Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Where and how were the texts that constitute the literary culture of the period 1880 to 1939 first published? Questions of this kind have until recently been considered chiefly the preserve of bibliographers and scholarly editors, academic specialists in the material history of text production and transmission. For bibliographers, such questions direct one of their primary aims: to list and describe as comprehensively as possible the total output of a period, a publishing house, or, most commonly, a specific author. For scholarly editors, these questions are motivated, not necessarily by an interest in changing publishing venues per se , but by an editorial concern with the history of textual variation these changes evince. In the last two decades, however, questions of publishing provenance have come to interest a larger constituency within and beyond literary studies. This is in part because of developments in literary theory and criticism — the influence of Stephen Greenblatt's “new historicism,” Janice Radway's feminist studies of women readers, and Raymond Williams's “cultural materialism” are especially pertinent — and in part due to the cross-disciplinary impact of revisionist bibliographers and scholarly editors themselves, most notably D. F. McKenzie and Jerome McGann. It is also a consequence of the new prominence given in the 1980s to the emergent interdisciplinary field ... log in or subscribe to read full text