Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities)

Originally published in 1992 in hardcover, this paperback features a newly corrected text and a revised and expanded bibliography, which is updated to 1994. The book is the first to address the entire spectrum of textual scholarship: enumerative and research bibliography; descriptive and analytical bibliography; paleography and typography; historical and textual bibliography; textual criticism and textual theory; scholarly editing
Designed for editors, literary and textual critics, and students, this historical and methodological survey is richly illustrated with line drawings and photographs. There is a bibliography of scholarship (including a list of standard editions in various fields), an appendix of illustrated types of scholarly editions with interpretive commentary, and a full index. The text is suitable for courses in research methods, critical editing, philology, paleography, manuscript studies, publishing, publishing history, and the history of the book and is an essential aid to graduate students in language and literature.

What specifically should a reader expect to gain from consulting this book? An awareness of the process of textual scholarship; An ability to recognize in practice the major classes of identification described throughout the book; A familiarity with the basic vocabulary of textual scholarship and a sense of the appropriate domain of each of the skills represented by the terms; and finally through the active reading and criticism of textual editions and an understanding of the principles whereon they are constructed.