On the Digital Mabbott Poe: "Source-Research," Text Editing, and Media History

This article introduces its readers to Mabbott Poe, a digital resource based on the research papers of Thomas Ollive Mabbott, the editor of the three-volume Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. It argues that a digital resource like Mabbott Poe, which exhibits a text editor's research process rather than the texts and papers of an author, encourages its users to reconstruct the creative act of text making as an act of interpretation that merits critical appreciation as well as critique. Because Mabbott learned text editing before the ascent of Greg-Bowers copy-text theory in the mid–twentieth century, his research process lacks a coherent theory and may seem idiosyncratic to us today. Yet Mabbott's editing method is an opportunity for humanists to reflect on the history of their own practices. The complex traditionalism reflected in his process—a mix of philology and explorations into extra-canonical sources—makes him an unlikely though compelling forebear of cultural studies. In three parts, this article addresses Mabbott's complicated character, his relevance to current theories of text editing, and the media-historical perspective facilitated by the digital remediation of his papers.