Introduction

Introduction Using as its principal theme "Bibliographical Problems in American Fiction," the Pennsylvania State University Conference on Bibliography convened at University Park on November 29-30, December 1, 1973. The six papers which follow were presented at that meeting. Established in 1960, the Penn State Conference uses the term "bibliography" in its broadest context. In the six meetings held during this thirteen-year span, scholars from forty-two universities and nine major research libraries have discussed such problems as attribution of authorship, provenance, textual editing, palaeography, translation, annotation, cataloguing, the function of the course in bibliography in graduate study, and the application of electronic data-processing methods to various aspects of the study of literature and language. Areas of concentration have ranged in time from the Medieval era to the decade of the 1960's, and in subject focus from the aube to the theatre of the absurd. Old-spelling advocates have debated with editors who prefer modernized texts, structural critics with defenders of explication de texte, and linguists with each other in attempting to convince traditional critics that historical and structural linguistics have major contributions to make in the interpretation of literature. The six essays in this issue of Studies in American Fiction continue these traditions of debate and variety of approach. Philip Young adds new details to his continuing study of Hemingway's manuscripts and spices the account with a series of anecdotes, some of them autobiographical, often wryly but always entertainingly retold. Roger Stein's essay is a definitional one: how can we define a category called "American sea fiction" in the years before Fenimore Cooper? And Burton Pollin presents a wealth of new evidence culled from contemporary periodicals to correct the historical record of what has been assumed to be the response of critics and, implicitly, the public of Poe's day to the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Thomas Tanselle uses the dual viewpoint of descriptive bibliographer and textual scholar to call attention to and elucidate certain of the problems faced by the modern editor of Melville, not the least of which concerns the relationship between the American and English editions of White-Jacket, Moby Dick, and The Confidence-Man. Joseph Katz argues the need for perspective in examining the link between the rise of American literary realism and the rise and development of the book trade in post-Civil War America. And Lewis Leary concludes the series by detailing some 2 Introduction "troubles" that the modern student of Mark Twain has inherited from the "alternately lackadaisical and persnickety" attitude that that Innocent Abroad adopted in textual matters—with a side excursion into the problems left us by the exuberant and irreverent Diedrich Knickerbocker . There is no room to include with these essays the record of discussion that each one evoked when they were delivered as lectures, all of which was stimulating and some—like Lewis Leary's spontaneous and alliterative soubriquet describing the editor of the MLA International Bibliography and his dedicated staff—memorable. Yet such discussion, however lively and productive at the moment of occurrence, flattens when transcribed from tapes and reproduced in print: something it was not intended for and which cannot do it justice. These six papers, moreover, need no further support or elucidation. They stand strong, in and of themselves. Harrison T. Meserole, Chairman" The Pennsylvania State University Conference on Bibliography *Harrison T. Meserole, Professor of English at Penn State and Bibliographer-in-Chief of the Modern Language Association, is the editor of the MLA International Bibliography and of Seventeenth-Century News. Author of Seventeenth-Century American Poetry, he is now preparing two seventeenth-century American manuscripts for publication: David Dunster's Gospelmanna (1633) and Francis Daniel Pastorius' The Beehive (1696). ...