ENGLISH

A Rationale of Textual Criticism

Book information

Publisher
University of Pennsylvania Press
Year
1992
ISBN
0812214099, 9780812214093
Open Library ID
OL8004363M
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
441 kB (451189 bytes)
Pages
104\109
Time added
2011-06-04 13:46:07

Description

Textual criticism—the traditional term for the task of evaluating the authority of the words and punctuation of a text—is often considered an undertaking preliminary to literary criticism: many people believe that the job of textual critics is to provide reliable texts for literary critics to analyze. G. Thomas Tanselle argues, on the contrary, that the two activities cannot be separated.The textual critic, in choosing among textual variants and correcting what appear to be textual errors, inevitably exercises critical judgment and reflects a particular point of view toward the nature of literature. And the literary critic, in interpreting the meaning of a work or passage, needs to be (though rarely is) critical of the makeup of every text of it, including those produced by scholarly editors.

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