This is a well-written and cogent piece of work. The problem it addresses - how one conceives of the task of the editor as conditioned by how one views authorial composition - is refracted through various scholarly disagreements on editions of specific texts. At the time, for example, there was considerable controversy regarding the Hans Gabler Ulysses (not referenced, but very relevant, and about which McGann has written elsewhere); and the classic example is the presence of two endings to Great Expectations. The question of whether one is trying to recover a text reflecting "authorial intention" or something different, conditioned by either/both of a socially mediated agreement regarding a standard text (some versions become iconic, as with Auden's "September 1 1939"), or by a model of composition as collaborative, will not go away with modern texts.

The issues are closely related to the perspective shifts associated with the New Historicism and other forms of theory which stress the social context of and constraints on the author at a different level. McGann's work contributes to what was then (and continues to be) an ongoing debate about the place of the author as the sole composer of a work, or the author's intention as the sole lens through which to see it.

These problems do not tend to arise in textual criticism of older works, precisely because the editor can't get back that far: even recreating an O text, an original base of a tree, is plagued with difficulties. (Be it noted, though, that some MSS traditions where there are several substantive families, as with Piers Plowman, raise similar issues, but more focussed around reception.) ( )

At 128 pages and with the imprimatur of a major university press, you'd think this would be a densely packed, closely reasoned analytical work, wouldn't you? Well, actually, it has the substance of an interesting blog post, while taking the form of an intellectual strip tease (one enticing promise of fulfillment is offered every page for the first two or three chapters) interspersed with some pretty extreme examples of donnish humor. The point is that, for modern literary productions (i.e. post 16th century), one does wrong to try to imagine there's such as thing as "authorial intention", whether an original intention or a final intention, since such concoctions are the consequence of the labors, ministrations and tampering of all sorts of people who have appropriated a certain amount of authority unto themselves, depending upon their role in what is considered the social enterprise of literary publication. Worth considering, of course, but not worth paying money for. Thank God for libraries. ( )

For most people, textual criticism is a closed book. And this critique, sadly, will close it even further.

Let's define the term: Textual criticism is the attempt to figure out exactly what an author meant to write. For modern authors, it's essentially irrelevant; they turn in their Microsoft Word files and that's that -- the file is the book, except maybe for laying out the margins.

For writers who submitted typed pages, or manuscript copy, this was less true. And as for authors who wrote before the invention of printing, it's even less true. For the handful of people who know what textual criticism is, that's probably what they think of first: Trying to reconstruct the text of the Bible, or Chaucer, or Vergil. That is not what this book is about. It is about more recent books, published in the era of printing, when living authors frequently played a role in the publication of their works.

McGann certainly has a point in his argument (which, if I may simplify to the point of absurdity, is that everybody is trying to make textual criticism too simple). Many works have gone through multiple stages -- editions, revisions, high-quality publications and low. Each of these stages has a certain validity. A book which goes through multiple revisions does not have a single state that is "the book."

On the other hand, this idea can be taken too far. There has to be a standard. If someone refers to "Romeo and Juliet, Act V, scene 2, line 44," without specifying the edition, it's possible that two readers will go to different lines!

McGann would have us be aware that there is more to textual criticism than a final product. This is good. But, in struggling through this book, I never saw anything that he offered as an adequate substitute. True, I come from a background of classical textual criticism, not all this new-fangled stuff. But if a textual critic can't figure out where he is going -- well, either the point is too vague to be useful or it needs to be described more clearly. ( )