trials, compounded by publication bias and selective reporting of their findings, the true effectiveness of many drugs remains unknown. It is a fact that the results of trials are more likely to be published if the findings are favourable than if they are not.4 In addition, some measured outcomes are never reported,5 which generally results in an overestimation of effectiveness and an underestimation of harmful effects. Thus, researchers and the public only come to know about those findings that are published and disclosed, and physicians prescribe treatments on the basis of this biased information. For all of these reasons, it is critically important that prescribing physicians have a source of information about drug effectiveness that is independent and as objective as possible. Truly independent drug bulletins – those produced without financial or editorial intervention from the pharmaceutical industry, regulatory agencies and governments – are such a source.6 They make a contribution to society by objectively comparing the effectiveness of different drugs. Independent drug bulletins began to appear in the 1960s, after the thalidomide scandal. At the time the pharmaceutical industry was producing new drugs that were modifying health-care practices. In the 1970s, a group of physicians and pharmacists in France began to meet to discuss and prepare independent information about drugs for other physicians and pharmacists. The group, which came to be known as “Prescrire”, gained official recognition in 1980, when the French Minister of Health commissioned it to provide independent information to the drug authorities. The group was initially supported through government funding, but this was eventually suspended and its drug bulletin, Prescrire, has been fully independent since 1993.7 Prescire is an example of a truly independent drug bulletin. It publishes no advertisements and is financed solely through subscriptions and training courses for health-care professionals. Its readership, mainly physicians and pharmacists living in France, grew gradually until 2000, plateaued for several years, and jumped to about 35 000 in 2012 after the European Medicines Agency recommended the withdrawal of benfluorex.8 Prescrire is published in French, although some reports are available in English. Prescrire’s articles and reports are the result of close collaboration among physicians and pharmacists. They are prepared by about 100 paid collaborators trained in the use of evidence-based approaches and have no individual authors. This 80-page, entertaining monthly bulletin contains reports, news and practical guidance. Each report is written by a main author and a co-author, who together conduct an exhaustive, systematic search of the information available on a given drug (i.e. published articles, reviews and guidelines, agency reports, reports obtained from pharmaceutical companies) and prepare a critical appraisal. After the co-authors and the editor in charge have reached agreement on a final draft, every report is reviewed by 15 to 40 internal and external peers before being revised and finalized by the authors and the bulletin’s editorial committee. Additional reports, including the annual financial statement, are available on the bulletin’s web site. Prescrire is influential in official drug-related decisions and daily drug use in France. There is a definite place for independent drug bulletins.6 The International Society of Drug Bulletins lists 50 of these publications, mainly from Europe and South America.9 Regardless of the difficulty of relying solely on subscriptions to pay for the collaborators’ hard work, the model merits being widely reproduced. Yet despite their vital role, independent drug bulletins cannot begin to compensate for the lack of transparency in the reporting of clinical research.10 Of all the clinical trials that are conducted, only about half publish their results and those that yield positive findings are selectively published more often.11 This is inadmissible. Everything from the key components of the protocol to the full data set must be made available for public scrutiny. To achieve this goal, authorities as well as national and international agencies must be persuaded, through strong and persistent advocacy, to adopt and enforce measures mandating the transparency of the entire clinical research process.

Miroir historial: livre X

This text is the tenth book of a universal chronicle composed in 1388 and originally comprising twelve books, of which only the final three survive. Its author was abbot of the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Vincent de Laon. Nineteenth-century editors such as Auguste Molinier, Joseph-Daniel Guigniaut, and Natalis de Wailly criticized what they saw as the work's lack of originality, but today, as Förnegård points out, the Miroir historial is better described as the product of a specific compilation technique, borrowing from both vernacular and Latin texts. Since many fourteenth- and fifteenth-century universal chronicles in French remain unedited, Förnegård's volume contributes to a broadening of the possibilities of research on compilations of this kind. His edition is remarkable for its extensive Introduction covering Jean de Noyal and his work, the manuscript, the manuscript tradition, the methods of compilation, and the principles behind the editing. The text's rare moments of originality, its thematic digressions, breaks in chronology, limited circulation, and indirect transmission of canonical texts such as Vincent de Beauvais make it typical of such chronicles. There was never more than one complete copy of the text; in addition, scholars in the Middle Ages copied out extracts. In the seventeenth century a significant part of the text was copied by André Duchesne and Étienne Baluze (Paris, BnF, Collection Baluze, 60, fols 272v–274v). The three extant books of Noyal's text are contained in Paris, BnF, f. fr. 10138. Förnegård helpfully attempts to reconstruct the text's manuscript tradition by examining references to the Miroir historial in post-medieval library catalogues and other works, and sets out various hypotheses about the version from which Duchesne and Baluze copied. He also comments extensively on Jean de Noyal's method of compilation, in a long chapter arranged according to the subject matter treated (for example, Franco-Flemish wars, local history), and includes some close textual analysis of parallel passages in the chronicle and its sources. The principle behind the editing is, as Förnegård explains in a relatively short chapter, largely traditionalist, which seems appropriate both to the nature of a historical chronicle and to the fact that it exists in only one manuscript; however, his division of long chapters into numbered paragraphs is a helpful editorial intervention. The critical apparatus includes useful comparisons with Jean de Noyal's sources where these help to illuminate the syntax. The editor's inclusion of a complete ‘Index verborum’ of all the words in the text in all their forms is intended to facilitate research on the lexicology, semantics, morphology, syntax, and style of Middle French. In addition, Förnegård includes an ‘Index nominum’, a bibliography, and an extensive table listing the direct and indirect sources of every section of the text. With its Introduction and critical apparatus, this edition will be invaluable to the scholar, but will also be of interest to the student and as a teaching aid for courses on the medieval chronicle.

Translation as argumentation: ethos and ethical positioning in Hoess's Commandant of Auschwitz

This paper draws on rhetoric and discourse analysis to explore the role and position of the mediator – editor or translator – who voices the perpetrator's perspective. The process inevitably raises questions of agency and ethical responsibility, compelling mediators to disclose their own attitude and leave traces of their presence in the text. Discursive strategies allow them to inject their own voice into the text, thus producing a counterdiscourse that can oppose and even sabotage the perpetrator's discourse. I propose an analysis of the speaker's “ethos” in the mediated autobiography of Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz who was sentenced to death in 1947. I will assess the importance of editorial and translational intervention as argumentation and positioning, in order to acknowledge editors and translators as ethical agents.

Indexing electronic medical records using a taxonomy

AbstractEditor's SummaryWith the move toward patient electronic medical records (EMRs), accessing information for insurance coding and research depends on standardized taxonomies to organize and index the content. Controlled vocabularies are necessary to interpret content consistently. Established quasi‐taxonomies provide codes for medical conditions and treatments, but applying these codes as metadata to index the records is laborious, requiring translation from natural language in the EMR to a code's verbal equivalent to the code. Indexing systems can streamline the categorization process for greater efficiency and accuracy by using Bayesian engines or a rule‐based approach. Analyzing discrepancies between human indexing and the software system results shows where editorial intervention is needed for continual improvement, with a goal of 85% or higher accuracy. Using a categorization system with a hierarchical taxonomy enables deep, precise indexing or quick, automatic filtering to more general concepts. The accuracy of medical indexing systems varies widely, based on the degree of automation and capacity for semantic analysis.

Haydn's (?) Cello Concertos, 1860-1930: Editions, Performances, Reception

While there exist numerous nineteenth- and early twentieth-century annotated editions of repertoire such as the violin sonatas of Beethoven, the repertoire for the cello was in general edited significantly less frequently. The cello concertos by or attributed to Haydn constitute an exception, both in the number of versions and the degree of editorial intervention. Three cello concertos were associated with Haydn's name: the well-known concerto in D Hob.VIIb:2, another concerto in D Hob.VIIb:4, and a concerto in C Hob.VIIb:5. The first is now known to be a genuine work of Haydn's although this attribution was not universally accepted in the nineteenth century. The second is an unattributable eighteenth-century concerto claimed to be by Haydn and accepted as such at its publication in 1895. The third was compiled by the cellist David Popper who claimed to have based it on Haydn's sketches, providing orchestration and linking material. This article discusses aspects of the five performing editions of Hob.VIIb:2 by Bockmühl, Servais, Becker, Klengel and Whitehouse, the two editions of Hob.VIIb:4 by Grützmacher and Trowell, and Popper's concerto, considering these texts, the reception of the concertos as compositions, and the reception of individual performances. This article surveys the period of the greatest diversity of editions, a period whose later limit is determined by the eventual entry of this work into the cello canon. It will be suggested that this diversity is a consequence of non-canonicity.

Beginning With ‘One More Thing’: Pragmatics and editorial intervention in the work of Raymond Carver

Abstract This paper considers Raymond Carver's writing and Gordon Lish's editorial interventions in that writing from the perspective of an approach to pragmatic stylistics which focuses in particular on inferential processes. Building on some fairly informal classroom work, it considers a small number of specific differences between two versions of the story ‘One More Thing’. It considers the contrasting nature of inferences which each version is likely to give rise to and argues that this approach helps us to understand the nature of the changes. In particular, it helps to understand the nature of Lish's interventions and to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the extent to which this might be described in terms of a contrast between a more ‘minimalist’ and a more ‘expansive’ style.

Review of The Complete Letters of Henry James 1872-1876

Review of The Complete Letters of Henry James 1872-1876 Oliver Herford Review of The Complete Letters of Henry James 1872-1876. Ed. Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias. 3 vols. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008-11. Vol. 1, $125; Vol. 2, $130; Vol. 3, $95 (hardcover). The Nebraska edition of James's letters began to appear six years ago, and its five volumes to date have now wholly supplanted the first volume of Leon Edel's Henry James Letters and made inroads on the second. It has established itself so confidently that one now takes perhaps too easily for granted the new reality it inaugurates in James studies: we shall, in time, get to read all James's surviving letters in the sequence of their composition, and the contrast that makes with all preceding stages in the publication of this astonishing correspondence is first and last a matter for rejoicing. Sheer excitement at the wealth of new material already made available to readers (to say nothing of the promise of the more to come) and awe at the scale and minuteness of the ongoing enterprise are matched by gratitude to Pierre Walker and Greg Zacharias and their editorial team. The three volumes covering 1872 to 1876 contain 232 letters and two letter-fragments, and 105 of those items are appearing in print for the first time. Many of their most compelling moments involve revisitings of one sort or another. After the European initiations of the first installment of correspondence (1855-1872), we see James here beginning to do things for the second and third times: re-experiencing the touristic destinations of his earlier travels as places to live and work, discarding or confirming old habits and acquiring new ones, converting appreciation into production. At the minutest textual level, his second thoughts are [End Page 285] shown up with admirable clarity by the plain-text editing of these volumes, which "reveal[s] James's mind in action" (CL2 1: 368) as well as the editors could desire. It is a gathering delight as well to find the sources of loosely attributed quotations one has always had to take on trust from Edel's biographical volumes. For instance, a pleasantly punning reference to Frank and Lizzie Boott, whom the traveling James keeps running into in the usual European places: "'The easy-fitting Bootts,' Henry James once described them in a letter home" (Edel 259). That letter now takes its place in the sequence of surviving correspondence, with Edel's relaxed, anecdotal "once" reduced to a proper historical specificity. James writes to his parents on 21 July 1872 from Grindelwald in Switzerland: "You will know, by this time, all about the Bootts having joined us & at the Byron + being very much the same easy=fitting Bootts as before" (CL2 1: 50). Moments like this come back to the reader of The Complete Letters at once very much the same as before and thrillingly not the same at all, more sharply defined and active within a larger, richer contextual field. Now that scholars and critics have had the opportunity to get used to working with the Nebraska Edition, it may be timely to make some observations on its principles of textual presentation and annotation and to offer some practical reflections on what it is like for an academic reader to use. The editors sensibly anticipate "tension" between the virtues of "reliability" (faithful representation of "the meaningful details of the historical document") and "readability," and they are surely justified in favoring the former (CL2 1: 367). But those qualities in a scholarly edition may be complementary at least as often as they are at odds, and there is room to ask whether a slightly greater degree of editorial intervention might be achieved without compromise to the edition's principles. The basis of the edition is unshakeably sound, but a critical reader does encounter a very few areas where more help would be welcome. The plain-text format adopted by Walker and Zacharias deploys a limited array of editorial symbols in the transcribed letter-text to represent cancellations, insertions, and emphases in the manuscript. Reviewing the first two volumes of the Nebraska Edition...

The impact of interventionist regulation in reshaping news agendas: A comparative analysis of public and commercially funded television journalism

In this article we draw on a specific case study – the re-regulation of BBC political reporting in the nations and regions in the UK post-devolution – to compare the BBC’s interventionist, public service framework with the ‘light touch’ regime of commercial broadcasting. We carried out a content analysis of BBC Television News (where issues of accuracy and impartiality are regulated by the BBC Trust), and three commercially funded channels (where programme content is entirely regulated by Ofcom) before and after an editorial intervention by the BBC Trust. We found that the BBC improved the balance and accuracy of its television news coverage whereas commercial broadcasters continued to overlook or misrepresent the reality of devolved politics in the UK. While it can be difficult to demonstrate empirically how regulation can enhance media content compared to a ‘light touch’ system – as our study found – we suggest that the impact of regulatory interventions should be more central to journalism studies internationally.

‘out of their owne mouths’? Conversion Narratives and English Radical Religious Practice in the Seventeenth Century

This article focuses on a form of writing, the conversion narrative, which was familiar to mid-seventeenth-century godly readers. The purpose of the narrative, which was a prerequisite for admission to the Church of Visible Saints, was to give the congregation a spoken account of the experience of conversion and of the workings of Grace in the life of the regenerate individual. Some of these reports were transcribed, revised, and published by the ministers of the churches. By focusing on the complex relationships between the ‘original’ experience, its expression, and subsequent written transmission, the tension between individuality and conformity, and the various forms of editorial intervention adopted by the ministers, this study attempts to highlight the collaborative nature of the textual construction of the conversion narrative and to address some crucial issues concerning both the authenticity of the memory recorded and its ‘true’ author.

‘Intolerable Flippancy’: The Arnot Robertson V. Mgm Libel Case (1946–1950) and The Evolution of BBC Policy on Broadcast Film Criticism

This article examines the ultimately unsuccessful libel case brought by the novelist and BBC film critic E. Arnot Robertson against Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The action followed a letter the film company sent to Robertson’s employer in 1946, asserting she was ‘out of touch’ with public taste, excluding her from their press screenings and requested the broadcaster’s assistance in preventing her from reviewing further MGM films on air. Robertson charged the film company with libelling her professional competence and imperilling her earnings. This article explores the origins and outcomes of the ensuing three-year legal dispute. Drawing on trade journals, law reports, press coverage and BBC records, the article considers the contrasting models of the ‘audience’ underpinning the wider conflict between the film trade and the ‘quality’ critics. It explores the role of BBC policy and ‘broadcast style’ in making radio criticism a flashpoint and traces the specific circumstances that led the two parties into court. Finally, it considers the lasting legal and cultural consequences of the case. Turner (Robertson) v. MGM redefined the legal meaning of ‘fair comment’, it reshaped BBC policy on broadcast criticism, and shifted the consensus on what constituted responsible and professional criticism – making wit a less respectable critical tool.