Introduction to Literary Research (ENGLM3029)
Focusing on writers such as Spenser, Shakespeare, Keats, Coleridge, Eliot, and Davis Foster
Wallace the unit will enquire into the changing nature of texts, textual authority, and
authorship, from the Renaissance to the present day. Approaching a diverse range of
literary forms (including poems, letters, fragments, essays and anthologies), it will
investigate when a collection of words becomes a literary text and how our understanding
of texts is shaped by the ways in which they are presented, taking into account such things
as paratexts, editing, and the physical aspects of the work. Different models of authorship
will be compared, and texts will be considered both as social products and as the creations
of a particular writer. The unit will also explore issues of book production and theories of
editing; introduce students into some of the databases and tools of literary research; and
introduce students to researching primary literary texts through the study of a particular
and significant year in English literary history, with the aim of recovering the diversity of its
literary production and considering how that diversity is represented by conventional
literary histories.
Bibliography
The few books at the start of this general bibliography are particularly recommended. The
new Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship will be available online for free once you
have registered for the course, but (along with the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the
History of the Book) is (relatively!) inexpensive should you want to get a head start on
introductory reading before you arrive.
The rest of the bibliography contains books of different kinds that you may find interesting
or useful as we move through the course – it is neither prescriptive nor comprehensive. I’ve
tried to include some books and articles on specific authors, as thinking about the
materiality of texts alongside a topic you are more familiar with is sometimes an easier way
in to the world of bibliography and the history of the book, and such thinking will doubtless
enrich your understanding of authors and texts you encounter on other elements of the MA.
Send queries to john.mctague@bristol.ac.uk.
To Begin:
Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, eds., A Companion to the History of the Book (Wiley
Blackwell, 2009)
Julia Flanders and Neil Freistat, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship (CUP,
2013)
Robert Fraser, Book History Through Postcolonial Eyes: Rewriting the Script (Routledge,
2008)
Claire Squires, Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in
Britain (Palgrave Macmillan: 2008)
Jerome J. McGann, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method
and Theory (Oxford University Press, 1988), especially the following chapter ‘The Monks and
the Giants: Textual and Bibliographical Studies and the Interpretation of Literary Works’
General, Introductory, Theoretical and Reference Works
Bajetta, Carlo M. “The Authority of Editing: Thoughts on the Function(s) of Textual
Criticism,” Textus 19 (2006), 305–22.
Barnard, John, and McKenzie, D. F., with Bell, Maureen, eds., The Cambridge History of the
Book in Britain, Vol. 4: 1557-1695. Cambridge, 2002.
Barney, Stephen, ed., Annotation and its Texts (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1991)
Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image-Music-Text, tr. Stephen Heath (London:
Fontana, 1977), 142-8.
Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007)
Caroline Davis, Creating Postcolonial Literature: African Writers and British
Publishers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
Dillon, Janette. “Is There a Performance in This Text?”, Shakespeare Quarterly 45
(1994), 74–86
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications
and Cultural Transformations in Early-modern Europe. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1979).
Eliot, Simon, Andrew Nash, and Ian Willison, eds. Literary Cultures and the Material
Book (The British Library, 2007).
Finneran, Richard J., ed. The Literary Text in the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1996).
Michel Foucault, ‘What Is An Author’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York:
Random House, 1984), 101-20.
Gabler, Hans Walter. “Beyond Author-Centricity in Scholarly Editing,” Journal of
Early Modern Studies 1.1 (2012), 15–35.
Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (OUP, 1972, rev edn 1974)
Genette, Gérard, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, tr. Jane E. Lewin, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997)
D. C. Greetham, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (New York: Garland, 1994)
Walter W. Greg, “The Rationale of Copy-Text,” Studies in Bibliography 3 (1950–1), 19–36.
Philip Hamburger, ‘The Development of the Law of Seditious Libel and the Control of the
Press’ Stanford Law Review 37 (1984-1985), 661-765
Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998).
Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1983)
D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (CUP, 1999)
McKenzie, D. F., Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays, Studies in Print
Culture and the History of the Book (Amherst: University Of Massachusetts Press, 2002)
James McClaverty, ‘The Concept of Authorial Intention in Textual Criticism’ The Library, Sixth
Series, 6 (1984), pp. 121-138
Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton UP, 1991)
Moretti, Franco, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso,
2005)
Raven, James, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 14501850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)
Schreibman, Susan, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, eds. A Companion to Digital
Humanities online here: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/
Shillingsburg, Peter L. From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representation of Literary Texts
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Tanselle, G. Thomas. A Rationale of Textual Criticism (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1989)
Tanselle, G. Thomas, “The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention,” Studies in
Bibliography 29 (1976), 167–211
Tanselle, G. Thomas, “Editing without a Copy-Text,” Studies in Bibliography 47 (1994), 1–22.
Rpt. in Tanselle, Literature and Artifacts (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the
University of Virginia, 1998), 236–57.
Taylor, Gary. “The Rhetoric of Textual Criticism,” TEXT 4 (1988), 39–57
Wells, Stanley, and Gary Taylor with John Jowett and William Montgomery, William
Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)
Williams, William Proctor, and Craig S. Abbott. An Introduction to Bibliographical and
Textual Studies (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1999).
Interesting Editions and Discussions of Specific Authors / Texts
Andrew Bennett, Wordsworth Writing (CUP, 2007)
Briggs, Julia, ‘Between the Texts: Virginia Woolf’s Acts of Revision’, TEXT, 12 (1999), 143-65
Fraistat, Neil. “Illegitimate Shelley: Radical Piracy and the Textual Edition as Cultural
Performance,” PMLA 110 (May 1994), 409–23.
Gabler, Hans Walter, ed. Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition (New York: Garland), 1984.
Lernout, Geert, “Controversial Editions: Hans Walter Gabler’s Ulysses,” Text: An
Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies 16 (2006), 229–41.
James McLaverty, Pope, Print, and Meaning (OUP, 2001)
James McLaverty, ‘The Mode of Existence of Literary Works of Art: The Case of the “Dunciad
Variorum”’ Studies in Bibliography 37 (1984), pp. 82-105
Sutherland, Kathryn, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005).
Thompson, Ann, and Neil Taylor, eds., Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623, 2 vols. (London:
Arden Shakespeare, 2006).
Stephen Urkowitz, ‘Well-sayd olde mole’: Burying Three Hamlets in Modern Editions,’ in
Shakespeare Study Today, ed. by Georgianna Ziegler (New York: AMS Press, 1986), 37-80
Viscomi, Joseph, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1993)
Werstine, Paul. “The Textual Mystery of Hamlet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988), 1–26.
Online
The William Blake Archive http://www.blakearchive.org/blake
Emily Dickinson, Dickinson Electronic Archives http://www.emilydickinson.org/
The Walt Whitman Archive http://www.whitmanarchive.org/
The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Hypermedia Archive
http://www.rossettiarchive.org/
Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts: http://www.janeausten.ac.uk/index.html
An online ‘collation’ tool: http://collation.folger.edu/author/thecollation/