The Society for Textual Scholarship

Information on the Society for Textual Scholarship.

Encoding Queer Erasure in Oscar Wilde’s "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

Literary scholars generally agree that the aesthetic qualities of Oscar Wilde’s influential text, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) classify it as a modernist work. At the same time, textual scholars have long speculated over the role of aesthetics in Wilde’s revision process in an apparent effort to reduce or obscure the homoerotic themes in the manuscript. Electronic editing standards such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) enable scholars to trace in detail the development of homoerotic themes within a digital space. Using the TEI standard, my project transcribes and encodes the first chapter of this manuscript, which introduces the story’s three main characters, Basil Hallward, Lord Henry Wooten, and Dorian Gray. In analyzing Wilde’s suppression of the homoerotic elements, I draw from debates in Textual Scholarship and Queer Historiography to explore how electronic editing might restore or "rescue" queer subjects and themes. I end with proposing a method for electronic editing that marks Wilde's alterations and deletions in TEI formal language in a way that probes the potential of TEI's “queerability.” My method examines how TEI might work as a tool of containment that suggests elusiveness through constraint. My work here manifests the intricate handling of homoerotic elements within a distinctly queer ethos.

The Work and the Listener

Paul Eggert’s The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies offers an important perspective on the value of the work-concept in textual scholarship. This response to his book, written for a seminar at the 2021 Society for Textual Scholarship conference, takes up threads leading outward from his argument, and in three sections considers the potential of bibliography beyond books, textual scholarship beyond editing, and archives beyond metaphor.

The Society for Textual Scholarship

Back matter

The Becoming of the Scholarly Editor

Paul Eggert’s The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies makes an important intervention in textual scholarship by redefining scholarly editions as functions of a process enacted in dynamic relation to an idea of a work on one hand and imagined readers — including the author as a first reader of drafts — on the other. This essay responds to The Work and the Reader by pursuing the definition of the “reader” toward a rethinking of edition-making as both a material and an ethical practice.

Constructing the Text of the View of the Present State of Ireland before the New Bibliography

This paper begins with an account of the history of modern editions of Spenser’s View, analyzes textual scholarship, and concludes with a skeptical reexamination of Spenser’s rhetorical objectives. As this paper will demonstrate, a critical bibliography is needed to clarify the dates, scribes, and provenance of the twenty-one complete manuscripts of the View of the Present State of Ireland.

Combinar leitura e “leitura”: ler, extrair, interpretar, visualizar

Recensão crítica de Martin Paul Eve. Close Reading with Computers: Textual Scholarship, Computational Formalism, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. California: Stanford University Press, 2019. 272 pp. ISBN: 9781503609365.