The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies: Scholarly Editing and Book History by Paul Eggert (review)

Are scholarly editions of literary texts arguments addressed to readers, as Paul Eggert proposes? Or—Samuel Johnson's "Let us now be told no more of the dull duty of an editor" ringing in their ears—do editors aspire to be more like window washers whose meticulous labors leave no trace (Eggert 2019, v)? Both, of course, depending on the text, context, occasion, and readership on behalf of whom the edition is undertaken. But in this critical moment for literary studies, with library budgets slashed, scholarly presses under severe economic constraint, and few new positions to replenish the ranks of literary scholars and critics, the legacy of modern textual criticism seems at some risk of being buried, even as the massive shift from print to digital media presents new challenges. After a golden age of modern scholarly print editions fostered in large part by the establishment of the MLA Center for Editions of American Authors (CEAA) and Center for Scholarly Editions (CSE) in the 1960s and 1970s, textual editors confront the expansive possibilities, challenges, limitations, effects, and implications of digital editions.

In a 2012 article in this journal, Amy E. Earhart surveys the uneven borderlands between the Greg-Bowers-Tanselle editing methodology (see Boydston 1991, 141n67) and the digital medium, from editorial skepticism towards the consequences of reducing literary treasures embodied in material artifacts to ephemeral ones and zeros to the groundbreaking brilliance of the Electronic Beowulf, the prizewinning Blake Archive, and the superb Lili Elbe Digital Archive. "Textual studies theories, forms, practices, and methodologies have been and are interwoven into the digital humanities", Earhart writes; indeed, "There is good reason to consider textual studies a central pillar of digital humanities work" (Earhart 2012, 24–5). Yet, while scholarly editors engage in intensive, fine-grained debate on how best to conceive and enact "best practices" for presenting reliable texts in the digital environment, to exploit the medium's potential for "value added", "better-than-print editions", and to relate to the new reading-effects that the digital medium makes possible, "many practitioners of digital humanities lack an understanding of the theories, methodologies, and history of textual studies" (Earhart 2012, 20, 24, 22, 24). On the cusp between print and digital media, one pressing question for the future of literary studies and its textual objects is how to foster mutual appreciation and fertile common ground between scholarly editing and the "relatively unregulated life of literary criticism and theory" (Earhart 2012, 25, quoting Leroy Searle). It is high time for scholarly editors to emerge from the basement of literary studies to proclaim the fundamental importance of their work for literary studies and its future.

In The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies: Scholarly Editing and Book History, Paul Eggert draws on editorial theory and practice over the past several decades to argue for closer commerce and greater mutual awareness and exchange between scholarly editors and readers. For Eggert, the limitation of the Bowers-Greg-Tanselle approach to scholarly editing "is that it consigns the work to a category of its own, over and apart from readings of it, despite the fact that, empirically and historically, reading is part of every phase and stage of a work's creation, production and reception" (32). Notwithstanding W. W. Greg's description, back in 1932, of the text as "not a fixed and formal thing […] but a living organism which in its descent through the ages, while it departs more and more from the form impressed upon it by its original author, exerts, through its imperfections as much as through its perfections, its own influence upon its surroundings", Eggert argues that Greg's definition of textual criticism as the analysis of transmission failures explicitly excludes reading from the scholarly editor's evidence-based labor; in theory, an editor ignorant of its language could...