Admired Scholarly Editions

 Admired Scholarly Editions

     Textual critics and editors who have engaged deeply with the introductions and textual apparatuses of various scholarly editions, were asked to identify one or two scholarly editions that they admire as editorial achievements, regardless of their opinions of the works being edited, and to add brief notes supporting the nomination and mentioning any reservations about otherwise admirable editorial work.

     Note: This site, while standing alone, was written and compiled in relation to an essay titled, "Limits of Scholarly Editing" published in Textual Cultures.

     Respondents gave their permission to include their answers here.  Responses are not identified by author, but  a list of respondents is appended.  Most respondents are members of the Society for Textual Scholarship or the European Society for Textual Scholarship.

     The purpose of this unscientific sampling of opinions of textual critics was not to identify a best edition or even a most admired editorial method.  All that has been achieved in that direction here is to reveal editions or methods that at least one expert in textual criticism admires.   The purpose of the survey was to see what experts in the field thought personally about admired editions.  Indeed, many of the responses are more personal than academic.

     Eighteen scholars responded--not a significant number, but enough to indicate that there are differences of opinion amongst expert textual critics about what kind of scholarly editions they admire most.  Nothing in this survey suggests experts admire only one kind of edition or that they could not admire different kinds of scholarly editions.

    Scholarly editors, asked to nominate exceptionally good examples of scholarly editions, did not all nominate the same edition.  They did not all nominate one kind of edition.  They did not support their nominations with the same arguments.  They did not unanimously, or even by a majority, endorse one method of achieving greatness in scholarly editing.  I don't think anyone should be surprised.  The results are enlightening and pleasant to read and tend to support certain (also unsurprising) propositions about scholarly editing and scholarly editors:

·         That verbal works are rich, complex, and varied, such that a fixed method of editing cannot be dictated for all works.

·         That scholars value different aspects of verbal works, and for different reasons.

·         That scholars, when using scholarly editions, do not necessarily focus attention on all aspects of an edition, but rather focus on that which interests them most.  Perhaps all readers act that way.

·         That scholars are just as interested in how an edition can be used as in the methodology of its creation--perhaps more so.

     Before publication, scholarly editions go through vetting processes by organizations like the Modern Language Association (through the Committee on Scholarly Editions) and by the edition publishers.  Vetting assures only that an edition has met a minimum standard, though editions may be more than that--indeed, even be outstanding.  Each vetting organization has its own criteria by which it assesses the editions.  Over time these criteria change, most notably in the history of the Center for Editions of American Authors and its successor the Committee on Scholarly Editions.  In addition, as one respondent wrote, "It should be noted that scholarly editions generally are prepared in scientific research institutions by a group of scholars, and the quality of every volume greatly depends on the responsibility of the people who are working on it."

     After publication, prizes and awards for scholarly editions measure editions by comparison to each other, rather than by applying a minimum standard.  The comparisons are often limited in scope to a specific window of time or for works of a particular period.  They indicate, however, editions that have risen above their peers.

    Here are links to lists of scholarly editions.

·         Editions that have gained the approval of the Committee on Scholarly Editions (of the Modern Language Association) and of its predecessor The Center for Editions of American Authors.  See https://www.mla.org/Resources/Guidelines-and-Data/Reports-and-Professional-Guidelines/CSE-Approved-Editions/Volumes-Published-and-Forthcoming-A-I

and

 https://www.mla.org/Resources/Guidelines-and-Data/Reports-and-Professional-Guidelines/CSE-Approved-Editions/Volumes-Published-and-Forthcoming-J-Z

·         Editions of historical documents usually follow methods different from those employed for literary texts.  A Descriptive List of Documentary Publications Supported or Endorsed by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission is posted at https://www.archives.gov/files/nhprc/projects/publishing/catalog.pdf

·         Modern Language Association Prize winning scholarly editions are posted at https://www.mla.org/Resources/Career/MLA-Grants-and-Awards/Winners-of-MLA-Prizes/Biennial-Prize-and-Award-Winners/MLA-Prize-for-a-Scholarly-Edition-Winners

·         Modern Language Association Prizes for editions of letters are posted at  https://www.mla.org/Resources/Career/MLA-Grants-and-Awards/Winners-of-MLA-Prizes/Biennial-Prize-and-Award-Winners/Morton-N.-Cohen-Award-for-a-Distinguished-Edition-of-Letters-Winners

      

         The Society for Textual Scholarship's Richard Finneran Award is sometimes given to a scholarly edition.  See https://textualsociety.org/sts-prizes-and-awards/

 

     The admired editions nominated in the present survey are predominantly American and European works, perhaps reflecting the method I used to solicit responses.  No list of editions from which to choose was submitted to responders. The assessments offered tend to represent the intellectual pleasures of serious edition users rather than any litany of basic requirements, or any concerted effort to compare editions.    Responses are purposely listed in no particular order, to encourage browsing.    The purpose of the survey was to see what experts in the field thought personally about an admired edition.  Significantly, no one nominated an edition they themselves had worked on. NB: All comments are by the persons who suggested the edition, quoted without attribution (of course), and sometimes excerpted (only a little).

 

·         "Old Bailey Online". https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/index.jsp  This projects edited the proceeding of the Old Bailey between 1674 and 1913. The texts are encoded in XML and, of course, the editions do not contain a complex apparatus or editorial annotations, as it is not a philological, but a historical project. However, it achieves the creation of textual editions that can also be studied as data, as is shown by related projects that use the editions for their research, like the digital panopticon: https://www.digitalpanopticon.org/

·         Bichitra Archive, online collection of the works of Rabindranath Tagore.   It is not an edition, but rather a work of historical bibliography and digital curation:  an archive of manuscripts and editions and a bibliographical and content resource for study and for the creation of new editions.  It is outstanding because of how it was created, with massive support from the Indian government, with teams of (mostly young) scholars, brilliantly organized by the directors of the project, completed in an amazingly short period of time, massive in size, careful in design and execution, not perfect but outstanding.  http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/index.php

·         Passion of Perpetua and Felicity (Oxford, 2012; ca. 203 CE) edition of the Latin and Greek MSS won the Modern Language Association Prize in January of 2013 for the best critical scholarly edition. 

·         I nominate Gary Taylor's edition of 'A Game At Chess' as it appears in:  Thomas Middleton 'The Collected Works' Ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007); and Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, John (editors) 'Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works' (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007).

·          Dimitri Kipiani, Collected works in 10 volumes (ISBN 978-9941-463-37-2).  The first volume was published in 2016. The texts, notes, comments and indexes are prepared by Tamaz Jologua (editors: Bego Bezhuashvili and Revaz Gogia) below is the link of the first volume: https://dspace.nplg.gov.ge/bitstream/1234/257251/1/Txzulebani_Tomi_I.pdf  Scholarly Edition of the XIX-XX cc. Georgian Writers’ Epistolary Legacy (ISBN 978-9941-22-186-6). The first volume was published in 2011, 10 volumes have been published and the project is going on.

·         'TWIXT LAND AND SEA, ed. Jacques A. Berthoud, Laura L. Davis, and S. W. Reid.  Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad.  Cambridge and NY: CUP, 2008.  cxx, 538 pp.     The introduction by J. A. Berthoud is excellent.  He is very good about explaining the source materials for the three tales in the volume.  As for the text, Davis and Reid did important work in revealing the tangled interrelationships between the British and American texts.  The American variants got back into the final British text because JC used an American edition to mark up and revise.  Some of the variants were quite important.  They straightened this out via emendation.  They should have boasted more about their accomplishment.

·         The five volumes of William Faulkner's Novels, edited by Noel Polk for the Library of America.     It was the editor's goal to publish what Faulkner wrote, not what someone else thought he should have written.  Faulkner saved MSS and TSS of nearly all of his novels, and there was much variation between these documents and the first editions.  There was also a good deal of unhelpful editorial interference, especially in such novels as Absalom, Absalom! and The Wild Palms.  Polk examined and collated all witnesses and straightened out the problems.

·         The Parallel King Lear, 1608–1623, ed. Michael J. Warren.  I'm very fond of it.

·          Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project's edition of Krapp's Last Tape, edited by Dirk Van Hulle and Vincent Neyt. (Perhaps because I think the character of Krapp would have approved of it.)   Plus a reservation: While the digital Beckett editions can be (genuinely) fun to work with (once you get a hang of the interface), the corollary print editions are occasionally unreadable and uninviting.

·         John A. Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds., Piers Plowman: The B-Version Archetype (Bx), XML version 2.0, PPEA Print Series 1 (Raleigh, NC: The Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts, 2018).  (Version 1.0 is online at <http://piers.chass.ncsu.edu/texts/Bx>.)

·         Critical and Synoptic Edition of James Joyce, Ulysses, Edited by Hans Walter Gabler.  Comments:   The edition has long been heralded for its innovative form, the ‘genetic’ representation in the synoptic text.  In fact, it is for its ingenious way of handling the textual condition of Ulysses that I admire the edition.  In essence, in absence of a complete fair copy that could be used as copytext, the editor found a way of using the fragmented composition documents to create this copytext.  The edition is classic Greg-Bowers in its underpinning, even if the final product is eclectic editing on steroids!  Reservations:   there are minutiae – critical decisions – that probably could be looked at again and improved on.  The system used to designate the stages in the composition is also confusing. The problem is that not every chapter in Joyce’s work goes through the same number of iterations.  So e.g. stage x in one chapter can be a TS, while for another it’s a galley proof.  Nonetheless, perhaps a more consistent way of handling this could have been found.

·         Another respondent: James Joyce, Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Garland, 1984) – applied a fully theorised editorial approach that redefined the nature of developing text and visualised it using an innovative computational program enabling an array of paratextual symbols on the lefthand pages to draw attention to the flare-ups in revisional energy, and provided the final stage on the righthand pages but without employing a copy-text as such

– reservation: ample textual but no explanatory notation was included.

·         Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ed. Juliet Grindle and Simon Gattrell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).   Even if I would not have necessarily followed its editorial logics myself then or now it was groundbreaking and made me think – applied the purest form of final intentions editing choosing the  earliest available copy-text and incorporating on bibliographic and critical grounds all of Hardy’s revisions through serial forms to the first edition and then in new editions for the next few decades; paid loving attention to the accidentals with a fine essay on their significance and on why the earliest forms should be retained by the choice of a MS copy-text– reservation: the decisions of an old and very old man about the text were thus incorporated into the text of a middle-aged man at the peak of his powers as a novelist.

·         D. H Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)– finally and definitively clarified the previously clouded textual emergence of this novel from the author's larger and ongoing intellectual and imaginative project. Thus grasped the need to enmesh the textual with the biographical; appreciated the shortcomings of final-intentions editing which he nevertheless adopted on the pragmatic basis (a series policy) that readers needed a readable text not one cluttered with paratextual symbols. This put added importance on the textual apparatus to capture the full history of the emergence; choosing a MS copy-text ensured this would be documented as a quasi-archive recording substantives and accidentals, and thus effectively returned it to its biographical genesis.– no reservations

 ·          The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, 5 vols (London, 1904–10). McKerrow’s achievement in developing and applying bibliographical analysis to Nashe’s works is only matched by the astonishing accuracy of the edition and his brilliant commentary on one of the most difficult authors of the time. The revised edition, edited by FP. Wilson (Oxford, 1958) is the one always used and cited by scholars, but McKerrow’s original work is outstanding.

 ·          The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. W.A. Ringler (Oxford, 1962).   Ringler’s edition of Sidney’s poems is a masterpiece of stemmatic and textual scholarship, in which classical editorial method is applied to the writings of a great poet whose works survive almost entirely in manuscript. Some of Ringler’s arguments may be challenged, but there is much to be learned from his critical method and thinking.

·          The Poems of T.S. Eliot, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, 2 vols (London, 2015).  The Eliot edition strikes me as innovative and an essential landmark edition of a modern author. The textual work is scrupulous and handled with great knowledge and assurance; the annotation suggests how one might shed a brilliant light on the thinking and creative methods of a great writer. The edition is a modern editorial masterpiece in every sense.

·          William Kirby, Chien d'or/The Golden Dog: A Legend of Quebec. (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2012). Edited by Mary Jane Edwards.  I spent days examining this work, looking for errors, omissions, misinformation and found none.  That never happened to me before.   Comprehensive coverage of evidence, clear expression of editorial goals and methods, and error free.  New Bibliography eclectic methods.

·          New Oxford Shakespeare, edited Gary Taylor, John Jewett et al, OUP 2016. The amount of scholarship that this multivolume edition includes, and the ambitious production of both a classroom-adaptable Complete Works and a two volume so-called Critical Reference Edition in old spelling  is impressive. Although I am not necessarily persuaded by all of the conclusions, I am deeply impressed by and have found very useful the  fourth volume, the Authorship Companion, which brings together the scholarship of Taylor and Jewett on the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays since the 1980s, including both their argument in Shakespeare Reshaped  (1993) and, more important, updated consideration of the attribution scholarship  in the Oxford Shakespeare of 1986.     --My reservations have to do with much the same thing that I admire: this 4 volume set is enormous, often tendentious, and beyond the buying power of most readers. From the point of view of a textual editor, I do not agree with their decision about how to choose which text of Shakespeare to follow, namely, ‘our basic principle was to choose the version of the work that contains the most Shakespeare.’ This is an Occam’s razor that sometimes leads them to choose a single text but then to print ‘ADDITIONS’’ in a box.        Note: The two-volume Complete Alternative Versions is currently being created by the General Editors (Gary Taylor, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan) and OUP is committed to publishing it. Indeed, the method by which it is being created -- in TEI XML written by the editors -- is the blueprint for OUP's Oxford Complete Works of Marlowe that has recently started.

·          Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797-1800. Ed. James Butler and Karen Green. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992.     This edition is part of the Cornell Wordsworth and is an excellent treatment of a difficult problem. Wordsworth fiddled with his poetry all his life (shades of Hardy), and there are multiple manuscripts of most of the poems, many of them fragments, as well as multiple lifetime editions that raise the eternal problem of the interrelation between author and publishing system.  They consulted 78 manuscripts, describe their provenance, and are the first edition of these poems to do so. The consequence is a very complete documentary edition. The editors are very clear about what pieces/poems come from where and who made what revisions—as far as their research lets them, and when they are not sure they tell you.   The reading texts are clear, and the footnote format makes the revisions fairly easy to follow. I particularly like the selected transcriptions in Part III, which makes for an interesting journey into Wordsworth’s compositional process. In fact, the entire edition is very strong on the history of composition, revision, and publication. The apparatus is set up so that scholars have everything they need, but one could also use this in an advanced class for study or to set problems for students in theory and practice, especially considering Appendix III which contains Wordsworth’s own commentary on the poems as well as the editors’ notes on dating, composition, and contextual allusion for each poem.   I like the way that each poem exists on its own as well as part of Lyrical Ballads, and the compilation history of the latter makes it clear that the volume was not conceived as a whole but came into being as a gradual collaboration between Wordsworth and Coleridge that also reveals the incipient rifts between their ideas of poetic practice. The process of choice is also made clear by including Wordsworth’s poems once intended for Lyrical Ballads. Basically, there are all sorts of different ways one can use this edition, but I also admire the meticulous work of the editors themselves.   What is lacking in this volume is any thorough reception history; the editors’ choice was to concentrate on textual history and content, and to the tune of 829 pages, that is admirably done.

·          One of the best scholarly editions of the twentieth century is in my opinion: Georg Büchner, Danton’s Tod, Historical-Critical Edition by Burghard Dedner, Thomas Michael Mayer, Eva- Maria Vering and others. 4 vols. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2000. The historical drama Danton’s Tod (“Danton’s Death”) deals with the political conflict between two main figures from the French revolution, Georges Jacques Danton (1759-1794) and Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794). They represent in the drama two conflicting views on the course and the future of the revolution. Danton thinks that the killing of political opponents should stop. The time has come for a social revolution. According to Robespierre terror is “the arm of the revolution”. It cannot be stopped, since the revolution is not finished.  The extensive edition of the drama offers all the information a scholar or an interested reader would like to have. In the second volume for instance the editors describe in detail the social background of Büchner, his years at school, his surroundings, his friends and the actual political debates of which Büchner was well-informed. In their sketch the editors use many contemporary sources, like pamphlets, periodicals, books and extant letters to and from Büchner. Between mid-January and February 20, 1835, Büchner wrote the manuscript (M) that served as the copy for the publication of Danton’s Tod. M is a combination of a fair copy and a draft with many corrections and additions. The editors have made the manuscript of Büchner the core of the edition. They present the full text of Danton’s Tod no less than four(!) times, each time from a different perspective. This multiple presentation of the full text is one of the innovative elements of the Büchner-edition. Besides a facsimile od M there is the transcription of M in volume one, both diplomatic and critical. It presents the text with all the graphic information the manuscript provides. The volume also contains a genetic presentation of the text in M. All the internal manuscript variants, like corrections, deletions, additions, etcetera, are presented in their chronological order. The third integral presentation of Danton’s Tod, the critical text, opens the second volume of the edition. Büchner used for his drama several historical and other sources. Intertextuality is an important characteristic of the drama. The way in which the editors present the intertextuality of Danton’s Tod is fascinating, innovative and, therefore, exemplary. They give in volume 3.2 again the full text of the drama, but now focused on the sources. In Büchner’s text the words, sentences etcetera, adopted from the sources, are indicated with typographical means.     Now, twenty years later, in the digital era, alternative means of presentation of the material are possible and in several ways better, but the goals and the theoretical basic of the Büchner-edition still stand strong.  Two come to mind. Neither is particularly recent but I always use them as my own study guides when teaching these texts:

 ·          Elida Lois and Angel Nuñez’s edition of Jose Hernandez’s Martin Fierro.     (Brilliant work with manuscripts and csrusbts, discussion of prosody and linguistic issues, excellent critical dossier)

 ·          Tele Ancona Porto Lopez’s edition of Mario de Andrade’s Macunaima.   (Exceedingly good introduction and notes, generous discussion of sources notably Theodor Koch-Grunberg).

·          I admire “To Be an Author”: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1889-1905, ed. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. and Robert C. Leitz, III.  I had no part in creating this edition. The annotations on these letters are detailed and precise, and they provide difficult to locate information about African American life and culture.     Their organization of the letters highlights Chesnutt’s interactions with white editors and publisher—part 1 is Cable’s Protégé in 1889-1891” and part 3 is “Page’s Protégé in 1897-1899.” Their organization emphasizes Chesnutt’s connections to the white world so much that it obscures the equally vital importance of his connections with Black intellectuals including W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, John Patterson Green, Kelly Miller, and Walter White. Positioning Chesnutt as a protégé risks seeming to be demeaning about a person who was not just an author but also a tremendously successful business man a trained lawyer.

·           My nomination of an excellent scholarly edition is the MUSA (Music of the United States of America, a series sponsored by the American Musicological Society, and published by A-R Editions)) edition of Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring in its original 13-instrument scoring, the first ever edition of the complete ballet.  It was edited by Jennifer Delapp-Birkett and Aaron Sherber, published in 2020.  For such a well-known work, the editors had a Herculean task in sorting out the various versions to get to the full-length original.  A particularly neat feature of the score is that it has a running series of photographs, aligned with the score throughout--snapshots of Martha Graham's choreography of the ballet.     [Sample pages are available here:  https://www.areditions.com/media/arfiles/product_images/MU31_samples.pdf ]

·          One of my favorite editions is Mario A Di Cesare's George Herbert, The Temple, The Bodleian Manuscript.   It was published by the Renaissance English Text Society.  I love it for its conception of what an edition can do--in this case, preserve the "remoteness" and strange beauty of the original., at least to some extent, for the reader.   Di Cesare does all kinds of crazy things -- he uses typography against itself to resemble handwriting; he identifies particular orthographic forms and "makes" his own....  None of the work is all that "successful" visually speaking -- but its failure is wonderful--and the point.   He refuses to make an edition that is a "shield" to readers -- i.e., that protects them from the difficulty of encountering a text remote in time. He refuses to protect us from "the problematic contingencies of the original" (Thomas Greene).  There is, moreover, something devotional about his editorial work. He puts it simply and beautifully at the end of his introduction: "In short, the edition was made to be a faithful witness to the one text which is the closest to George Herbert's original, and to offer something of the grace that attends reading this text in all its difference, vitality, and strangeness."  I have been drawn back to those words so many times.   Di Cesare is like Random Cloud, but in an unironic mood.   There are so many editions I love -- like true friends. But this is one I keep on a special shelf of books I always want near me.

·          I love Anne Fernald’s edition of Virginia Woolf's  Mrs Dalloway. Cambridge University Press, 2014.  I think the notes are perfect. And the textual apparatus is clean, clear, easy to use. 

·           [From another respondent] I wanted to suggest Anne Fernald's Cambridge edition of Mrs. Dalloway, overall but especially for the breadth and depth of its annotations which express an 'ethos of generous editing,' as Stephanie Browner remarks in a forthcoming essay. Unfortunately the $150 list price is not quite as generous to potential readers, especially students.

·          One of the editions I most admire is Ralph Franklin’s The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson. It transformed critical approaches to one of America’s most important writers. It made reading Dickinson more interesting, more fun, more aesthetically pleasurable. Piecing those fascicles back together required great skill on Franklin’s part. The edition itself is a beautiful object, a work of art in its own right.   I suppose all editions attempt to preserve or rescue texts that would otherwise be lost or remain inaccessible. In this case, what was recovered was very precious, and because the fascicles had been disassembled, rescued from oblivion.

·          Sinéad O'Sullivan, edd, Glossi Aevi Carolini in Libros I-II Martiani Capillae de Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii. Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 237. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010.   My admiration is of the meticulous and deeply intelligent work of a solidly traditional kind.

·          I guess the quandary for me has to do with digital editions. The urgency I feel (apart from, you know, the whole mortality thing) is that the idea and initial engagement with digital editing has been around for forty years, with little support for innovation in editorial design conducive to bringing readers into interaction with the kinds of textual fluidity we deal with in editing, rather than just displaying reading texts and variants in emulation of book design. Then, too, there's the problem of maintenance of digital editions, which gets no support either.  I could point to editions I admire, Kenneth Price's Whitman for its comprehensive corpus, Marta Werner's Dickinsons for their different inventions,  Harrison Hayford's Billy Budd and Hans Walter Gabler's Joyce for showing that genetic editing can work, and Dirk Van Hulle's Beckett for much of the above as well as revision sequencing.  I have praised them in assessments elsewhere, though they each have technical limitations, as does my own MEL [Melville Electronic Library].  So I'll just speak to the common concerns of the designing, making, and support for strategically interactive and interoperable editions than singling a particular edition.  I guess you might say this digital and interactive prerequisite for excellence in digital editing is fundamentally critical and pedagogical. That is, the design should enable critics to build arguments from the database of texts in the edition, and it should be a workspace for teaching folks what a text is and how it evolves in a culture. Or not.          The same might be said for my own print edition of Moby-Dick. This is/was a new editing of MD (not a reprint of the NN [Northwestern Newberry] or of the problematic 3rd Norton MD).  This Longman edition does not mix versions and offers integrated textual, contextual, and revision annotation (revision narratives) on the page, but in a readable, minimally interruptive way, to entice readers into the British expurgations of MD while enabling them to enjoy HM's narrative. This Longman edition is now out of print b/c Longman dropped its entire Lit List a couple years after it came out, despite growing support for the edition. (Not all is lost: We use the Longman reading text and revision narrative for MEL's digital version of MD.) The Longman MD's inventory lasted long enough to supply the classroom demand for it, but that dried up, and I need to find a new publisher for it. Oy.

Not admired:

·          The OUP Evelyn Waugh or the EUP George Moore.   Comment: The most disappointing edition is the edition that actually does not do any editing at all. By this, I don’t mean documentary editions (for these are edited!) but editions that, although they are accompanied by an apparatus, simply reprint the textus receptus. 

·         Invitation to participate on this site:

Comments, disagreements, new nominations, and all discussion of types, limitation and opportunities for scholarly editing are welcome.  Nomination of editions that are not scholarly, historical, critical editions should be submitted elsewhere and will be removed if submitted here.  Our focus is on the quaility of editing, not on the quality of the works edited. Thank you.

                                                                                            Peter Shillingsburg

  

RESPONDENTS

Daniel Balderston, Stephanie Browner, John Bryant, Ian Cornelius, Paul Eggert, Judith Fisher, Suzanne Gossett, Warrick Gould, Thomas Hefferman, David Holdeman, Brooks Kuykendall, Geoffrey Mustafa Lokke, Willard McCarty, Maia Ninidze, Kenneth Price, Gustavo Fernandez Riva, Peter Shillingsburg, Wim Van-Mierlo, H.T.M. van Vliet, James L W West III, Henry Woudhuysen, John Young