A Rationale of Textual Criticism

by G. Thomas Tanselle

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 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.

Genres: Nonfiction

104 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1989

Reviews

[Esther Windt · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting book on the idea of drafts. Like which draft is best for authorial intent and also seeing drafts or individual prints of books as their own separate things.

[Andrea · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tanselle gets very passionate about textual criticism, but he would do better to separate some of his longer paragraphs into smaller chunks because I was losing him in his wordiness. I guess maybe he thought he should try to reach 100 pages (failed).