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  • The Textual Condition of Nineteenth-Century Literature by Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small
  • Rachel Sagner Buurma (bio)
The Textual Condition of Nineteenth-Century Literature, by Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small; pp. 201. New York and London: Routledge, 2012, $128.00, £90.00.

In this co-authored book, a continuation of their explorations of what they identify as the problem of literary value after the theory era in Politics and Value in English Studies: A Discipline in Crisis (1993), Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small argue that recent practices of textual editing and (secondarily) material text scholarship manifest a troubling tendency to mute or defer questions of literary value. The approach to scholarly editing dominant in the last thirty years, they claim, values openness, multiplicity, and the preservation of versions and variants; the role of the editor, therefore, “is limited to providing readers with the materials which will enable them to make such judgments [about the preferable version of the work] for themselves” (viii). In this it stands opposed, as Small and Guy frame it, to the closure, stability, and author-centrism that characterized earlier scholarly editing. This recent school (exemplified for the authors by the work of Jerome J. McGann, David Greetham, and Peter Shillingsburg) finds its most extreme form in digital editions allowing the reader to choose what version of a given work she wishes to read. Such editions, Guy and Small claim, necessarily defer questions of meaning and, indeed, of value to the reader.

But, the argument continues, such textual editors do not merely renounce their evaluative responsibilities by attempting to discard what might be called “the work” in favor of “texts,” thereby deferring evaluative decisions to readers while remaining value-free themselves. For in seeking to extricate themselves from the traditional editorial function of deciding what defines the literary work—a canon-building process involving evaluative judgments about what the best version of the work might be—textual editors and other textual materialists have substituted the idea of merely presenting the reader with all possible versions. And yet, Guy and Small argue, these versions themselves must be fixed and identified, which returns the hapless textual editor inevitably to the question of what constitutes a literary work, with all of its attendant questions of literary value. The editor may as well, they suggest, accept the burden of making judgments about literary value from the beginning, given that she almost inevitably does so despite (what Guy and Small assume are) her own intentions.

In successive chapters on “The Novel,” “Poetry,” “Non-Fictional Prose,” and “Drama,” Guy and Small take up a series of especially thorny textual editing problems, in each case elucidating the challenges of settling on a definition of the work necessary to direct the practice of textual editing. (They base several key examples on the work of Oscar Wilde, drawing—no doubt—on their own extensive previous work on Wilde.) They end each chapter by noting that almost all current responses to such challenges defer the question of value by multiplying possibilities instead of limiting them. So their chapter on the novel examines publishing formats like Broadview Press’s Encore Editions and digital facsimiles of part-publications and magazine serializations in order to argue that such formats both seek to reproduce an historically specific Victorian reading experience and yet at the same time “deny that very historicity by presuming distinctions between past and present can be elided” (25). This chapter’s ensuing long examination of the various editorial approaches to Wilde’s famously multi-versioned The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and of Thomas Hardy’s much-revised Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) ends by suggesting that [End Page 330] it is not useful to the reader to have editors insist on the preservation of so many different textual embodiments of the same work.

This perceived split between the historicist practices of contemporary editing and the needs of the modern reader (who is imagined as having little interest in such historical questions) is strengthened in later chapters. The second chapter draws on work by Kathryn Ledbetter, Linda K. Hughes, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, and Linda H. Peterson on the importance of understanding Victorian...

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