What is authorial philology? by Paola Italia et al. (review)

This work, whose first Italian edition came out in 2010, provides a synthetic though complete overview of authorial philology, focusing on its history (Chapter 1) and its methods (Chapter 2), in their development in the Italian scholarly tradition, which is a particularly prolific one, stimulated by the very early preservation of autograph materials and encouraged by the attention on the authorial work since the fourteenth century, that is to say, the century of Petrarch. Indeed, Petrarch's Codice degli abbozzi is a fundamental witness not only because of the texts it preserves and the key role that his Canzoniere plays in Italian literature, but also because the Codice degli abbozzi testifies to a fracture between medieval literature and a new, so to say modern, awareness of the authorial work. The attention of the author to his own work, in fact, inspired Bembo's work as his editor, showing once again an early interest in this 'peculiar' approach to the literary text.

An extremely rich theoretical reflection arose around this historical situation of Italian literature, that is, the early preservation of autograph materials, including the revisions made by the authors to their own texts.¹ The effort to clarify the relation between author and text and between material documentation and interpretation of the literary work has been fundamental to scholars like Pasquali, Contini, and, of course, Dante Isella, who first used the expression "authorial philology" to identify the discipline. The book describes in a very clear manner this fruitful history, following the development of authorial philology as an autonomous discipline through different stages of theoretical definition and practical applications.

The completeness of the historical section of the book goes along with the clearness of the truly methodological section and of the examples of critical editions. Both carried out on the basis of strong methodological criteria and didactic approach, the sections Methods and Examples (this last divided into two chapters centered respectively on Italian examples and European ones) allow us to enter the workshop first of the philologist and then of the author. This gives easy accessibility to philological authorship to non-specialist readers or to philologists from different scholarly approaches. In particular, the sections of examples set out in chronological order (Chapters 3 and 4) provide an overview of some concrete problems related to the treatment of authorial variants in critical editions. The choice of the analyzed editions offers samples of the most common and problematic situations faced by philologists, including the definition of a base-text, the individuation and representation of writing and intermediate versions of a work (an issue typically raised by the Seconda minuta of I promessi sposi), and so on.²

With regard to the Italian version of the book, this chapter is enhanced in the English edition with cases drawn from European literature. Regarding the Italian context, those examples are taken from the already cited Petrarch's Codice degli abbozzi, from the Rime d'amore by Tasso, from Leopardi's Canti, Manzoni's Fermo e Lucia and from Gadda's novels and short stories. For the European perspective, instead, Chapter 4 presents cases from Lope de Vega, Shelley, Austen, Proust, and Beckett, provided both by specialists of the authors (Presotto, Boadas, Beloborodova, Van Hulle, and Verhulst) and by Italian scholars (Centenari, Feriozzi, and Marranchino) whose main research interests are Italian literature and philology. This choice promotes a dialogue between Italian philological tradition and experts of foreign literature and gives concrete proof of the applicability of Italian philological methodologies to European literature as well. Moreover, the copresence of authors with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds is a practical application of the spirit which guides the whole book.

In fact, the central aim of this translation is to give a clear overview of authorial philology in other countries. However, I think that it also intends to show a practical possibility of the coexistence of different philological methods and approaches...