Norton Critical Edition Research Articles

Second Norton Critical Edition: T. S. Eliot: “The Waste Land” and Other Poems

Second Norton Critical Edition: T. S. Eliot: “The Waste Land” and Other Poems

A Norton Critical Edition: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises ed. by Michael Thurston

Reviewed by: A Norton Critical Edition: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises ed. by Michael Thurston Donald A. Daiker A Norton Critical Edition: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Edited by Michael Thurston. New York: Norton, 2022. 348 pp. Paper. $14.38. The Norton Critical Edition of The Sun Also Rises, edited by Michael Thurston, is welcome because of its illuminating textual annotations but disappointing because of its one-sided approach to the novel’s meanings and value. [End Page 116] In addition to the full, magnificently annotated text of Ernest Hemingway’s first and arguably finest novel, the Norton Critical Edition (hereafter NCE) includes biographical and autobiographical material, background pieces on postwar Paris, bullfighting, and literary influences, and a brief selection of letters. For criticism, the NCE provides contemporaneous reviews by Edmund Wilson, Allen Tate, and others followed by ten essays of “Modern Criticism.” The volume concludes with a useful Hemingway chronology and an uneven selected bibliography. If you are reading The Sun Also Rises for the first or fourteenth time, your best bet is the annotated NCE text. That’s because this 1926 Hemingway novel includes references and even whole conversations that are difficult and even impossible for twenty-first-century readers to comprehend. The competing editions, like the Hemingway Library Edition and trade paperbacks, offer no annotations at all. The Library of America edition edited by Robert W. Trogdon provides helpful annotations not as footnotes but hundreds of pages away in a section labeled “Notes.” Besides, the NCE notes are far more extensive and helpful. Whereas Trogdon says nothing about Robert Cohn’s “feeling of inferiority and shyness . . . on being treated as a Jew at Princeton” (5),1 Thurston tells us that “Princeton had the lowest number of Jewish students among the Ivy League universities” (5). Trogdon does not gloss the passage when young men arrive at the dancing club, but Thurston’s note would have been appreciated by my students: “Hemingway’s description suggests that the young men are homosexual. Jake’s subsequent reaction confirms this” (17). Trogdon ignores Jake’s reference to the “n***** drummer” at Zelli’s restaurant in Montmartre, but Thurston responds with an informative and nuanced mini essay (47). Following the exemplary model of the Hemingway Letters Project, the annotated NCE enlarges our experience and deepens our understanding of The Sun Also Rises. The NCE aptly includes what is perhaps the most famous letter from one American writer to another: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letter to Hemingway praising the novel he had read in manuscript but urging that its original opening be deleted because of its “sneers, superiorities and nose-thumbings” (195). Thurston also includes several relevant Hemingway letters but not some of the most significant: Hemingway’s letter to Fitzgerald cautioning that Sun is “not . . . at all for a child to read” (Letters vol. 3, 75); his letter to Canadian writer Morley Callaghan asserting that Sun “is not about sex” (Letters vol. 3, 112); and his letters to his editor Maxwell Perkins explaining why he cannot further reduce the book’s “profanity” (Letters vol. 3, 107), why it “is a great mistake to put real [End Page 117] people in a book” (Letters vol. 3, 110), why Sun is not “a jazz superficial story” (Letters vol. 3, 148), and why Gertrude Stein’s epigraph, “splendid bombast,” should not be taken seriously (Letters vol. 3, 158). Thurston’s well-written, informative, and lucid “Introduction” helps explain his choices of critical essays. For Thurston, Sun lacks anything like a moral code or set of values. Instead, he writes, readers “are invited to find meaning in the arduous achievement of technique” (xxi). Thus, it is Hemingway’s “stylistic achievement”—his “mastery of the sentence”—and not “moral behavior” (xx] that is central to the novel and best accounts for our enjoyment of it. If you had read only the ten chosen “Modern Criticism” essays, you would scarcely have known that the novel’s central relationship is between Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley. You would be largely unaware of the novel’s most important dramatic scenes—the bedroom scene in Paris, the seduction scene in Pamplona, and the scenes in a bedroom, bar...

Middle English Romances: Authoritative Texs, Sources and Backgrounds, Criticism, selected and ed. by Stephen H. A. Shepherd. 2nd ed. A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 2023 (orig. 1995), xxix, 825 pp.

The second edition of this hefty tome in paperback is a good indicator that research and teaching of Middle English literature have gone through profound changes, moving well beyond the ‘classical’ canon of Langland, Chaucer and Hoccleve. Late medieval English romances receive increasing attention, and this for good reasons. In contrast to many other similar anthologies, Stephen H. A. Shepherd, Professor of English at Loyola Marymount University, presents only complete works, based on a critical edition of the relevant manuscript version. This makes the present edition also highly useful for research, although the primary purpose of this book and the entire series aims to make this literature more accessible for student readers. This is demonstrated through the heavy glossing on the side of the text, offering practical translations, and an extensive apparatus at the bottom. The first note always gives the source of the respective text, such as in the case of Havelok, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 108, fols. 204r–219v. Subsequent notes offer textual interpretations. Unfortunately, those notes are in a very small font size and barely readable. This minimalization comes as a result of the editor’s effort to provide a maximum of romances and explanations. The 1995 edition contained seven complete romances, to which now are added eight more. Those are altogether (* marks those in the previous version): Havelok (*), Ywain and Gawain (*), Of Kyng Robert of Cisyle, Hou Pride dude Him Begyle, Sir Orfeo (*), Sir Launfal (*), Athelston, The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne (*), The Weddyng of Syr Gawen and Dame Ragnell for Helpyng of Kyng Arthoure (*), The Grene Knight, The Sege off Melayne (*), and The Taill of Rauf Coilyear, How He Harbreit King Charlis.

A Norton Critical Edition: Ernest Hemingway In Our Time ed. by J. Gerald Kennedy

A Norton Critical Edition: Ernest Hemingway In Our Time ed. by J. Gerald Kennedy

New Editions of The Great Gatsby

<i>New Editions of</i> The Great Gatsby

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

The Hawthorne Society, The Scarlet Letter, and Me

The Hawthorne Society, <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>, and Me

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Reviewed by: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens David Paroissien Charles Dickens. A Tale of Two Cities. Edited by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, W. W. Norton, 2020. Norton Critical Editions. Pp. xliii + 395. $13. 75; £5.95. ISBN 978-0-393-26423-4. A Tale of Two Cities occupies a distinctive place in the Dickens canon. The novel has a dual role, combining the historian's vatic voice with that of a narrator using "popular and picturesque means" to advance the story of a young orphan summoned to France on the basis of "some new intelligence" sent to London. Contradictory ends also characterize its composition. While various threads have their origin as far back as 1847 and indicate a long gestation, Dickens found himself, a decade later, rushed to get the novel underway. As the joint owner of All the Year Round, he had to move quickly with an original story to give his new journal a good send off, a challenge further complicated for personal and professional reasons. In July 1858 Dickens had separated from his wife and shortly afterwards acted to dissolve his partnership with Bradbury and Evans, publishers of Household Words. That same year he also recast himself as a paid reader from his books. Taken together, these changes and other obligations formed the background against which Dickens struggled to "please [himself] with the opening of [his] story" (Letters 9: 30). Crucially, they also play into the informational context Norton Critical Editions characteristically supply. A remark by Claire Tomalin in Charles Dickens: A Life (2011) throws light on the challenge editors face. We might note in passing that Tomalin has little respect for Dickens's historical fiction. In a dismissive remark about Barnaby Rudge (1841), Dickens's ambitious project set against the Gordon Riots of the 1780s, Tomalin sees little beyond "crude melodrama," "insipid" young women, and "absurd" plotting. Overall, she concludes, the novel fails to sustain readers on the grounds that history was not Dickens's "territory" (122). Nearly two decades later, according to Tomalin, not much seems to have changed. A Tale of Two Cities (1859) manifests many of the same hallmarks. Its plot is "too long drawn out and elaborate," the whole is peopled by "emblematic puppets" of good and evil, and awkwardly welded to a "somewhat mechanical" attempt to expose the horrors suffered by the poor in France. Perversely, however, Tomalin thought the novel could work as "entertainment," one route to which is to note its anachronisms. [End Page 189] "It took John Sutherland," she notes, to point out that Sydney Carton's use of chloroform in the prison scene, when he swaps his identity with Charles Darnay, occurred "decades before its use was known" (308–09). Impressed by Sutherland's playful exposure of the use of "ether anaesthesia," a wonderful drug "fully sixty years ahead of the British medical establishment" (Sutherland 153, 155), Tomalin concludes: his "clever essay should be reprinted with every new edition, because it adds to the entertainment, and A Tale of Two Cities was intended as entertainment" (309, 466 n. 13). Readers who encounter the Norton Critical Edition of A Tale of Two Cities will welcome this addition to the series. Not only does the volume ignore Tomalin's counsel; it injects new life into old, tired discussions. Of course the novel contains "puzzles" that defy narrative plausibility; of course Dickens, as he freely admitted, drew on Carlyle's The French Revolution: A History (1837) when he referred to "the condition of the French people before or during the Revolution" (5; Preface). But rather than characterize the novel as "an adventure story set in the second half of the eighteenth century, […] inspired by Carlyle's study" and "researched" under his guidance (Tomalin 307), why not examine links between Carlyle's historiography and Dickens's own practice? Why not grant Dickens an interest in historiography and overlook the condescension Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities have customarily received? Even a cursory glance at this edition supports the contention that Dickens took the depiction of historical events in fiction seriously. A generous selection of Contexts comprised of a mixture of Dickens's own writing and excerpts from...

Late-Life Love: A Memoir by Susan Gubar

Reviewed by: Late-Life Love: A Memoir by Susan Gubar Arthur W. Frank (bio) Susan Gubar. Late-Life Love: A Memoir. New York: Norton, 2019. 352 pp. Hardcover, $25.95. If Late-Life Love were only a study of novels, poetry, and films in which persons of a certain age fall in love, then it would not be reviewed in this journal. The book's subtitle opens its second strand, which is a memoir of a period of time—maybe a year but it's vague—in which Susan Gubar and her partner who is called only Don (check the new Norton Critical Edition of Pride and Prejudice to learn his surname) experience multiple injuries and illnesses (more his than hers), move out of the home where they built lives together when they married in late middle age, and through all this, keep themselves in love with each other. As these two strands entwine—art and life informing each other—a third emerges: reading as healing. In her weaving of these three strands, I believe Gubar opens up a new imagination of writing in this field of literature and medicine. Some disclosure is required before proceeding. I have been in contact with Gubar since the publication of her 2012 Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer, and I contributed a promotional comment to her 2016 book, Reading and Writing Cancer: How Words Heal. She and I are members of a very small club: those who have written memoirs of illness and then gone on to write more widely about illness and health care. With apologies for whomever I forget, she and I may currently be the only active members of this club, which affects how I read her. Before Gubar began writing about cancer, she was a distinguished literary critic, but tracing the continuity of her long career exceeds my scope. She is most widely read today in her Living With Cancer blog in the New York Times. A future entry in that series discusses my work. All is now disclosed. Late-Life Love is less a narrative than a chronicle. The memoir sections follow a narrative logic of earlier events leading to later ones. In the core narrative, Don suffers a fall, then is injured again, and Susan and Don realize they can no longer live in their beloved home, which they call the Inverness. The Inverness is described only in fragments, but it is very much a character in the story. The chronicle includes other things that happened and had to be responded to but, as Gubar writes, "They just happened to happen simultaneously" (305). Gubar's writing plays with the difficulty of distinguishing in life which events are part of some narrative order with preceding causes and outcomes that follow from them, and which just happened to happen then. An example is her repeated refrain of distress over the withdrawal from [End Page 226] her life of her oldest friend. The friend appears only in flashbacks from happier days and in quotations from cryptic notes she now sends to Susan, so we are left guessing what precipitated the break. Susan is left guessing. As we experience this uncertainty with Susan, we sort out the complexity of which events fit life narratives. Susan reads to sort out relationships like hers with Don, and how specific issues of late-life love reflect questions of the continuity and discontinuity of old age with the rest of a life. The preceding paragraph switches outrageously between referring to Gubar, the author, and Susan, a character in the story. When Gubar introduces Simone de Beauvoir's writing on love in later life, she describes Beauvoir as "a real person but also a character" (13). The whole book engages that duality. I can't tell which came first: Gubar or Susan. That's another lesson about life and narration. How the memoir depicts Susan living in what I would call fragile survivorship is its most distinctly medical contribution. There must be other follow-up memoirs of illness, sequels that trace ongoing effects of how illness continues to be part of life long after diagnosis and initial treatment, but I have seen only short...

The Norton Chaucer ed. by David Lawton

Reviewed by: The Norton Chaucer ed. by David Lawton David Raybin David Lawton, ed. The Norton Chaucer. New York: W. W. Norton, 2019. Pp. xii, 1196. $62.50 cloth; $35.00 e-book. Chaucer scholars and students alike may be grateful to David Lawton for his composition of a much-needed and reasonably priced classroom-friendly edition of Chaucer's complete works. The sturdy, hardback Norton Chaucer provides reliable texts and helpful introductory material, and it is admirably user-friendly for both students and a general audience. Pages are easy on the eyes, presenting Chaucer's poetry and prose in single columns and a large and crisp font. Marginal glosses are placed at the side of each page, with explanatory notes at the bottom. Lawton's lightly modernized texts are easily legible, and the presentation is comfortable enough for sitting back in a chair and reading. As best as I can tell, the only other edition of the complete works currently in print is Oxford University Press's 2008 paperback reissue of the 1987 Riverside Chaucer, available in Britain but not for sale in the United States or Canada. Thus, for North Americans who wish to read all of Chaucer, the book is a necessity. British readers may also prefer Norton, as the Riverside paperback's minuscule print and back-of-volume notes are difficult to use for many readers. It must be acknowledged that the Norton Chaucer is not a replacement for Riverside as a standard scholarly edition. The glories of Riverside are its voluminous explanatory and textual notes, detailed (albeit now out-dated) discussions of the critical tradition, and an authoritative list of primary texts. In contrast, Norton includes no textual notes and relatively few explanatory notes, treats the critical tradition only minimally, presents a selective three-page bibliographical note that ignores primary sources, and prints only fifty lines from the G-text of the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women (those related to "Chaucer's library" [1117]). Recommendations for reading about Chaucer's life are limited to Derek Pearsall's 1992 biography and two articles by Christopher Cannon on raptus and rape (though a careful eye will find Marion Turner's massive Chaucer: A European Life mentioned in relation to "Chaucer's place as a European writer and thinker" [51]). Norton's twenty-six-page glossary hardly compares with Riverside's hundred pages of Middle English words and seventeen pages of proper names. What the Norton Chaucer does offer is a splendid volume for classroom use. Lawton's General Introduction (fifty-three pages) speaks lucidly of Chaucer's life, reading, afterlives, and reception; of the urban and national [End Page 421] political and social environments that he inhabited; and of the manuscripts and principal editions of his various works. An additional section (eleven pages) offers a cogent treatment of Chaucer's language and meter, and a rationale for mild modernization of the manuscript spellings. Brief descriptive analyses introduce each of Chaucer's longer works, the different parts (fragments) of the Canterbury Tales, and the shorter poems. This presentation facilitates "reading Chaucer in his original language" by recognizing that "nonspecialist readers … may need less apparatus and more help than standard scholarly editions provide" (45). A CD included with the book introduces readers to the sounds of Chaucer's Middle English. Twenty-nine admirably clear recordings from across Chaucer's work—by Lawton, Jennifer Brown, Ruth Evans, and Elizabeth Robertson—capture the energy and many voices of Chaucer's poetry. What matters most in a Chaucer edition is, of course, the quality of its texts, and Lawton's texts are reliable. He has reedited "[e]very line of Chaucer's poetry, consulting manuscripts, [E. Talbot] Donaldson's text [in the 1958 Chaucer's Poetry]), and the decisions of other editors" (ix), including light adaptation of Kathryn Lynch's Norton Critical Edition of the dream poems. Chaucer's prose texts are newly edited by Jennifer Arch. Following on Donaldson's lead, Lawton has rethought punctuation and modernized spelling, though not to the extent of his predecessor, and he has retained the traditional Canterbury Tales line numbering by part instead of Donaldson's separate numbering of each tale...

The Cambridge Companion to Dracula, edited by Roger Luckhurst

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to Dracula ed. by Roger Luckhurst Nicholas Daly (bio) The Cambridge Companion to Dracula, edited by Roger Luckhurst; pp. xvi + 219. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018, £54.99, £17.99 paper, $69.99, $22.99 paper. They stab him with their steely knives, but they just cannot kill that Transylvanian beast. Count Dracula fails utterly in his mission to conquer England in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel: forced to flee the country, he hightails it for Castle Dracula, but just as his castle lair is within reach, he is apprehended and reduced to vampire dust by the Kukri and bowie knives of Jonathan Harker and Quincey Morris, and the magical power of the setting sun. If the Count is defeated, though, it seems fair to say that the book that bears his name now holds sway over not just England, but the Anglophone world more generally, and many other linguistic territories besides. Its offspring are legion, and not only are there a host of direct adaptations and more loosely-linked fictions, dramas, and arcade games, but there have also been innumerable Dracula-tinged spin-offs, including Halloween costumes, sugary snacks, and other merchandise; in my 1970s childhood, I licked a HB's mixed-fruit flavor "Dracula" ice lolly long before I ever encountered the book or even saw a film version. At the other end of the consumer market, the Count also now sleeps contentedly in the consecrated ground of literary respectability. This canonical status was not conferred overnight, and one could point to a few landmarks along the way: for instance, Leonard Wolf's 1975 Annotated Dracula, David Punter's discussion of the novel in The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (1980), Phyllis A. Roth's 1982 critical study of Bram Stoker, the Oxford World's Classics edition of 1983, and the 1996 Norton critical edition. And now we have The Cambridge Companion to Dracula, edited by Roger Luckhurst, who also edited the most recent Oxford World's Classics Dracula. Its appearance can hardly be a source of surprise; since its rediscovery, there has been a veritable frenzy of critical activity around Stoker's bloody tale. The initial 1980s Marxist (Franco Moretti) and [End Page 496] feminist (Phyllis A. Roth and Carol Senf, also a contributor to this collection) accounts were followed by a dizzying array of others, so much so that I have sometimes suggested to colleagues that the very last drop of interpretive blood has now been sucked from Stoker's text. This latest addition to the market, however, shows that there is plenty of life in the old monster yet, and Luckhurst has assembled a band of critics who seem more than able for this particular vampire hunt. New critical approaches are explored here, and some older ones receive a new lease on life. Importantly, I think, the contributors do not confine themselves to the novel itself, but also range freely around it. Recognizing that Stoker's late-Victorian gothic tale is assembled from the disjecta membra of earlier material, several essays here explore Dracula's literary and historical antecedents, while others deal with the many offspring of the novel: notwithstanding Van Helsing's pronouncement that vampires cast no shadows, this particular monster has cast a very long shadow indeed in popular culture. I cannot do full justice to the range of individual essays here, so I will pick out just a few highlights. In the section on Dracula's roots there are two strong pieces by Nick Groom and William Hughes. In his fascinating survey of earlier attitudes to vampires, Groom reveals the extent to which vampirism was often treated quite matter-of-factly by European writers in the eighteenth century. He also notes, however, that at least one contemporary British commentator, Caleb D'Anvers (pseudonym of Nicholas Amhurst), argued in 1732 that reports of blood-sucking monsters from continental countries should be read figuratively rather than literally, suggesting that such stories contained "a secret satire upon the Administration of those countries" (21). Long before Karl Marx, then, the rich representative possibilities of vampirism were put to use...

The Year's Work in American Humor Studies, 2017

The Year's Work in American Humor Studies, 2017

Conradiana: A Journal of Joseph Conrad Studies

ConradianaA Journal of Joseph Conrad Studies John G. Peters, Editor, Jana M. Giles, Managing Editor, Anna Bounds, Melissa Jackson, Karla Robertson, and Tia Smith, Editorial Interns Conradiana, an international journal devoted to and welcoming essays on all aspects and periods of the life and works of Joseph Conrad, is published three times yearly in the spring, summer, and fall. If possible, essays should cite Conrad’s works within the text. Essays must cite a major authoritative edition of Conrad’s works (such as the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad; the Uniform edition of the Collected Works of Joseph Conrad [Doubleday or Dent edition]; or the most recent editions of the Modern Library, Broadview, Norton Critical, Oxford, or Penguin editions of Conrad’s works), as approved by the General Editor of Conradiana. Submissions should be double-spaced throughout and follow the MLA Manual of Style. Manuscripts may be submitted electronically (preferred) as a Microsoft Word file (or in a compatible format) to John G. Peters, Editor, at jgpeters@unt.edu. Authors preferring to submit a hard copy may do so by sending their work to the Editor at 1155 Union Circle, #311307, Department of English, University of North Texas, Denton, TX 76203-5017. Correspondence should be directed to the Editor, except in the case of subscriptions and other business matters, which should be addressed to Texas Tech University Press sales office, Lubbock, TX 79409-1037. Books for review should be sent to Ellen Burton Harrington, Book Review Editor, Department of English, University of South Alabama, 5991 USA Drive, N., Room 240, Mobile, AL 36688 (eharrington@southalabama.edu). Subscriptions are $64.00 for individuals and $120.00 for institutions. Conradiana is indexed in Abstracts in English Studies, American Humanities Index, Index to Book Reviews in the Humanities, MLA International Bibliography, and Twentieth-Century Literature. COVER: Detail from “Joseph Conrad Listening to Music,” etching by Walter Tittle, courtesy of the Rare Book Room, Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Texas Tech University. This journal is a member of , the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Conradiana—ISSN 0010-6356 Spring/Summer 2019, Volume 51, Numbers 1–2 (published three times a year) Texas Tech University Copyright © 2018 Texas Tech University Press Box 41037 Lubbock, Texas [End Page i] Copyright © 2019 Texas Tech University Press

A Mandate Fulfilled (1965–2017): The Writings of Herman Melville

A Mandate Fulfilled (1965–2017): The Writings of Herman Melville Hershel Parker On 27 October 2017, I could have lined up paperbacks of the fifteen volumes of The Writings of Herman Melville. After 13 February 2018, I could have lined up all the hardbacks on my upside-down mantel above the door to my study, this way: Click for larger view View full resolution I have tried to fake two more spines for lost volumes that Melville completed, The Isle of the Cross (to go between Pierre and some of the short stories, ideally, or the next book, Israel Potter) and Poems (between The Confidence-Man and Battle-Pieces). Here is my rough seventeen-volume array: Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 14] Why start off this way? Because few people who love Melville have come round to visualizing anything close to the trajectory of his literary career as he lived it, the career in which he tried to publish two lost volumes, The Isle of the Cross and Poems. The final section of my Historical Note to Published Poems was “The Trajectory of Melville’s Literary Career.” As I said in the Billy Budd volume (13, but the last of the fifteen to be published), “A major purpose of this Historical Note is to reveal more of the trajectory of Melville’s career by providing clearer glimpses of some of the arcs that have been unknown.” This forum gives me the opportunity to emphasize how much remains to be absorbed, even after we have found so much, and to acknowledge that much more will be discovered. In the early summer of 1965, the Office of Education in the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare gave General Editor Harrison Hayford, Associate General Editor Hershel Parker, and Bibliographical Editor G. Thomas Tanselle a mandate to produce fifteen volumes of The Writings of Herman Melville, headquartered at Northwestern University and the Newberry Library (abbreviated NN). In addition to an authoritative text accompanied by textual and bibliographical evidence, the volumes were to include Historical Notes on such things as accounts of the composition, publication, reception, and later critical history of a book, most to be written by professors from other universities who had published on Melville. As it turned out, Melville’s works did not present as many complicated textual situations as did some books in other editions of American writers undertaken about the same time. W. W. Greg’s “Rationale of Copy-Text” seemed to work well, although it was applied a little too arbitrarily once or twice (as in White-Jacket). Starting in 1964 Hayford and I had collated the American Moby-Dick against the English The Whale for the Norton Critical Edition (NCE), finding that some words in the English edition were Melville’s corrections of mistakes in the American text (where his handwriting was mis-copied) and a few were his additions. Making multiple collations was necessary, for if a collator blinked a dazzling Melville word in the English edition might go undetected. This is an American passage: “Nor, will the tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest sweep and direct swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally so important in his art, as the one now alluded to.” Melville’s correction in the English edition, “direst swing,” ranks in significance with the correction he pointed out to Sophia Hawthorne in his essay on Mosses—not “same madness of vital truth” but “sane madness.” For the 1967 NCE of Moby-Dick (which later flowed into the NN), Hayford and I made textual decisions on the basis of collations of the two early editions, aware all the while that Melville’s handwriting was regularly [End Page 15] misconstrued, even by his wife and sisters. In his contributions to the Literary World, we had Melville’s manuscript with which to correct the printed text, and in the “Extracts” in Moby-Dick, we saw in working on the NCE and in the still more comprehensive checking of Melville’s sources for the 1988 NN edition (done with Tanselle’s help) unsettling evidence of how many misreadings must have been in his books where no...

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett

Reviewed by: The Expedition of Humphry Clinkerby Tobias Smollett Rivka Swenson T obiasS mollett. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, 2nded., ed. Evan Gottlieb. New York: W. W. Norton, 2015. Pp. xv + 552. $13.48. New editions make a difference; indeed they do as much to shape the course of the conversation as many a monograph, journal issue, or volume of essays. When a formerly unknown or forgotten "old book" sees a modern edition for the first time, suddenly scholars start writing about it, students start reading it, and the book becomes part of the conversation for the long term. And yet, university administrators tend to devalue the work of editing primary texts, perhaps especially those that are designed in large part for classroom teaching, and other scholars may be less likely to review [End Page 198]editions when so many monographs and essay collections need reviewing. This is unfortunate because well-done editions are what every scholar-teacher both wants and needs, and we owe it to ourselves, our colleagues, and our students to acknowledge in print the enormous amount of work (some inspired, some scholarly, some pedagogical, some mere drudgery) that goes into performing the priceless service of editing primary texts. Clinkeris not unknown, and it may be a stretch to say it has been forgotten, but Smollett has been generally neglected by critics in recent decades, especially in comparison to his peers (Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and, more recently, reclaimed authors such as Eliza Haywood), a fact all the more shocking in light of Smollett's prominence and popularity in his own time, his influence on the other major contemporary novelists, and indeed his contribution to the rise of the novel. Additionally, while Smollett is not the first Scot to have written vernacular prose fiction, he is Scotland's first novelist qua novelist. While Clinkerhas not been neglected by editors (see, for instance, editions from University of Georgia Press [1990], Penguin [2008], and Oxford Classics [2009]), the last Norton Critical Edition appeared some thirty-five years ago. Mr. Gottlieb's new edition of Clinker, the text of which is based on the previous Norton Critical Edition but which corrects several of its typographical errors, stands to revitalize Smollett studies by making this classic text—immensely popular in its own time, too little read in ours—freshly available, in the second decade of the twenty-first century to a new generation of readers. And what a wonderful service that is: Clinker, Smollett's final and arguably his finest novel is a book that frankly deserves to find new readers under any cover it can. May we hope Smollett's other novels will be next? Impressively, the edition's footnotes are as generous in number—very few pages pass without a footnote, or, more typically, footnotes, plural—as they are pithily useful to readers of all ranges. The footnotes for page 49, for "fizzogmony," "Harry King's Row" / "Crashit" / "Hottogon" / "Bloody Buildings," "pennorth," and "flegm" / "farthing" are representative: 1. Physiognomy, i.e., facial features and appearance. 2. Probably Harlequin's row, so named for its mix of brick and stone facades. "Crashit": likely the Royal Crescent. "Hottogon": the Octagon Chapel in Milsom Street, finished in 1676 [ sic], which was a fashionable place of worship. "Bloody Buildings": likely the Bladud Buildings, named after Bath's legendary founder and located in Broad Street. 3. I.e., a penny's worth, meaning a very small amount of something. 4. A variation on the proverb "not worth a brass farthing." A farthing was a coin worth one-quarter of a British penny. "Flegm": i.e., phlegm, one of the four bodily humors, associated with calmness and dispassion. While this edition takes a different tack than some of its competitors (by excluding, for instance, a glossary of Win's linguistic foibles), almost every page has two to four such footnotes, carefully rendered, like Mr. Gottlieb's judicious Preface, to enlighten Smollett's twenty-first-century readers. The other accompanying material is no less useful. The "Backgrounds" and "Contexts" section does good things within a tight compass just shy of twenty [End Page 199]pages. A few helpful pages here, a...

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville

Reviewed by: Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville Christine A. Wooley HERMAN MELVILLE Moby-Dick; or, The Whale Ed. Hershel Parker. New York: Norton, 2018. xv + 706 pp. The third Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick is a testament to love and scholarship. It expands the work of the second NCE by assembling materials—biographical insights, critical reactions, and histories of the novel’s cultural impact—that offer readers, as its preface announces, “the fullest storehouse of factual riches and, just as important, of incitements to the appreciative imagination” (xv). As editor, Parker presents the legacy of Melville’s most passionate readers and connects these reactions, expressed in both creative and critical work, to the still-growing realm of facts about Melville, which “frees the imagination to speculate reasonably about Melville’s own creative processes and achievements” (xv). Parker intends the third edition’s “factual riches” and the ideas they (reasonably) generate to reach a broad audience of scholars, students, and nonacademic readers. These riches are presented in footnotes that aid both novice and expert readers, as well as in the revised “Contexts” and “Criticism” sections that follow the text of the novel. Parker introduces “Contexts” with a captivating set of accounts detailing Melville’s “formidable” (421) abilities as a public storyteller. In the subsections that follow—both “Whaling and Whalecraft” and “Before Moby-Dick: International Controversy over Melville” are carried over from the second NCE—Parker provides new authorial attributions and an 1846 obituary for Melville’s brother Gansevoort. In the obituary, Gansevoort’s traveling companion, Captain E. Knight, recounts Gansevoort’s justification of the United States’ claim on Oregon as a “birth-right” essential to transpacific and transatlantic trade (464). Pointing to a globe, Gansevoort remarked that on one side of the Atlantic was a “little speck called Europe” and on the other “a smaller speck . . . called New England” (464). Nevertheless, he doubted that “any American can carefully examine the map of our globe, and not feel a gratitude and just pride at seeing the geographical position our country holds” (464). The phrasing made me turn to “Nantucket,” where Melville seems to play off of Gansevoort’s image of New England as a speck in order to question US imperial ambitions. Ishmael describes Nantucketers as [End Page 133] “so many Alexanders” who “issu[e] from their ant-hill in the sea” (60) and then declares, “Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s” (60–61). For those teaching Moby-Dick, the opportunity to juxtapose these passages illustrates both a contrast in perspectives on American expansion and the impact of literary language. Ishmael’s elevation of the Nantucketer separates their oceanic expeditions from more mundane, land-bound pursuits, leading students to consider how Melville transforms ideas through the figures that represent them. When one of Gansevoort’s “specks” becomes an island “ant-hill” of “many Alexanders,” what becomes of the presumptions behind American imperial aspirations? “Contexts” also features some small changes that refine the argument this section makes for the impact of both facts and “incitements to the appreciative imagination” (xv). While the second NCE’s “Analogues and Sources” section features work by twentieth-century critics as well as nineteenth-century writers, the third presents us with “Sources of and Influences on Moby-Dick” and hews closer to nineteenth-century voices that demonstrate a more direct influence on the novel. In addition to material from Owen Chase, J. N. Reynolds, and Melville himself (excerpts that appear in the second NCE), we get Melville’s annotated list of the Acushnet crew and a summary of Melville’s sources for the notes in his Shakespeare. This attention to Melville’s marginalia is not new; the second edition excerpts Geoffrey Sanborn’s 1992 essay presenting the discovery that Melville’s “most famous notes” (543) on Shakespeare are from “Superstition and Knowledge” (an article published in the London Quarterly Review in 1823). The third edition, however, provides readers with a list, not an essay: just quotations from “Superstition and Knowledge” followed by...

A Brief History of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition

A Brief History of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition G. Thomas Tanselle and Meaghan Fritz The fifteen-volume Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, completed in the fall of 2017 with the publication of “Billy Budd, Sailor” and Other Uncompleted Writings, had its beginnings in the early 1960s as part of a broad academic movement. In 1962 a series of conferences was held under the auspices of the American Literature Group of the Modern Language Association of America, responding to a widespread recognition among American literature scholars of the need for reliable texts of the major American writers. The result was the establishment in early 1963 of a Center for Editions of American Authors as an MLA committee with several functions: to promote responsible editorial standards for producing unmodernized texts reflecting their authors’ intentions; to secure grants that would assist in paying for the research involved and then to allocate the money to individual editions; and to provide an inspection service that would review editions before publication and allow them to include an emblem reading “An Approved Text” if they met the required standards of editing and presentation of evidence. In the summer of 1963, a few months after the CEAA was set up, it began holding a series of fifteen planning sessions for individual editions. Through the advocacy of Harrison Hayford, a Northwestern University English professor and Melville scholar who was a member of the original CEAA committee, the first of those sessions was devoted to Melville. Hayford then proceeded to work out an agreement for the sponsorship and publication of a Melville edition among Northwestern University, the Newberry Library, and Northwestern University Press; and he oversaw grant applications, where the textual situation was summarized this way: “The reasons for the urgency in Melville’s case are readily stated. Melville is now widely regarded as our greatest imaginative writer. . . . Yet there is no scholarly complete edition of his works. Indeed, the only relatively complete edition, published in London in 1922–1924, is [End Page 9] available only in the major libraries, and is in any case not textually reliable; its textual principles are indeterminate, and no effort was made to find and follow Melville’s own intentions—spelling, for example, was completely Anglicized. At present, scholars, along with classroom teachers and the common reader, must piece together Melville’s works from a motley assortment of uncertainly reliable separate editions. The respectably scholarly editions among them were prepared on various textual principles and are not in any case readily identifiable by nonspecialists. Teachers are likely unwittingly to assign a bowdlerized Typee, an abridged Moby-Dick, or a garbled Billy Budd.” Official word of the award of a grant to the Melville edition from the United States Office of Education (in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare) came in early 1965. (The CEAA’s first grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities did not arrive for another year; and because the Melville edition had already received funds, it was not included among the eight editions, involving 150 scholars and eight university presses, to which the $300,000 grant was allocated: those for Crane, Emerson, Hawthorne, Howells, Irving, Thoreau, Mark Twain, and Whitman.) With a grant in hand, the Melville edition could proceed under the editorial team Hayford had already established. He was to be General Editor, assisted by two of his former students: Hershel Parker as Associate General Editor and G. Thomas Tanselle as Bibliographical Editor. Hayford had recently completed (in 1962) a complex editorial project with Merton M. Sealts, Jr., a landmark edition of Billy Budd, Sailor that included the first careful transcription of Melville’s uncompleted manuscript; he and Parker had already started work on the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick (which was published in 1967); and Tanselle had begun research and writing on American publishing history, descriptive bibliography, and editorial theory. The editorial procedure recommended by the CEAA, and followed by the Melville edition, was derived from W. W. Greg’s 1950 essay “The Rationale of Copy-Text,” as adapted by Fredson Bowers for use in connection with nineteenth-century writings. (The CEAA did not set it out in published form until...

New Norton Critical Editions of Four American Literary Classics

New Norton Critical Editions of Four American Literary Classics

Sara Ahmed. Living a Feminist Life. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017. 299 pp.

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe CI ReviewSara Ahmed. Living a Feminist Life. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017. 299 pp.Susan FraimanSusan Fraiman Search for more articles by this author Susan Fraiman is professor of English at the University of Virginia. Her most recent book, Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins (2017), takes unconventional and precarious homemakers as the basis for a new feminist theory of domesticity. Other books include Cool Men and the Second Sex (2003) and Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (1993). She is the editor of Northanger Abbey: Norton Critical Edition (2004) and coeditor with Rita Felski of a special issue of New Literary History entitled “In the Mood” (Summer 2012).PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 44, Number 4Summer 2018 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/698177 Views: 1085Total views on this site © 2018 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings, by Leland S. Person

<i>The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings</i>, by Leland S. Person