Essay Notes (1) W. D. Thorn, a Past-President of the Society and a true bookman, deserves our special thanks.back

(2) E.g. in March 1994 amongst members of the Internet electronic mail discussion group, 'electronic scholarly editing' ('ese': the discussions are archived at ese@ra.msstate.edu), of the Rossetti electronic archive of paintings and poems being assembled by Jerome McGann and others at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia, and available in sample form on the World Wide Web:
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/rosetti/rosetti.html back

(3) The term's datedness is nicely indicated by the fact that the MLA committee which preceded its Center for Editions of American Authors (CEAA, est. 1966, and succeeded by the Committee for Scholarly Editions in 1976) was called the Committee on Definitive Editions. It was set up in 1947, but its attempts to secure funding for editions of American works failed.back

(4) W.W. Greg, 'The Rationale of Copy-Text', Studies in Bibliography, 3 (1950), 19-36 repr. Bibliography and Textual Criticism, ed. O.M. Brack and Warner Barnes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp.41-58.back

(5) W. Speed Hill, 'The Ironies of Paternity', Documentary Editing, xvi (1994), 29-33 (p. 30), reviewing G. Thomas Tanselle, The Life and Works of Fredson Bowers (Charlottesville:
The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1993).back

(6) E.g. : 'Thus, by the middle of the 1970s, two editorial establishments had developed in the United States, each focussing its attention on important American figures, each drawing on traditions of textual criticism and modern technology' (Kline, Guide, p. 8). back

(7) See Peter L. Shillingsburg, 'Polymorphic, Polysemic, Protean, Reliable, Electronic Texts' in Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, ed George Bornstein and Ralph Williams
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 29-44.back

(8) I see this is crucial, although recent editorial theorists such as Jerome McGann do not agree: see Eggert, 'Document and Text: The "Life" of the Literary Work and the Capacities of Editing',
Text, vii (1995), 1-24.back



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