Editing British and American Literature, 1880–1920: Papers Given at the Tenth Annual Conference on Editorial Problems, University of Toronto, November, 1974 ed. by Eric W. Domville (review)

HUMANITIES 433 tion; his Notes are admirably full and interesting, and make judicious use of both manuscript and published sources. There are two useful appendixes: a history of Gissing's revision of his early work, and a chronological list of his publications during his lifetime. Not being a Gissing scholar, I have concentrated on the technical aspects of Collie's book; literary critics and social historians may render a different judgment . Anyone who has suffered through the birthpangs of a descriptive bibliography knows the difficulties and dangers, the manifold opportunities for error in this agonizing form of compilation. Perfect bibliographies are as rare as perfect human beings. But a bibliography must, first and foremost, be useful, and must enable collectors, students, and bibliographers to identify the works of its subject. The faults of this one are such that this will be difficult. It is a matter for grave concern that the University Press of the largest University in Canada would publish a work riddled with such inconsistencies, omissions, and errors. Apart from the typographical errors (including two items labelled xlVb), and an index in which those titles of Gissing's works which begin with an article are listed under the article, there are many inaccuracies which could have been corrected by even modest editing. The Press has done Collie, his readers, and themselves a great disservice. (CHRISTINA DUFF STEWART) Eric W. Domville, editor. Edithlg British and American Literature, 1880- 1920.Papers Given at the Tenth Annual Conferen ce on Editorial Problems, University of Toronto, November, 1974. Garland Publishing. 98. $12.00 Perhaps the simplest way of describing this latest volume in the annual series of papers published by the Conference on Editorial Problems is to say that it continues both the broad range and the high quality of those which have previously appeared. Like most of its predecessors, it includes papers which differ greatly in the extent to which they explicitly take up the theoretical implications of whatever particular editorial problem is under discussion, and in this volume the most interesting contributions seem to me to be those which dwell less on theoretical matters but provide more straightforward expositions of practical editing problems and procedures. There is, for example, scarcely any explicit theory in Norman MacKenzie's paper on editing Hopkins, but he does provide a beautifully lucid account of the kinds of problems to be found in the tricky series of drafts, transcriptions, and revisions which resulted from the Hopkins-Bridges friendship - including a detailed (and for critics, cautionary) analysis of such minute cruxes as those in line 9 of 'The Windhover.' His discussion of the bibliographic uses of the Infra-red Image Converter will be of special interest to all but the very few textual scholars who have had personal experience with this improvement over 434 LEITERS IN CANADA 1976 photographic filters and bromide plates. Similarly, David Farmer convincingly demonstrates that no edition of Women in Love provides the text as Lawrence intended it, and in the process unravels some of the complex problems involving authorial motive and aesthetic judgment which an editor of that novel must face; and Michael Sidnell not only ably surveys the confused landscape of Yeatsian textual studies but also comments sensibly on the practical problems of editors facing the monumental disarray of Yeats's published and unpublished texts. But, like MacKenzie, Farmer and Sidnell avoid attempting to venture far into the realm of theory: neither Sidnell's suggestion for a 'grand comprehensive edition' of Yeats's work nor Fanner's decision to use Seltzer's edition of Women in Love as copy text ('the accidentals are least corrupt therein') seriously challenges conventional editorial wisdom. Not so the essays on problems in editing Henry james and Frank Norris by Maqbool Aziz and joseph Katz: both offer striking examples of I the special editorial difficulties posed by the james and Norris texts, but '. both also plunge headlong into one or another of those two black holes of modern editing - the confusions surrounding questions of authorial intention and choice of copy text. Unfortunately, although they develop striking (and often cogent) arguments, they were hampered by lack of space to deal adequately with the tangled theoretical questions...