Norton Critical Edition Research Articles

Roughing It in the Bush

Roughing It in the Bush

John P. Harrington, Modern Irish Drama. A Norton Critical Edition.

John P. Harrington, Modern Irish Drama. A Norton Critical Edition.

"A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man": Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism (review)

Reviewed by: "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man": Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism Michael Patrick Gillespie (bio) "A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man": Authoritative Text, Backgrounds And Contexts, Criticism, edited by John Paul Riquelme, with the text edited by Hans Walter Gabler, with Walter Hettche. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2007. xxx + 490 pp. $11.25. Before I begin this review, I should make clear my connections with the editor, the project, and the publisher. I have known John Paul Riquelme for over twenty years and have admired his Teller and Tale in Joyce's Fiction for longer than that.1 I am thanked in the preface of this volume for my early response to a questionnaire, though my inability to recollect what I said makes me wonder about the value of my contribution. And I have edited two of Oscar Wilde's works—The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray—for the Norton Critical Editions series, working with the same excellent editor at Norton, Carol Bemis, who was involved with Riquelme's [End Page 166] project. Having noted all this, I still cannot imagine that my enthusiasm for this edition would have been one jot less had none of these connections existed. In a market that already has a number of fine editions of Joyce's first published novel, Riquelme has produced a masterful compilation of scholarship, interpretation, and background material supporting a superb text version of the novel. Any edition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man will present the compiler with difficult choices. A Norton Critical Edition, because of its prescriptive layout, its wide-ranging target audience (from high school students to seasoned literary critics), and the expectations already raised by Margot Norris's superlative Norton Dubliners, offers a daunting trial. In every respect, Riquelme has met those challenges. Perhaps the trickiest decision for this edition lay in selecting the copy text. In this regard, Riquelme very shrewdly turned to the best editor of Joyce's writing available, Hans Walter Gabler. For the past thirty years, Gabler has been writing about the textual cruxes of A Portrait and has produced an important edition of his own, brought out by Garland Publishing in 1993. Riquelme's choice to use Gabler's 1993 version in this edition has allowed Gabler to join his project. Although the Norton volume does not contain Gabler's full editorial apparatus, it does benefit from his abilities as a textual critic. Further, the judicious selection of Gabler's notes and his masterful introduction to the compilation of the work will enable anyone with an interest in Joyce's composition process to form a clear sense of how the book came together. Ancillary material shows equal attention to detail and balances accessibility with sophistication. Riquelme's explanatory notes fill in the intellectual, historical, cultural, and spiritual contexts from which the narrative emerges without overburdening the reader with excessive and intrusive asides.2 The chronology of historic events from 1798 to 1916 provides a useful thumbnail sketch for readers unfamiliar with the political background alluded to in A Portrait (227-30). And a series of political cartoons and broadside covers graphically illustrates English and Irish attitudes toward Charles Stewart Parnell and the political events that defined his career (241-44). Of course, the value of the Norton Critical Editions has always depended upon the secondary material in their volumes. Their aim to appeal to broad audiences makes the selections to be included in these sections both crucial and difficult. In his choices, both for background information and for critical commentaries, Riquelme has shown great sensitivity to the central cultural issues that give direction to the narrative and to the interpretive issues that demand the reader's attention. The "Background and Contexts" section begins with essays relating [End Page 167] to the Irish nationalist movement (227-303). Although the names of the essayists will have little familiarity for any contemporary reader without a broad knowledge of nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Irish history, the writings provide invaluable material for understanding the political tensions that run through the opening and closing sections...

“Dubliners”: James Joyce (review)

Reviewed by: “Dubliners”: James Joyce Cóilín Owens “DUBLINERS”: JAMES JOYCE. A Norton Critical Edition, edited by Margot Norris. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. 413 pp. $9.00. This recent addition to a familiar publisher’s list will be of interest to readers of this journal. It provides a reliable text, some supporting historical documents and illustrations selected to bring alive the realism of the stories while also “to make [them] come to life for a first-time twenty-first century reader,” and eight critical essays “helpful in illuminating the stories that are most frequently taught and . . . represent[ing] a range of critical and theoretical approaches” (xi, xi–xii). It opens with Hans Walter Gabler’s substantial and original essay on the composition and publication history of Dubliners. The study is carefully assembled and precisely expressed but a bit too technical for neophytes. With the eye of an Hercule Poirot, he reviews the difficulties Joyce encountered in writing and publishing this book. On the basis of some fresh forensic evidence, he explains his rationale for accepting the 1910 page proofs (incomplete as they are) as his copy-text: mainly on the grounds that these were authorized by Joyce himself. Gabler’s adoption of a continuous lineation system for each separate story is a welcome, and long overdue, inducement to precision, accuracy, and ease of citation, and the text here reproduces the Vintage Press edition (1993), but comes with a page-by-page apparatus, purporting to provide readers with an account of the variants. They are but selectively presented, however, and on what principle, we are not informed. One example, from the apparatus accompanying “A Painful Case,” illustrates the problem. In the introduction to the volume, Gabler informs us that Joyce’s original title was “A Painful Incident” (xviii), but the apparatus does not register this significant alteration. The reader’s attention should be flagged to consider the advantage that Joyce saw in the word “case” in its various applications in a narrative enclosing the newspaper report: the medical, legal, and moral senses, at least. I have, moreover, some reservations beyond the scope of this [End Page 824] review about the textual decisions he has made in consequence of his decision about the copy-text. The stories are accompanied by bottom-of-the-page annotations. This is a tricky business, as we all know from the controversies provoked by Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman’s annotations to Ulysses.1 In my opinion, annotations should provide only essential historical, geographic, or other information; should not do so prematurely; should avoid hindsight interpretation; should not be tautologous or irrelevant; and, above all, should be accurate. I regret that, despite the many previous sets of annotations in print, approximately 20 percent of the annotations here violate one or more of these principles. Here are a few examples. “[P]aralysis” (“The Sisters”—D 9) is annotated: it “may be caused by an apoplectic seizure or other medical condition such as syphilis” (3). This ignores the import of the “stroke” in the first sentence and steers readers to prejudge potential symptoms that do not appear until several pages later in the story. The annotation of “English accents” (“Araby”—D 35) informs us that “the young people at the stall are British rather than Irish” (25), whereas the reference conveys nothing more reliable than the narrator’s perception (salient to an understanding of this story). Elocution classes in Irish Protestant schools taught “the King’s English”: thus, the observation may reflect no more than the boy’s social insecurity. There are several annotations for “Eveline” that are speculative, mis-emphasized, or in error. We are informed that the “man from Belfast” (D 36) is “possibly a Protestant” (27). This is both speculative and inconsequential. Margaret Mary Alacoque (D 37) is annotated twice, the first time with the tautologous misstatement, “[s]he was canonized and made a saint in 1920” (saints are recognized, not “made”—27, 219). The note on “Derevaun Seraun” (D 40—“meaning unknown”) is supplied in ignorance of my own careful translation and contextual explication (31).2 Turning to “The Boarding House,” I observe that “little volumes” (D 63) refer to copies...

Indie Publishing?: Broadview Press, Gynocritics, and Anne of Green Gables

I just have an overarching disrespect for business in general, for the forces of capitalism and how they contradict the needs of the people and the interests of art. Ani DiFranco INDEPENDENT RECORDING ARTIST Am DiFranco spoke these words in an interview John Teshima to explain why she began to record independently of large, established record companies and, more importantly, why she continues to do so. Independent, or Indie, musicians and artists most often seem to have a political or philosophical message which leads them to, or requires, indie production, a message that they refuse to compromise in order to market and sell their work. I invoke Am DiFranco and indie musicians because the book publishing industry seems to be faced a similar conundrum: to produce and market works which will sell and sell a lot or to maintain a commitment to a philosophical world view and trust that the product will sell regardless. I do not know if we can fairly call Broadview Press an Indie publisher, but it is certainly an independent book publisher a clear vision. Based in Peterborough, Ontario, offices in Guelph, Halifax, and Calgary, Broadview prides itself on its independent status, with no affiliation to any larger publishing house or media conglomerate (Broadview website). According to the Broadview Press mandate, this Canadian publishing house produces high quality scholarly books in paperback so that they are immediately affordable for academics, the general public, and students. One can analyze this rationale quite quickly to determine that the textbook market is particularly lucrative for Broadview, especially if they focus on inexpensively constructed paperbacks. Who can blame Broadview for attempting to establish a lucrative niche for itself? In this economic climate where publishers are turning to non-fiction and away from traditional fiction, where large publishing conglomerates such as Penguin mass produce literary classics in paperback, and where the Canadian media corporations have exploded in size (witness the recent Bell Globemedia's takeover of CHUM Ltd. to become CTV globemedia), any publishing house that manages to survive is doing well. More than mere survival, however, Broadview has located its place in the Canadian market, turning a profit for eight of the past nine years (Broadview website). Their editions of older, often only marginally classic texts are quite special, their detailed, scholarly introductions and fascinating appendices boasting contemporary reviews and excerpts from scholarly works and other material relevant for establishing the cultural context of the piece in question. While the website claims that the term broadview represents the wide spectrum of perspectives this publishing house embraces, the introductions and appendices which characterize the books clearly demark Broadview editions as arising from a distinctively cultural studies philosophy. Of course, most publishing houses attempt to corner a specific market. Ashgate Press, for example, approaches the field a completely different mandate than Broadview. Ashgate produces only hardcover, small-run scholarly books aimed primarily at the university library. Their editions are expensive, but they enable swift and focused publication. They are not intended as textbooks. On the other hand, the Norton Critical Editions, designed as textbooks, are competition for Broadview. Similar to Broadview texts, Norton Critical Editions append relevant material that establishes the social and historical context, in addition to critical articles, both recent and contemporary. Broadview tends to focus on the historical material. Broadview's texts are not only affordable and teaching-friendly, however; they differ from Norton's Critical Editions in the way that they are also deftly political. In her landmark essay of 1981, Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness, Elaine Showalter discusses gynocritics, or the examination of literature by women. …

James Pethica, Yeats’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose. A Norton Critical Edition.

James Pethica, Yeats’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose. A Norton Critical Edition.

Inclusive Ignorance: The Anthology, English Studies, and Higher Education in the United States

And ride in tryumph through Persepolis? Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles? Usumcasane and Theridamas, Is it not passing brave to be a king, And ride in tryumph through Persepolis? (Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1, II.iii) Those programs that embrace engagement, innovation, and assessment and accounta bility, those programs that confirm our commitment to academic primacy and operational excellence will establish the priorities of the University. (Policy statement, Provost of a large state university in the United States) THE genre, if so I may call it, of the literature anthology, particularly those anthologies intended for college1 students and aimed a specific literary periods, has a curious history, especially in the United States. I do not believe that English studies in the rest of the English-speaking world have reached quite the degree of regimentation achieved in the United States and it is almost certainly the model of this country's experience of tertiary education for which these sorts of books have been and are developed. That these three books2 are intended for just such a market is made clear by the general notices for the series in which they appear. The editorial note in Payne and Hunter's volume reads, ‘each volume has been thoroughly researched to meet the current needs of teachers and students’ (ii) and in Braden's ‘… for use on specialist and appropriate survey courses’ (iii). Rumrich and Chaplin's publisher, W. W. Norton, has been a little longer in the classroom anthology business than has Blackwell, and is somewhat more circumspect about direct pedagogical claims and leaves such statements to the solicited puff by David Scott Kastan on the back cover: ‘For the study of seventeenth-century poetry this Norton Critical Edition is exactly what professors want and undergraduates need.’ If the academic model for which these books have been created is that found almost exclusively in the United States, it will be useful to see how that model came to exist.

The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales (review)

Reviewed by: The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales Janet L. Langlois (bio) The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales. Edited with an introduction and notes by Maria Tatar . Translations by Maria Tatar . New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002. xxi + 445 pp. The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales is such a gorgeous book that it is hard to be critical. Its dust jacket, featuring magenta lettering and geometric design on a golden background with miniature illustrations from fairy tales on each corner, heralds the "storytelling archive" within its covers through allusions to Arabian Nights arabesque and to manuscript illumination. Editor Maria Tatar has chosen to present 26 classic fairy tales with over 300 accompanying classic illustrations to highlight the golden age of the fairy tale in the Western tradition. "The Tales" section of the book includes familiar texts ranging from those of Charles Perrault, Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Alexander Afanasev, Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, Joseph Jacobs, Philipp Otto Runge to those of Hans Christian Andersen (17-330). It is in Tatar's annotations for each tale, however, that the "familiar" is cracked open and explored intricately but clearly for an implied general audience of parents, children, students, and others interested in the subject matter through innovative use of different type faces, font sizes and colors. Each tale's number; its title in capital letters, such as tale 1, LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD, or tale 18, KATE CRACKERNUTS; its specific author in italics, such as Charles Perrault or Hans Christian Andersen; and its footnotes on the page margins are [End Page 305] all printed in light but readable purple ink that matches the geometric border of white vines on purple ground which heads each new tale. Small black print at the bottom left-hand side of each tale's first page announces that the source for this version of the tale is from Charles Perrault, "Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre," in Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des moralités (Paris: Barbin, 1697) or from Joseph Jacobs, "Kate Crackernuts," English Fairy Tales (London: David Nutt, 1898), for example. The text of each tale itself is in larger black print while Tatar's headnote introducing each tale is in black italics. Illustrations from different artists, some in color and some in black and white, are placed throughout each tale text with captions indicating the specific lines or scenes in the tales from which the artists drew inspiration with accompanying commentaries by the editor. Tatar's headnotes, footnotes, and illustration captions are informative, clearly drawn from a wide range of scholarly sources, her own among others, but are not academic per se. For instance, her introduction to tale 11, "Bluebeard," draws from comparative studies that she had already referenced in the 1999 Norton critical edition, The Classic Fairy Tales: "Known as Silver Nose in Italy and as the Lord of the Underworld in Greece, the French Bluebeard has many folkloric cousins" (145). Her headnote also condenses scholarly shifts in academic interpretations of the Bluebeard tale: "The Bluebeard story has traditionally been seen as turning on the curiosity of the wife, who can never 'resist' the temptation to look into the chamber forbidden to her. . . . Rather than celebrating the courage and wisdom of Bluebeard's wife in discovering the dreadful truth about her husband's murderous deeds, Perrault and many other tellers of the tale disparage her unruly act of insubordination" (146). Here, Tatar appears to draw on, but downplays, her chapter, "Taming the Beast: Bluebeard and Other Monsters," in her 1987 The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales, still one of the best feminist rereadings of fairy-tale scholarship. In another example, Tatar introduces tale 8, "The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich," as the first in the Grimms' Nursery and Household Tales, then refers explicitly to Bruno Bettelheim's psychoanalytical reading of the tale "as a compressed version of the maturation process, with the princess navigating a path between the pleasure principle (represented by her play) and the dictates of the superego (represented by the father's commands)," then shows how Bettelheim's reading "helps to understand why the tale has such a powerful...

Leaves in Class: Recent Text Editions of Whitman's Work

Reviews Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (Norton Critical Edition, 2002); Whitman, Selected Poems, ed. Harold Bloom (American Poets Project, 2003); and Whitman, Poetry and Prose, ed. Shira Wolosky (2003).

BOOK REVIEW: Edited by Biodun Jeyifo.Modern African Drama, Norton Critical Editions. New York: Norton, 2002.

Known for their canon-making authority, the Norton Critical Editions series have also tended to neglect literature and especially drama outside the British and American centers. The appearance of a critical edition that is also an anthology of African drama is thus a reason for celebration. This collection offers both seasoned scholars and new students a range of plays and critical essays in one volume, which will give drama and African studies higher profiles in universities. The volume combines oft-anthologized plays like Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman and Sizwe Bansi Is Dead by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, and the less well-traveled Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels by Femi Osofisan, from the usually well-represented Nigeria and South Africa, with others less known but no less important, such as Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Ngugi wa Mirii's I Will Marry When I Want (Kenya), Ama Ata Aidoo's Dilemma of a Ghost (Ghana; the only play by a woman), and Collision of Altars by Ethiopian Tsegaye Gabre Medhin. It also includes criticism on individual plays and key theoretical essays, from writers and activists like Fanon, Soyinka, and Ngugi, and from scholars, including the anthology's editor, which place African drama in the broader postcolonial context.

Being “Out of Place”: Edward W. Said and the Contradictions of Cultural Differences

Paul B. Armstrong is professor of English and dean of the college at Brown University. He is author of The Phenomenology of Henry James(1983), The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding and Representation in James, Conrad, and Ford (1987), and Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation (1990). He is also editor of the Norton critical edition of E. M. Forster's novel Howards End (1998). He is at work on a book about the politics of reading and the modern novel.

The Changing Face of Darwinism

M a any people have come to Charles Darwin through Philip Appleman. A founding editor of Victorian Studies, a novelist and a poet, Appleman is also the editor of the Norton Critical Editions of Darwin. The first edition appeared in 1970, the second edition in 1979, and now we have the third edition just out in 2001. The first edition went through twelve printings in nine years; the second edition went through twenty-three printings in twenty-two years. Thinking in Malthusian terms-Appleman is also the editor of Norton's Malthus-since we are working in an geometric progression, we should expect this edition to last until around 2040 and go through between forty and fifty printings. Charles Darwin is well served. The Norton Critical Editions are aimed at the college market. What kind of picture of Darwin and Darwinism is Appleman giving to young students? Let us start back with the first edition of 1970. The

Alllooksame? Mediating Visual Cultures of Race on the Web

The Internet presents a real dilemma to postcolonial theorists, writers, and intellec­ tuals; indeed, perhaps to postcolonial theory itself. The range and tone of re­ sponses to cyberspace reflect a deep split in the ways that this new communication technology is viewed by non-Western cultures and races. Ziauddin Sardar sees the Internet as a tool of imperialism, and he asserts that it is simply the newest example on a continuum of imperializing practices perpetrated by the West in its ongoing domination of other cultures. He regards cyberspace as a medium that can only transmit imperialistic ideologies; its background in military research and high cost of access makes it intrinsically a Western technology with no potential for resistance by people of color. In short, he sees it as a medium that’s inherently flawed by its association with modernity, tropes of colonialism, and hypercapitalism. His critique is extremely similar in many ways to Chinua Achebe’s famous response to Joseph Conrad’s Heart o f Darkness. There’s no turning back from the way that Achebe singlehandedly politicized that text; the Norton Critical Edition of the novel includes it because it’s now become part of the discursive field of Lisa Nakamura is Assistant Professor o f Communication Arts and Visual Culture Studies at the U niversity o f W isconsin, Madison. She is the author o f Cybertypes: Race , Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, 2002) and co-editor o f Race in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000). She has published articles on cross-racial roleplaying in Internet chatspaces; race, embodiment, and virtuality in the film The Matrix; and political economies of race and cyberspace in publications such as Women's Review of Books, Unspun: Key Concepts for Understanding the World Wide Web (New York, 2000), The Cybercultures Reader (Routledge, 2000), and The Visual Culture Reader (Routledge, 2002). She is currently working on a new book tentatively entitled Visual Cultures of Race in Cyberspace. She can be reached at lanakamura@wisc. edu.

Virtual Histories: The Year as Literary Period

Michael North is professor of English at the University of California,Los Angeles. He is author, most recently, of Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (1999). He has completed a Norton Critical Edition of T. S. Eliot's Waste Land (2001) and is at work on a study of the visual arts, spectatorship, and modern literature.

The Norton Critical Edition of Coleridge's Poetry and Prose

The Norton Critical Edition of Coleridge's Poetry and Prose. Un article de la revue Romanticism on the Net (New Texts and Textual Scholarship in British Literature, 1780-1830) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Contexts, Intertexts, Metatexts: Eighteenth-Century Prose by Women

Contexts, Intertexts, Metatexts: Eighteenth-Century Prose by Women Ros Ballaster Mary Astell. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, ed. Patricia Springborg. Pickering Women's Classics. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1997. ISBN 1-85196-268-9. Paula R. Backscheider and John J. Richetti, eds. PopularFiction by Women 16601730 . An Anthology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. ISBN 0.19-871137-9. Aphra Behn. Oroonoko, ed. Joanna Lipking. Norton Critical Editions. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1997. ISBN 0-393-97014-0. Frances Brooke. The Excursion, ed. Paula R. Backscheider and Hope D. Cotton. Eighteenth-Century Novels by Women. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. ISBN 0-8131-1979-0. Frances Burney. Evelina, ed. Kristina Straub. Bedford Cultural Editions. Boston and New York: Bedford Books, 1997. ISBN 0-312-12796-0. Elizabeth Griffith. The Delicate Distress, ed. Cynthia Booth Ricciardi and Susan Staves. Eighteenth-Century Novels by Women. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. ISBN 0-8131-2014-4. Eliza Haywood. The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, ed. Christine Blouch. Broadview Literary Texts. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1998. ISBN 1-551111-147-0. Elizabeth Inchbald. Nature and Art, ed. Shawn L. Maurer. Pickering Women's Classics. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1997. ISBN 1-85196-265-4. Charlotte Smith. Desmond, ed. Antje Blank and Janet Todd. Pickering Women's Classics. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1997. ISBN 1-85196-26. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 11, Number 3, April 1999 348 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION In the shaping of an interpretive community alert to the pleasures of an arguably different set of contextual, intertextual, and metatextual relationships, the metaphors of geography and topography have been key tools for feminist literary criticism. To take only the best-known example, Elaine Showalter described her book A Literature of Their Own as "an attempt to fill in the terrain between ... literary landmarks and to construct a more reliable map from which to explore the achievements of English women novelists" than "the Austen peaks, the Brontë cliffs, the Eliot range, and the Woolf hills."1 The exercise ofmapping a lost tradition, if tradition it proves to be, entails the development of a common vocabulary which readers must share and understand if they are to make sense of what they encounter. The necessity, as well as the pitfalls, of this process are both evident and ongoing. In 1980, Annette Kolodny observed that "we read well, and with pleasure, what we already know how to read."2 Her insight has remained foundational in the nearly twenty subsequent years ofreprinting and editing early writing by women. In the mid-1980s, Pandora Press produced a series of some twenty paperback reprints of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century novels by women, under the general editorship of Dale Spender, as companion publications to her survey, Mothers of the Novel? The Pandora series sought to revisit the success Virago Press had enjoyed in the late 1970s and early 1980s by reprinting Victorian and Edwardian fictions by women. Each novel was printed on relatively cheap paper with no annotation except a short preface by an enthusiast: the series provided for some time the only teaching and library texts for academics working in the field. Subsequently, the major presses for paperback "classics" reprints (Penguin and Oxford) have allowed a small number ofthese works to enter their canons, and have also authorized new editions of the classic works of better-known women writers with prefaces that take account of the reappraisal, indeed "revision," generated by feminist critical debate. Penguin have not only put into paperback editions by Ros Ballaster of Delarivier Manley's New Atalantis and by Kate Lilley of Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World in their "classics" series (both originally published in hardback in Pickering Women's Classics), but also produced new textual editions of Jane Austen's novels with introductions informed by feminist interpretation. Pandora's "mothers of the novel" series assumed that general readers, lovers of the novel, would find eighteenth-century fiction by women as accessible as later works. However, without a context—a sense of the traditions, influences, and debates on which each novel draws (rather than the later tradition to which it may have contributed)—readers were often at aloss. WithoutMargaretDalziel's edition of...

T. S. Eliot at 110

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsJames F. LoucksJames F. Loucks, guest editor of this issue, is associate professor of English at The Ohio State University at Newark. His most recent book is a Norton Critical Edition of Robert Browning's poetry. He is at work on a comprehensive chronology of the life and work of T. S. Eliot.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Interpretations, ed. Richard E. Flathman and David Johnston. Pp. x + 381 (Norton Critical Editions in the History of Ideas). New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997. Paperback 6.95 (ISBN 0-393-96798-0)

Journal Article Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Interpretations, ed. Richard E. Flathman and David Johnston. Pp. x + 381 (Norton Critical Editions in the History of Ideas). New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997. Paperback £6.95 (ISBN 0-393-96798-0) Get access M. A. Box M. A. Box University of Alaska Fairbanks Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 44, Issue 4, December 1997, Pages 559–560, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/44.4.559 Published: 01 December 1997

The Study of Modern Manuscripts: Public, Confidential, and Private

In this text, the author draws on 30 years of experience in editing the manuscripts of Shelley, Byron and others to offer insights into the scholarly use and analysis of post-medieval manuscripts. Reiman begins by distinguishing among the manuscript traditions of the Renaissance, Enlightenment and Romantic periods. He then sketches the historical developments that influenced both the changing nature of surviving manuscripts and the growth of interest in preserving the manuscript record. Over the course of the book's next four chapters, he discusses the nature and function of three classes of manuscript - the private or personal, the confidential or corporate, and the public. Citing a variety of examples from both published and unpublished sources, Reiman shows how past failures to distinguish among these three classes of manuscripts have misled editors and critics alike. In the course of the discussion, he engages such issues as the relative authority of manuscripts and first editions; Paul de Man's reading of The Triumph of Life; and the practice of substituting rejected early texts of Wordsworth's poems for the versions approved by the author. In the final chapter, he outlines a personalist poetics designed to counter the sterile abstractions that have come to dominate much theoretical debate on poetry and fiction. Donald H. Reiman is co-editor of and his Circle and of The Complete Poetry of Bysshe Shelley. He is the author or editor of more than 150 volumes on Shelley and the English Romantics, including Shelley's 'The Triumph of Life' - a Critical Study, Percy Bysshe Shelley - the Romantics Revived and Shelley's Poetry and Prose - a Norton Critical Edition.

Reviews

Journal Article Reviews Get access Carroll L (ed. D. J. Gray), Alice in Wonderland 2nd edn. Pp. viii + 408 (Norton Critical Editions). New York and London : W. W. Norton , 1992 . Paperbound £6.95. GILLIAM AVERY GILLIAM AVERY Oxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 40, Issue 4, December 1993, Page 562, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/40-4-562 Published: 01 December 1993