Textual Criticism Basics
Textual Criticism Basics
The Who, What, Where, When, and Why of Textual Criticism
Beginnings
Textual Criticism is as old as the ancient Greeks. For as long as there have been books, there have been people interested in preserving them, studying them, and understanding their relationship to...
Big Players
So, we've already mentioned them—A. W. Pollard, R. B. McKerrow, and W. W. Greg were the big bad Brits who started it all. Pollard was one of the first guys to systematically study and classify Sh...
Key Debates
You'd be surprised how many fights a bunch of bibliophiles can get into. Is there a comma in this line in this play by Shakespeare, or isn't there? Is that word capitalized in Paradise Lost, or isn...
State of the Theory
As long as we have books, and different versions of books, we'll have Textual Criticism. And yeah, that even applies to e-books. The field is now moving in a direction that's taking more and more a...
Talking the Talk
What is literature? Literature is made up of a mess of manuscripts, a number of textual documents competing for authoritative status.What is an author? An author is someone who writes a literary wo...