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Studies in Bibliography 56 (2003-2004) 1-44

Tanselle's "Editing without a Copy-Text":
Genesis, Issues, Prospects
Richard Bucci

At the opening panel of the 2001 conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship, some interesting remarks about copy-text were delivered by John Unsworth, a member of the Modern Language Association's Committee on Scholarly Editions (CSE). Unsworth said that he had originally planned to tell his audience that "the Greg-Bowers theory of editing" or "copy-text theory" had once enjoyed "hegemony within the CSE," but no longer did, owing to challenges from outside the Greg-Bowers school, where the focus was on other "periods, languages, and editorial circumstances." Unsworth submitted this thesis to Robert H. Hirst, the chair of the CSE at the time, for his thoughts, and reported receiving the following reply:

You seem to imply that all this change is coming from outside the hunkered down group of copy-text editors! . . . it has been chiefly copy-text editors over the decades who have insisted on refining and changing the application of copy-text theory. After all, Tom Tanselle is the only editor I know who's actually published an essay advocating "Editing without a Copy-Text." And long before that, Bowers published his essay on "Radiating Texts," that is, texts for which the very idea of a copy-text was inapplicable. So from my point of view, the hegemony of copy-text theory (both inside and outside the CSE) is mainly in the eye of the beholder, as opposed to the everyday practitioner. Practitioners have always sought to broaden or change everything from the "final intention" goal to (in Tanselle's case) the very idea that any one text should be automatically preferred in cases of doubt. 1

Unsworth was kind to pass on this private communication, since it contains many points worthy of deeper consideration. Hirst's phrase "hunkered [End Page 1] down group of copy-text editors" appropriately summons the false image some critics have projected of adherents of the editorial approach inspired by W. W. Greg's 1949 essay, "The Rationale of Copy-Text," and developed by Fredson Bowers—the better to dismiss them as relics of a by-gone age. This criticism ignores the rich practical experience of "copy-text editing" and the satisfying—one could even say exciting—theoretical developments it has engendered over the years. Hirst also names two outstanding moments in this experience when he mentions Bowers's encounter with what he called "radiating texts," and, most importantly, G. Thomas Tanselle's essay "Editing without a Copy-Text," which appeared in the pages of this journal in 1994. 2 This essay, which is indeed one of the most important writings on editing to appear in recent times, is concise and not intended to be exhaustive of its subject in and of itself. It stands, however, upon a great body of knowledge, having arrived on the morrow of a long period during which many literary scholars were deeply engaged both practically and theoretically with the Greg-Bowers-inspired idea of copy-text. Tanselle has been the most insightful and far-seeing participant in this collective engagement, and so his recommendation to "move beyond" Greg's "often useful but nevertheless inherently restrictive concept" (p. 2), so that editorial problems may be understood more immediately and with less technical prejudice, should arouse intense interest.

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Tanselle's essay focuses our attention on the point where Greg explicitly limits the role of editorial judgment, and then demonstrates that this seemingly modest restriction has had unexpected adverse consequences. We are reminded that Greg's "strong endorsement of editorial freedom" extends only to the text's substantives (Greg's term for the wording); the copy-text "accidentals" (his term for the spelling, punctuation, word division, and emphasis) are accepted almost automatically (p. 8). While Greg also insisted that the editor be free to emend either the substantives or the accidentals whenever there was cause to do so, his assumption that a copy-text was needed at all was...

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