CHINES, Loredana. 2021. Filigrane. Nuovi tasselli per Petrarca e Boccaccio.

Review.

An Evolutionary Textual Environment

This article introduces the notion of evolutionary textual environment as the outcome of a digital experiment. The experiment consisted of transforming a digital archive of Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet into a changing textual space sustained by role-playing interactions. As conceptual and technical artifact, this living archive expresses an innovative model not only for the literary acts of reading, editing and writing, but also for reimagining the book as a network of reconfigurable and dynamic texts, structures, and actions. The programmed features of the LdoD Archive can be used in multiple activities, including leisure reading, study, analysis, advanced research, and creative writing. Through the integration of computational tools in a simulation space, this collaborative archive provides an open exploration of the procedurality of the digital medium itself. The “unfinished machine” metaphor suggests the open-endedness both of the evolving textual environment and of the computational modeling of literary performativity that sustains the whole experiment.

CAMPEGGIANI, Ida and Niccolò SCAFFAI, eds. 2019. Eugenio Montale: La Bufera e Altro.

Review.

ITALIA, Paola, Giulia RABONI et al. 2021. What is Authorial philology?

Review.

Notes on Contributors

Information on the issue's contributors.

Printers of the Kosmos

This essay describes the editorial logic behind a recently released variorum of the 1855 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The history of the composition, printing, binding, distribution, and reading of this set of books informs the design and apparatus of the variorum, which attempts to represent something of the fundamental textual and material instability of the copies that make up the edition.

How Should One Read “The Reader”?

In the final months of her life, Virginia Woolf worked on two projects. One was the posthumously published novel Between the Acts (1941). The other was a literary-historical project, which she provisionally titled “Turning the Page” or “Reading at Random”, but which is now known by the dual titles “Anon” and “The Reader”. Although published in a 1979 eclectic edition, these documents have received little critical attention. This article proposes three novel approaches to this archive of documents. The first takes up the methodology proposed by Woolf’s original titles and reads a single folio of this project at random, paying close material attention to what is on both sides of Woolf’s typescript page. The second approach expands on the materialist slant of the first approach and offers an anatomy of this archive, while the third approach expands on my previous discussion of cataloging and classification, in order to sketch out a historiography of Woolf’s late archive.

Table of Contents

Contents.

The Accidentals Tourist

Since the 1980s, editorial theorists and proponents of ‘unediting’ have chipped away at W. W. Greg’s “Rationale of Copy-Text”, speculating that the accidental/substantive division is deceptively reductive, as even minor variants can have major implications. This essay contextualizes debates over Greg’s “Rationale” by recognizing that his theory of accidentals was a practical affordance designed to ensure that a copy-text (and often a specific document) could be reconstructed by working backwards from a scholarly edition — a vital bibliographic resource in an age before scholars were easily able to fly across the Atlantic Ocean in order to check variant copies. By considering shifting editorial values alongside the rapid development of the technologies of travel, ‘The Accidentals Tourist’ demonstrates that theoretical texts — and the subsequent revisions and corrections of them — are the products of the affordances of their own historical moments.

Tipologie di contaminazione nella tradizione testuale della “Commedia” dantesca

This essay examines the phenomenology of contamination in the textual tradition of Dante’s Commedia. After clarifying the definition of contamination, and its relationship with the editio variorum, the essay explores useful strategies to diagnose this phenomenon in the text and the consequences, from a stemmatic point of view, of the diffusion of the particular type of contamination ‘of workshop’.