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Issues In Electronic Scholarly Editions: Has Hypertext Made An Honest Woman Of Us At Last?, Graham Barwell, Phillip Berrie, Paul Eggert, Chris Tiffin

Graham Barwell

There have been at least three significant attempts in the last fifty years to comprehend what exactly is this text thing that we scholarly editors and textual critics work with. The initial wave was the Greg-Bowers New Bibliography which tried conscientiously to use all surviving witnesses as forensic evidence to reconstruct the author's intention. The text according to this view was ultimately a product of volition, and the task of the textual critic was a recuperative psycho-historico-linguistic one. The second attempt was marked by Continental inclusiveness and semiotic despair at identifying a single stable authoritative version. This despair produced the …