Critical and Scholarly Editing in Australia and New Zealand in the Last Twenty-Five Years: An Essay on the Nomenclature of Editions and a Representative Listing

Paul Eggert and Kym McCauley

When asked in 1993 to contribute an essay on textual editing in Australia and New Zealand, covering the twenty-five years of the Society's existence, I supposed that there had not been a great deal undertaken. I reasoned that we have not had sufficient numbers of textual scholars to have generated a strong tradition of editorial scholarship. Compiling a listing first was the obvious (and, I thought, easy) solution. Library catalogues were of little assistance given that they are indifferent to the nationality of the editor of a literary or other work. A mailing campaign and the following up of word-of-mouth leads have, to a large extent, remedied that problem. The bulk of the work for the listing was done by Kym McCauley, and we wish to thank the very many scholars who responded to the questionnaire or otherwise provided information.(1) While at times we feared that a further twenty-five years would be required to complete our preliminary task, other problems were coolly lying in wait.

It would be difficult enough to characterise editing trends and achievements in our own field, modern English literature. How should we do so in the other eras and fields we considered, literary and non-literary works in English, foreign and ancient languages? There were also areas we had not considered before our mail-out such as papyrology and epigraphy.

Confronted with an ever-broadening horizon, we had to consider how to delimit workable categories for the listing. However, the meanings of crucial terms such as 'definitive editions', 'critical editions', 'scholarly editions', 'variorum editions', 'genetic editions' and (German) 'historical-critical editions' have been called into question in recent years by editorial theorists in this and other journals. Could we make these new theoretical positions yield some practical results for our listing? This is the subject of the following discussion of the shifting sands of editorial theory and practice.

But first some results: perhaps the most pleasing thing to report is the high number of editions. It was soon evident that there were too many to provide a comprehensive list for the Bulletin. To date, September 1995, we have listed some 600 editions, not counting those still in process. Of these, we sighted some 250. As a result, we necessarily re-evaluated our earlier, ambitious task. This gave way to a representative listing of those editions we had sighted (i.e. those accessible in the time available) and which met our criteria. The full, but only partly evaluated listing will be available on the World Wide Web homepage of the Australian Scholarly Editions Centre (see below).

For the purposes of the present listing, the scholars need either to have been based in Australia or New Zealand or to have been born in either country. The listing is unrestricted in terms of subject matter. It does not list only the editing of literary works nor is it restricted to the editing of works written by Australians or New Zealanders. Entries concentrate in the year-span 1969-94, the period of the Society's first twenty-five years, but earlier critical editions have also been included, for example that of Charles Badham (1813-84). The list does not take into account editions presented as higher degree theses unless they were subsequently published.



The nomenclature of the kinds of editions listed below has recently re-emerged as a problem.(2) Recognising this I propose now to stop using the unhelpful term 'textual editing'. (What else do editors edit other than texts? Significantly, the unused term 'textual edition' is a tautology). Instead I shall denominate the kinds of editions the listing is intended to cover. Traditionally (and by this I mean in the period since the Second World War), there has been a distinction amongst editors working in the Anglo-American tradition between 'critical' and 'scholarly' editions, even though the terms are often used interchangeably by others. Pseudo-scientific claims were made for editions in the so-called 'school' of Sir Walter Greg and Fredson Bowers: editions which established a reading text of a literary work according to the criterion of final authorial intentions were often called 'definitive editions'. (3) Given the impressive apparatus of variants which accompanied them, this claim or conferral of status was understandable. But Bowers himself steadfastly maintained they were critical editions, depending to some extent on the exercise of the editor's literary-critical judgement in the ascertaining of the author's intentions at the local level of individual words and punctuation. Gradually the term 'definitive' has fallen out of use, especially as, in the wider culture, the positivism of the fifties and sixties has given way to the relativism of the eighties and nineties.

The conventional accolade, 'critical' or 'definitive', in any case had always left room for the editing of works of primarily historical significance, for example, the papers of early US Presidents. Such documents would never have been readied or intended for publication and the determining of final intentions about variant wordings might be of less importance than preserving the historically-laden nature of the document from which the text was taken. The establishment in the USA in 1978 of the Association for Documentary Editing (and the strong postwar tradition of historical editing it recognised) helped to cement the distinction between critical editing of the Greg-Bowers kind and the 'scholarly' or non-critical editing of historical documents. In the first paragraph of the Association's A Guide to Documentary Editing (1987), Mary-Jo Kline stresses the distinction between 'documentary, or non-critical, editing . . . and more traditional textual, or critical' editing (p. 6). The field of scholarly editing is said to divide into these two areas, and Kline's business was to provide an account of the rationale and methodology of documentary editing which up until then had been lacking, whereas critical editing, in contrast, had since 1950 had the benefit of Greg's 'Rationale of Copy-Text' as a cornerstone.(4) In the 1989 second edition of the MLA's An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, William Proctor Williams and Craig S. Abbott, both editors of literary works, accepted Kline's division: documentary editing 'presents a text as it was available at a particular time in a particular document. Such editing is not critical in that it does not emend the text, even a text that may not accurately reproduce an author's words', whereas 'Critical editing, the second major form of scholarly editing, does not reproduce the text of a particular document but produces an eclectic text based on several texts and on editorial emendations. It assumes that though multiple texts of a work may vary in authority, no one text is entirely authoritative.' (pp.56-7).

Scholarly or non-critical editing in the literary arena has also been much practised, as for instance in the old-spelling, type-facsimile editions of sixteenth and seventeenth-century writings (where the need was to maintain the original orthography). A scholarly edition could also be a photo-facsimile edition, or a reset edition with specified emendations, of a historically important state of a literary work (or historical document) with the text surrounded with sufficient bibliographical analysis to render its significance plain. Another kind of scholarly edition has been the variorum edition of, for example, the work of major poets. A base text is selected and the apparatus records the variant readings in other historical printings.

In summary therefore, the critical edition has been considered one which either: (1) for the classical or medieval periods, attempts to recover the text of a lost document, typically one as close as possible to the original text, but which is now represented by a range of much later scribal copies in various complex relationships of textual descent; or (2) for the modern period where the documentary tradition may be more or less unbroken, attempts to establish a text according to some criterion of authorial intention, usually the text which the author would, under ideal circumstances, have wanted published.

One would go about critical editing in one of the following ways. In the first case a 'best text' is chosen and emended according to the editor's (literary critical) sense of its deficiencies, by reference to other documentary witnesses; or, by means of Lachmanian analysis, textual family relationships (declared by the existence of shared errors) are plotted, and a systematic attempt is made to isolate and eliminate the errors allowing the approximation of the original text. In the second case, a base- or copy-text is chosen and emended by readings from other extant states which the author is known to have revised: an eclectic text is thereby created. In both cases, the textual collation on which this work is based is conventionally published in whole or in part in the volume's apparatus.

In accepting the very usable distinction between 'critical' and 'non-critical' scholarly editing, I am beginning to paint a benign picture of peaceful co-existence amongst practitioners; but this was not the case, at least in the USA. Bowers was apt to see variorum editions as timorous because they only displayed textual variation rather than attempting to decide which instances of it needed to be incorporated into the copy-text. One either established a reading text of the work, or one shrank from the responsibility and merely recorded the textual possibilities: the literary work was thus assumed to have in its ideal form (except in rare case) one text which it ought to be the editor's business to try to establish by critical means. Bowers also hoped to educate the documentary editors into his point of view, and in this he was ably assisted by G. Thomas Tanselle's devastating essay in the 1978 issue of Studies in Bibliography, 'The Editing of Historical Documents'. Tanselle exposed illogicalities in documentary editing practice (see below); he criticised documentary editors for failing to take advantage of analytical bibliography when dealing with published works (as critical editors routinely would); he pointed out that documentary editions are usually critical anyway in their practice of using editorial judgement to emend obvious errors; and he concluded remarkably that US critical editors, who always provided a record of all deviations from the copy-text if they were to secure the CEAA seal of approval, showed thereby more respect for that text's historicity than documentary editors did. The essay, according to Kline, changed historical editing in America: since Tanselle wrote, there has been a swing back to a more conservative form of historical editing.

Tanselle's victory was not, however, complete, as W. Speed Hill's review-article of Tanselle's recent biography of Bowers points out: the general response of historical editors to Tanselle's strictures was one of immunological rejection. Although the Association [for Documentary Editing] awarded Bowers its Julian P. Boyd Award in 1986, he confided to friends that he would have preferred that its members had paid more attention to his editorial principles, and he was memorably dismissive in his speech of acceptance.(5)
Immunological rejection takes place in hidden ways, under the surface. It is not inconsistent with Kline's saying and repeating that many documentary editors were themselves having difficulties with the tradition in which they worked, and found Tanselle's essay an answer to their prayers. It gave them the opportunity to adjust their methodologies by questioning the assumptions of the old ones. But they were not converted to Tanselle's larger intellectual agenda. The first chapter of the Guide offers a detailed and careful history of the relationships between critical and documentary editors, and she is at pains to stress the achieved nature of the two forms of editing.(6) On the surface, the chapter calmly and confidently articulates the outcome of dispute. In contrast, the energy of its conclusion suggests something of the vigour of rejection mixed with a note of continuing defensiveness:
Documentary editing, although non-critical in terms of classical textual scholarship, is not an uncritical endeavor. It demands quite as much intelligence, insight, and hard work as its critical counterpart, combined with a passionate determination to preserve for modern readers the nuances of evidence that exist in the sources on which the printed documentary editions are based. (p.24)
Kline's Guide must, I think, be read as a manifesto of intellectual independence from the Greg-Bowers school and a claim of methodological and theoretical coherence.

My conclusion, for the purposes of the present listing, is this. The peaceful division of the kingdom of scholarly editing into critical and documentary editing, in truth, an uneasy detente, is the way things looked so long as definitions of the key terms were offered from within the literary or historical fields. But in fact the key terms have traditionally been used with far less exactitude, and what has been essentially an American controversy pushed the issue to a clarification, but one complicated by inherently unstable academic-political imperatives. I believe it is time to step outside that context and ask what different view of things we would get if definitions were delayed until the whole field of editing is surveyed. What would that do to the definition of the key terms? And how might that delay help to clarify the practical problems of defining boundaries for the present listing?

A preliminary observation that needs to be made is that the standard definitions are in respect of historical phenomena: either the documentary texts or the (perhaps more elusive but nevertheless equally historical) authorial intentions for the text or texts at the time. Tanselle's essay relentlessly pushes this line as he exposes example after example of documentary editors making emendations for readers' convenience (expanding some abbreviations, not recording deletions, removing repeated words and other slips of the pen) in contradiction of their central criterion of respecting the historicity of the document. However, by concentrating so firmly on the latter as the sole court of appeal, Tanselle tends to write the audience, for whom any edition is being prepared, out of his editorial rationale. This is, I think, a blindspot. Publishers' editors, for instance, are never guilty of it: for obvious reasons their audience is always at the forefront of their mind.

There is a wisdom here, I suggest, and it points at a fundamental definition: an editor mediates, according to defined or undefined standards or conventions, between the text or texts of documents made by another and the audience of the anticipated publication. This definition includes the editors employed by publishing houses who adjust, abridge, embellish, correct or criticise an author's manuscript in the stages preceding the publication of a version of it. The definition also includes translators whose mediation is aimed at remaking a work for a new audience: the rendering of biblical texts into gender- (or whatever-) sensitive language is a subset of this activity. Newspaper and magazine editors select, and subeditors rewrite or correct, the articles of others with a view to satisfying the tastes of their audience (and, sometimes, their proprietor). At another level, collectors of oral literatures are editors: this would include the editing of children's playground rhymes and of nursery rhymes, ethnographic transcriptions by linguist-anthropologists, and the transcriptions of interviews done from tape by oral historians. The blending or alteration of takes in filming and sound-recording is another editorial mediation; and so, in a different way, is the Laban or other notation of performed dance. All of these activities involve the taking of attitudes towards preservation and presentation of an existing text, whether that text is physical or intangible. Any or all of these editorial projects may be deemed scholarly because of the rigour and intelligence with which the work is done. While their publication (like any other) opens the possibility of a textual tradition whose transmission could perhaps in the future be worthy of study, none necessarily presupposes the taking of a critical attitude to the transmission of the text, which it is the editor's (usually urgent) business to re-present in some form or other. The wider angle of approach implied by the present definition of editing suggests that 'scholarly' editing is a more variously practised activity than the received (American) consensus of the late 1970s and 1980s would indicate.

The term, 'critical editing', is also problematic but for different reasons. The problem arises out of shifts in editorial theory which have put more emphasis on the literary work as a process rather than a finalised product and which see it (phenomenologically) as multi-texted rather than (ideally) as single-texted. These shifts accord the apparatus of variants a more important role than Bowers was willing to concede. The advent of electronic-archival editions will dramatically enhance readers' capacity to use apparatus. These editions will aim to record all states in facsimile and transcribed form, with automatic collation alerting the user to evidence of variation.(7) Given such a changing climate in editorial theory and practice, the present listing cannot and should not restrict the definition of 'critical' editing to the earlier understanding spelled out above. To signal the existence of a field of textual variation-; and preferably to nominate the people responsible for the change(8) -; without actually taking decisions about which variants to incorporate into a copy-text has to be acknowledged as a principled form of critical editing. The listing assumes this as a matter of course.

Documentary editions involve the reasoned choice of the 'source text' as it is called, based on its importance as historical witness. Emendation is either ruled out or minimised. This, however, does not mean the edition is not critical under the broader definition I have proposed: the adoption of a documentary orientation is a critical decision made not only in respect of the documents but also in respect of the anticipated historiographical needs of the audience. It is interesting to note that if Mary-Jo Kline was content to grant that documentary editing was non-critical and if, for whatever reasons, she did not choose to challenge the Greg-Bowers' idea of the critical edition, she was not prepared to grant that documentary editions were or are uncritical.

The traditional division of 'scholarly' editing into 'critical' and 'documentary' editing is clearly in need of renovation. Accordingly, therefore, the criterion on which inclusion in our representative listing of critical editions is based is the editor's taking a critical attitude towards the transmission of the text. I cannot think of another defensible position which responds to the wider definition of editing offered above and to changes in editorial thinking in recent years. The listing is therefore of critical editions, as newly defined, and not of the wider pursuit of scholarly editing.

Thus, there are no new translations listed nor dance notations, film editing and re-working of already established biblical texts; and, only because it was not practicable, musicological Ur-text and other editions have not been included, even though such endeavours would often fall within the definition accepted here. The only subsidiary distinction which would have been useful had time been available for prolonged inspection of each edition is the scale of critical editions: whether or not a full-scale collation of the textual witnesses had been carried out as a preliminary to the editing and to what extent the results of the collation were reported.

If a critical edition is one in which a critical attitude is taken to the transmission of the text, then what, under the new dispensation I am proposing, is a scholarly edition? I suggest that, if the term need not act as the portmanteau term to contain critical and documentary editing, then it can be allowed resume its normal, wider cultural meaning. If I may be permitted to use a personal example, I have recently prepared a students' edition for Penguin of The Boy in the Bush by D. H. Lawrence and Mollie Skinner. The text comes from the Cambridge University Press critical edition. Despite the fact that the Penguin will have a two-page note on the text with some striking examples of textual variation already noted in the critical edition and despite the fact that I established the reading text of the critical edition, I do not consider the Penguin edition to be a critical one. Its introductory essay is mainly literary critical, and the edition itself, given its audience, is not intended to offer an original report on bibliographical analysis of the novel's textual transmission. That has already been done in the Cambridge edition, and the Penguin edition rides on the back of it. If in the event my work for Penguin is felt to be accurate and painstaking, then it may warrant the approbation 'scholarly'. On the other hand, if the Cambridge edition had not existed and if, after a good deal of original research into the textual transmission of the novel in manuscript, typescripts and early editions including collation, I had presented the results of that research in summary form for Penguin together with, say, a resetting of the first English edition, the volume would stand as a critical edition under the broader definition I have proposed, even if not, because of its lack of apparatus, a full-scale critical one. It would be critical because it placed the first English edition within the textual tradition of the whole work and defended its printing on the grounds that it was an authoritative document, the source of many subsequent reprintings, and contained the text by which the original British and Australian audiences first made acquaintance with the work. In other words, a critical edition carefully documents, discusses and defends its own textual procedures.

It follows therefore that new editions which reset an existing edition according to the long and assiduously observed custom that it happens to be the nearest copy to hand are deemed to be outside the terms of the listing. In a critical edition as defined here the choice of copy-text or source text must be consciously articulated, categories or all instances of emendation must be listed and there must be a careful discussion of the history of the textual transmission. This applies whether the work exists in one textual state or many, and whether it was first published last millennium, last century or last year. It was inevitably produced by people who have changed or died in the meantime and for a readership subject to conditions and tastes different from today's. Texts from the past have an otherness that critical editors attempt to mediate by careful description, documentation and annotation. Facsimile editions are similarly assessed: emendation is not present, but the choice of historical edition (and of 'ideal copy' of each page in a printing originally subject to stop-press correction) and the surrounding text-analytic discussion are crucial.

Moderated List

This page was compiled by Kym McCauley.

Last Updated : 2 February 1998