The University of Michigan Press announces that it will assume the annual publication of TEXT: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship, beginning with Volume 7. As the journal of the Society for Textual Scholarship, TEXT has always had a strong commitment to the theory as well as the practice of textual scholarship, and the new imprint strengthens this association. It will continue to be the best single source for keeping up with and following the increasingly active debate within the international textual community.
The Society for Textual Scholarship is an interdisciplinary organization devoted to providing a forum for the discussion of the cross-disciplinary implications of current research in various areas of contemporary textual work. These areas include the discovery, enumeration, description, bibliographical analysis, editing, and annotation of texts in disciplines such as literature, history, musicology, theater, film, linguistics, classical and biblical studies, philosophy, art history, history of science, legal history, computer science, library science, lexicography, epigraphy, paleography, codicology, and textual and literary theory. The contents of TEXT reflect this interdisciplinary concern and this range of fields.
TEXT 7 continues the tradition of offering its readers a series of sophisticated essays on specific textual problems, written by acknowledged experts in each field, balanced by a certain concern for those general problems in textual scholarship that all editors, bibliographers, and textual critics (not to mention literary critics) must confront. It is thus a further contribution to the "discourse" of the text and is as critical and ideological as it is descriptive and analytical.
The volume is organized in the same way as earlier ones, with an opening section of articles dealing with theoretical matters (e.g., Paul Eggert on document and text and Joseph Grigely on textual space), followed by articles arranged in chronological order of subject from medieval (e.g., Mary-Jo Arn on punctuation and Daniel Mosser on editing the Canterbury Tales) to Renaissance (e.g., Ted-Larry Pebworth on coterie poetry and Ernest W. Sullivan II on Donne) to modern (e.g., Heather Bryant Jordan on T. S. Eliot and Lawrence Rainey on Pound). Most of the essays in the chronological section also have a substantial theoretical argument. The final section of the volume consists of review-essays and reviews that give a thorough account and evaluation of books and editions while situating them in the various current debates on author, text, and culture. Highlights include reviews of editions of Marlowe, Burton, Johnson, and Thackeray and of George Landow's Hypertext, Ian Small and Marcus Walsh's Theory and Practice of Text-Editing, and D. C. Greetham's Textual Scholarship.
D. C. Greetham is Professor of English, City University of New York Graduate Center. W. Speed Hill is Professor of English, City University of New York. Peter Shillingsburg is Professor of English, Mississippi State University. All three are on the board of the Society for Textual Scholarship.
