Texts and Textuality: Textual Instability, Theory, and Interpretation

by Cohen,Philip G.; Cohen,Philip

• ISBN13: 9780815319566
• ISBN10: 0815319568
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-03-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

These essays deal with the scholarly study of the genesis, transmission, and editorial reconstitution of texts by exploring the connections between textual instability and textual theory, interpretation, and pedagogy. What makes this collection unique is that each essay brings a different theoretical orientation-New Historicism, Poststructuralism, or Feminism-to bear upon a different text, such as Whitman'sLeaves of Grass, Faulkner'sThe Sound and the Fury,or hypertext fiction, to explore the dialectical relationship between texts and textuality. The essays bring some of the textual theories that compete with each other today into contact with a broad range of primarily literary textual histories. That texts are intrinsically unstable, frequently consisting of a series of determinate historical versions, has consequences for all students of literature, because different versions of a literary work frequently help shape different readings independently of the interpretations brought tobear upon them. Textual instability of the works is relevant to our understanding of how the meanings of texts are generated. The contributors build on the numerous challenges to the Anglo-American editorial tradition mounted during the past decade by scholars as diverse as Jerome McGann, D.F. McKenzie, Peter Shillingsburg, D.C. Greetham, Hershel Parker, and Hans Walter Gabler. The volume contributes to the paradigm shift in textual scholarship inaugurated by these scholars. Index.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Textual Instability, Literary Studies, and Recent Developments in Textual Scholarship
Oral Tradition into Textuality	p. 1
Reading in and around Piers Plowman	p. 25
Context and Text: Navajo Nightway Textual History in the Hands of the West	p. 59
"The Tongues of the learned are insufficient": Phillis Wheatley, Publishing Objectives, and Personal Liberty	p. 81
"Hideous Progenies": Texts of Frankenstein	p. 121
"My thought is undressed": Some Theoretical Implications of the Texts of Dickinson's Poems	p. 141
Multiple Editorial Horizons of Leaves of Grass	p. 161
A "Very Different Dance": Intention, Technique, and Revision in Henry James's New York Edition	p. 183
Discourse versus Authorship: The Baedeker Travel Guide and D. H. Lawrence's Twilight in Italy	p. 207
"The Key to the Whole Book": Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, the Compson Appendix, and Textual Instability	p. 235
The Rhetoric of Interactive Fiction	p. 269
Converging (or Colliding) Traditions: Integrating Hypertext into Literary Studies	p. 291
Notes on Contributors	p. 313
Index	p. 315
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