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Creating the Cold War canon: A history of the

Center for Editions of American Authors.

Blackwell, Matthew Ryan

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Blackwell, M. R. (2022). Creating the Cold War canon: A history of the Center for Editions of American

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CREATING THE COLD WAR CANON:

A HISTORY OF THE CENTER FOR EDITIONS OF AMERICAN AUTHORS

Matthew Ryan Blackwell

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy

degree in English in the

Graduate College of

The University of Iowa

December 2019

Thesis Supervisor: Associate Professor Matthew Brown

MATTHEW RYAN BLACKWELL

2019

Graduate College

The University of Iowa

Iowa City, Iowa

CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL

____________________________

PH.D. THESIS

____________

This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of

Matthew Ryan Blackwell

has been approved by the Examining Committee for the thesis requirement for the

Doctor of Philosophy degree in English at the December 2019 graduation.

Thesis Committee: Matt Brown, Thesis Supervisor

Ed Folsom

Loren Glass

Adam Hooks

Jennifer Burek Pierce

For Elisa, for everything

iii

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.

Roland Barthes

“The Death of the Author,” 1967

The editor aims to establish, as far as surviving evidence permits, a text which

presents, both in its accidentals and substantives, the author’s intention.

Center for Editions of American Authors

Statement of Editorial Principles and Procedures, 1967

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

“The publishing of a scholarly edition [is] an act of homage to the physical source from

which one is working—a way of saying thank you for holding the riches you hold.”

Nicholson Baker, “Reading the Paper”

If Nicholson Baker is right that publishing a scholarly edition is an act of homage to the

original, then this dissertation is surely an homage to scholarly editions themselves—a way of

saying thank you for the riches they hold, as well as saying thank you to the tireless editors

responsible for creating them (however much I may criticize these editors in the following

pages). In writing this dissertation, though, I've accrued debts of a more personal kind. My

director Matt Brown’s perceptive reading, extensive notes, and good-natured encouragement

made this project far better than it would have otherwise been in each of its stages. Ed Folsom's

kindness and support throughout my career at Iowa, from the Whitman Archive to his Whitman

and Dickinson seminars to my time at Technische Universität Dortmund, provided a model of

generous scholarship and mentoring. Loren Glass encouraged my writing early in my career at

Iowa and exemplified the type of institutional history I practice here in his own work. In many

ways, this project has its genesis in Adam Hooks’s book history seminar, which first alerted me

to the problems and possibilities of scholarly editing. Similarly, Jennifer Burek Pierce’s seminar

in the history of reading provided valuable insight into the reception of literary texts. Kembrew

McLeod, though he ultimately could not attend the defense, gave valuable feedback on issues

relating to copyright and authorship. Each of these professors, as both mentors and scholars,

shaped my work in foundational ways, for which I cannot express proper gratitude.

I spent time in many rooms receiving helpful feedback from many people during the

writing of this dissertation. Most important among these is Room 0.406, Emil-Figge-Strasse 50,

Dortmund, Germany, where Walter Grünzweig and the faculty and staff of the Institut für

Amerikanistik at the Technische Universität Dortmund heard several drafts of sections in

progress and provided criticism and commentary. The audience of the Ruhr Ph.D Forum in

American Studies, in the conference room of Reckhammerweg 3, Essen, asked questions that

aided me in framing certain of my arguments. I spent several pleasant afternoons over coffee

with the Ruhr American Studies reading group at I Am Love in Bochum, where Dietmar and Lea

helped me work through theories of canonization and other thorny problems. The historians and

political scientists who invited me to the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies (in a beautiful

room upstairs at Abdij 8, Middelburg, Netherlands) gave advice regarding archival research that

informed this project and will guide my future work as well. In a classroom of the John F.

Kennedy Institute of the Freie Universität Berlin, the audience's questions prompted me to

reconsider certain aspects of the relationship between technology and editing. Finally, I received

great advice and insight from David Vander Meulen and the other participants in his course on

scholarly editing at the Rare Book School, in a room in the basement of the lovely Alderman

Library, University of Virginia. In a very real sense, all of these professors, colleagues, and

friends are collaborators and co-authors on this project.

My frequent visits to Cherie Hansen-Rieskamp’s office throughout my graduate career and

especially in my final weeks at Iowa attest to her knowledge, skill, and patience in administrative

affairs. I extend my thanks to Cherie for all her help, without which I could not have navigated a

sometimes labyrinthine university bureaucracy.

I was able to spend much time in Study Room 18 on the fourth floor of the University of

Iowa Library because of support from a Ballard and Seashore Dissertation Fellowship in my last

semester. I’d like to thank the Graduate College at the University of Iowa for this crucial

protected time.

One more room deserves special mention: the small study in Apartment 1 at Calle Tossalet

4, Valencia, Spain, where I was always most productive and where, not coincidentally, my (now)

wife Elisa Hernández Pérez was always close at hand. I don’t know where I’d be without her, but

it wouldn’t be as nice as this.

vii

ABSTRACT

“Creating the Cold War Canon” tells the history of the Center for Editions of American

Authors, an ambitious, government-funded, Cold War-era organization tasked with creating

definitive editions of nineteenth-century American authors. Just when poststructuralists like

Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault were declaring the death of the author in the late 1960s, the

CEAA was gaining its funding and authority with claims that it could restore authorial intention

to canonized American works by “purging” them of “corruptions” introduced during their

original publication. Its methodology, Greg-Bowers intentionalism, was based on the idea that

textual variability could be recorded with the use of a machine called the Hinman collator and

human interference could be negated by emending the earliest extant text with only those

changes from later texts that were deemed to reflect the author’s final intention. Changes made

by CEAA editors sometimes numbered in the thousands per text, from the addition of commas to

the deletion of entire passages. However, determining authorial intention was itself a matter of

editorial judgment. In effect, CEAA editors re-wrote the American canon, creating and

distributing texts that the authors themselves would not have recognized in their details. Today,

CEAA editions are the standard texts for the study of many American authors, and they continue

to be republished for popular audiences by paperback presses.

Despite its outsized influence on the production of American literary texts, no dedicated

history of the CEAA has yet been written. “Creating the Cold War Canon” fills this gap in the

scholarship by analyzing the academic and political context in which the CEAA gained

prominence and the effects its editions have had on the study of nineteenth-century American

literature. Proceeding chronologically from the early 1960s to today, this dissertation pairs a

viii

series of scholarly editions that mutually illuminate issues crucial to the organization’s

development. Its first half narrates the rise of American scholarly editing and the

institutionalization of Greg-Bowers within the CEAA. Chapter One compares Fredson Bowers’s

edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, which first applied Greg-Bowers to a

nineteenth-century text, to Thomas Ollive Mabbott’s edition of Edgar Allan Poe, which was

subsequently panned for its unmethodical approach. Chapter Two considers Harvard University

Press’s Collected Works and Miscellaneous Journals and Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson in

light of critiques made by Edmund Wilson and others regarding the effects of the CEAA on

popular publishing. The second half of the dissertation then examines how the CEAA has

influenced later print and digital editions. Chapter Three examines how the Yale Frederick

Douglass Papers Edition volume of Life and Times and the University of Nebraska’s Willa

Cather Scholarly Edition version of The Professor’s House deform and elide crucial elements of

the publication histories of their primary materials through the application of Greg-Bowers.

Chapter Four traces the effects of the CEAA on SUNY-Geneseo’s digital “fluid text” edition of

Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and contrasts its reader-oriented design with Princeton

University Press’s intentionalist edition of that work. It is thus the goal of this project to connect

the beginnings of the Center for Editions of American Authors to our current digital moment,

tracing its influence and its effects on how American literature is edited, published, and read

today.

PUBLIC ABSTRACT

The Center for Editions of American Authors was a government-funded Cold War-era

organization tasked with producing definitive editions of canonized nineteenth-century writers.

Just when literary theorists like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault were declaring the death of

the author at the end of the 1960s, the CEAA gained its funding and authority through claims

that its techno-scientific methodology could restore authorial intention to American works by

“purging” them of the “corruptions” introduced by editors, compositors, and other actors in the

original publishing process. This method was attractive to a U.S. government invested in the

ideology of freedom of expression. Though the extent to which this process altered its texts made

it a controversial choice, the editions that the CEAA produced became the standard texts for the

study of many American authors. “Creating the Cold War Canon” is the first extended study of

the CEAA and its effects on the scholarship of American literary history.

This dissertation narrates the rise of American scholarly editing and its institutionalization

via the CEAA and supporting organizations like the MLA and the NEH, and then considers how

the CEAA’s intentionalist methodology has determined the approach of more recent editions.

Throughout, I analyze key editions including the Centenary Edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the

Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Frederick Douglass Papers Edition, the Willa

Cather Scholarly Edition, and Walden: A Fluid Text Edition. Ultimately, I show that the CEAA’s

insistence on restoring authorial intention to the works under consideration deform their texts by

eliding the crucial participation of nonauthorial actors. The result is that a Romantic,

individualistic conception of authorship is reified in the American canon through this Cold War-

era project’s focus on the freedom of expression of the “inspired” author.

 
x  
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
LIST OF IMAGES...........................................................................................................xii 
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................. 1 
Greg-Bowers Intentionalism and Social-Text Theory ................................................. 10 
Individual versus Collaborative Authorship ................................................................ 19 
Creating the Cold War Canon..................................................................................... 27 
Overview of Chapters................................................................................................. 36 
CHAPTER ONE: “A RESPECTABLE OCCUPATION AT LONG LAST”: THE 
PROFESSIONALIZATION OF AMERICAN SCHOLARLY EDITING .................................. 41 
Fredson Bowers, the New Bibliography, and the Foundational Discipline .................. 44 
Intellectuals vs. Critics vs. Editors: The CEAA and Anti-Professional Discourse ....... 54 
Hawthornian Romance and Anti-Professionalism ....................................................... 63 
Mabbott's Poe and Editorial Intention ......................................................................... 76 
CHAPTER TWO: RALPH WALDO EMERSON © HARVARD: THE CEAA AND 
THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF THE AMERICAN CANON .......................................... 87 
Greg-Bowers and the Death-Wish of the Editor .......................................................... 94 
The CEAA, the NEH, and the Institutionalization of Greg-Bowers ........................... 105 
Copyright and the Afterlife of the Author ................................................................. 113 
CHAPTER THREE: EDITING MINORITY AND WOMEN’S WRITING: THE 
CANON WARS AND THE COMMITTEE ON SCHOLARLY EDITIONS ........................... 124 
The CSE in the Canon Wars ..................................................................................... 130 
Greg-Bowers in the Papers Edition of Life and Times of Frederick Douglass .......... 134 
Paratext and the Construction of the Author ............................................................. 146 

 
xi  
Willa Cather and Feminist Textual Editing ............................................................... 157 
Cather as a Lesbian Writer ....................................................................................... 165 
Edith Lewis’s Hand and the Problem of Evidence .................................................... 171 
CHAPTER FOUR: “AT THE TIME WHEN I WROTE THE FOLLOWING PAGES 
WERE WRITTEN”: FROM DEFINITIVE EDITION TO FLUID TEXT ................................ 178 
Digital Editions and Archives ................................................................................... 181 
Fluid-Text Editing .................................................................................................... 189 
Walden, From Manuscript to Fluid Text ................................................................... 193 
Reading the Fluid Walden: The Tale of the Particularly Wretched Man .................... 197 
The New Controversy: From NYRB to LARB ........................................................... 206 
Epilogue ................................................................................................................... 212 
REFERENCES .............................................................................................................. 215 
 
 
 
 
   

 
xii  
LIST OF IMAGES 
Image 1: The seal of approval of the CEAA. ...............................................................................3 
Image 2: Sol Lewitt’s “Wall Drawing #797” ............................................................................. 25 
Image 3: Fredson Bowers supervises Matthew Bruccoli at the Hinman collator at the    
University of Virginia. .............................................................................................................. 49 
Image 4: The author at the same Hinman collator at the University of Virginia. ........................ 50 
Image 5: Arthur Johnson, builder of the Hinman collator, delivers a machine to William    
Charvat and Roy Harvey Pearce at Ohio State University .......................................................... 51 
Image 6: NEH staff member Nancy McCall stacks CEAA volumes to illustrate the  
organization's productivity. ..................................................................................................... 110 
Image 7: The emblem of approval of the Committee on Scholarly Editions. ............................ 125 
Image 8: A page from the Walden manuscript. ........................................................................ 195 
Image 9: An example from Clapper's genetic text of Walden. .................................................. 196 
Image 10: The first lines of Walden in Versions A-D as displayed in Walden: A Fluid Text 
Edition. ................................................................................................................................... 201 
 

INTRODUCTION

“When the history of scholarship in the twentieth century comes to be written, a case can

be made that it will be known as the age of editing.”

Fredson Bowers, “Editing a Philosopher: The Works of William James”

Fredson Bowers, the foremost American bibliographer and scholarly editor of the

twentieth century, had good cause to predict that the twentieth century would be considered “the

age of editing” by future historians of scholarship. He did more than anyone to legitimize

scholarly editing in America. He brought the field of the New Bibliography stateside from

English scholars including A.W. Pollard, R.B. McKerrow, and W.W. Greg, thereby introducing

the rigorous evidentiary standards of analytical bibliography to scholarly editing. He then

furthered the strides taken by McKerrow and Greg in formulating their intentionalist editing

system to create the Greg-Bowers methodology. This new methodology, he claimed, could

restore final authorial intention to literary texts by locating and correcting the “corruptions”

introduced by editors, compositors, publishers, and others in the original publication process. For

the first time, readers could experience the ideal, “purified” versions of their favorite works, just

as their authors intended them to be read. Though he was by training a scholar of Renaissance

drama, he applied Greg-Bowers to his Centenary Edition volume of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The

Scarlet Letter in 1962 and set the course of American scholarly editing for the second half of the

twentieth century.

Set up within the Modern Language Association in 1963 and funded by the National

Endowment for the Humanities from 1966 to 1976, the Center for Editions of American Authors

was the first professional organization tasked with producing scholarly editions of canonical

American writers. Using Bowers’s Hawthorne as their model, the CEAA standardized Greg-

Bowers intentionalism and established it as the American mode of scholarly editing. During its

tenure, the organization became a locus of controversy and polemics. To its proponents, it

restored balance to literary studies by using objective, evidence-based textual criticism to counter

the rise of what they considered to be overly subjective New Critical interpretations—and this at

a time when New Criticism was described by more impressionistic critics as itself too insular and

evidence-based. According to Bowers and the CEAA, the organization’s rigorous application of

the Greg-Bowers method would make the study of American literature as respectable a pursuit as

that of Renaissance literature. It would produce definitive editions of important American writers

that would stand as a monument to the country’s literary tradition during the first decades of the

Cold War, when the U.S. desperately needed to show off its cultural bona fides.

To its detractors, the CEAA was an unwieldy behemoth, bogged down by bureaucracy. It

was producing editions of uneven quality as its methodology was applied more and more

haphazardly to meet production demands. Worse, it was using government funds to interfere

with private publishers’ ability to publish the American classics on an even playing field. The

NEH, founded in 1965, used the CEAA as its first flagship venture, touting its productivity as

evidence of the benefits of government support of the arts and humanities. They funneled money

into the enterprise during its first several years, as the application of the Greg-Bowers editing

procedure (not including production, marketing or distribution) cost about $85,000 per volume,

adjusted for inflation. This funding reached its height in 1968, as the CEAA received upward of

$2.5 million total that year in today’s dollars. The CEAA also aggressively lobbied for copyright

protections for their editions, arguing that they constituted new works. Though this was

ultimately unsuccessful, they still required a licensing fee for private publishers to reprint their

texts and to reproduce the CEAA seal marking them as “definitive.”

And the CEAA was certainly productive. It

oversaw the editing and production of 133 volumes during

its tenure to 1976, across the complete or partial collected

scholarly editions of fifteen American writers: The

Bicentennial Edition of Charles Brockden Brown (Kent

State), James Fenimore Cooper (SUNY), The Works of

Stephen Crane (Virginia), The Collected Works of John Dewey (Southern Illinois), The Journals

and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson and The Collected Works of Ralph

Waldo Emerson (Harvard), The Major Works of Harold Frederic (Texas Christian), The

Centenary Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Ohio State), The Selected Edition of William Dean

Howells (Indiana), The Complete Works of Washington Irving (Wisconsin and Twayne), The

William James Edition (Harvard), The Writings of Herman Melville (Northwestern with the

Newberry Library), The Centennial Edition of William Gilmore Simms (South Carolina), The

Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Princeton), The Works of Mark Twain and The Mark Twain

Papers (Iowa and California), and The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman (NYU). The CEAA

seal of approval featured on the copyright pages of these editions became a symbol of

methodological precision and rigor for scholars; for the general public, it attested that the text

had been vetted by professionals to ensure it represented the author’s final intention for their

work.

Image 1: The seal of approval of the

CEAA.

In 1976, the CEAA lost its NEH funding and reconstituted as the Committee on

Scholarly Editions. Many of the editions that were not completed under the auspices of the

CEAA continued after its dissolution as CSE editions. The eventual fates of these editions

differed considerably. Some remain incomplete. The NYU Whitman, for instance, after suffering

from organizational problems since its inception, ended up stretching across three different

university presses and multiple editorial rationales, making it difficult to determine what it

includes and in which set of volumes.

Others plodded along, putting out new volumes on a

regular schedule until they were completed as planned. The most remarkable example of this to

date is the Northwestern-Newberry Melville, which, having begun in 1968, just published its

final volume in September of 2017, totaling nearly a half century of dedicated work to the

author. The CSE, unlike the CEAA, did not control funding for editions, but merely oversaw

editing and approved of completed volumes. Editions that continued beyond or began after 1976

had to go directly to the NEH or other foundations to fund their work. The power that the CEAA

lost in its control of funding was partially made up by the CSE in its more catholic approach to

texts, however. The CSE would oversee and approve of any text, from any era or country, rather

than limiting itself as the CEAA did to nineteenth-century American texts. Also, for the first

time, editions of women and minority writers were given seals of approval marking their status

as “definitive.” Despite the advances in canon revision in the 1980s and 90s, however, the

University of Nebraska’s Willa Cather Scholarly Edition and Yale’s Frederick Douglass Papers

Edition are currently the only two approved editions of non-white or non-male American

For more on the Whitman edition’s troubles, see Amanda Gailey, Proofs of Genius: Collected Editions

from the American Revolution to the Digital Age, pp. 113-121.

authors. Because the CSE still advocated for the Greg-Bowers methodology in all its approved

editions until relatively recently, all of these editions were also subject to its assumptions about

the ontology of texts.

And so from Bowers’s vantage point at the University of Virginia in 1980, the twentieth

century’s denomination as the “age of editing,” and his own status within its history, were

assured. In his view, scholarly editing was the presiding discipline, as it “lies at the base of all

intellectual endeavor in our cultural heritage” (“Textual Criticism” 24). This had proved true of

American literature, as scholarly editing in the American context was defined by Greg-Bowers

intentionalism, and CEAA editions helped to define the subject as it grew into an autonomous

discipline after World War II. Though the CEAA had folded, its legacy continued in an

expanded form in the CSE, and those editions would come to define the literatures of other

countries as well.

However, the histories of scholarship have been written, and the CEAA and Bowers

himself are absent from them.

Immediately after his 1980 pronouncement, signs that Greg-

Bowers was losing its hegemony and that scholarly editing itself was ceding its ground to literary

theory began to proliferate. Following the translation into English of key structuralist works by

Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and others who declared the “death of the author” in the late

Histories of English or American literary studies that overlook the CEAA include Gerald Graff’s Professing

Literature: An Institutional History (1987), David R. Shumway’s Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of

American Literature as an Academic Discipline (1994), Robert Scholes’s The Rise and Fall of English:

Reconstructing English as a Discipline (1998), and Elizabeth Renker’s The Origins of American Literature Studies:

An Institutional History (2007).

1960s and 70s, the authorial intentionalism on which Greg-Bowers rests seemed hopelessly

naïve. The issues raised by the critical projects of poststructuralism, deconstruction, gender and

queer theories, and critical race studies moved to the center of the academy, and it is these

movements that largely make up the histories of twentieth-century scholarship. From the 1980s

on, the conflicts within scholarly editing focused (perhaps belatedly) on how to integrate these

theories into editorial practice and to bridge the perceived gap between textual criticism and

theory. The idea that scholarly editing was objective or pre-hermeneutic work—painstakingly

establishing a definitive text to be interpreted by others—no longer served its campaign for its

status as the presiding discipline. Instead, the modes of interpretation inherent in editing itself

had to be recognized and their problematic tendencies addressed.

The distance that scholarly editing moved in its pursuit of theory, and the concurrent loss

of interest in Greg-Bowers, can be measured by comparing two special issues of Studies in the

Novel from 1975 and 1995. The majority of the first issue, Textual Studies in the Novel, consists

of a Forum on the CEAA’s editorial principles. Of the four articles outside of the Forum, two

were by CEAA editors (G.T. Tanselle and Hershel Parker, both working on the Northwestern-

Newberry Melville). In comparison, the only article invested in the problems of Greg-Bowers in

the 1995 follow-up, Editing Novels and Novelists, Now, came from the editors of the CSE-

approved Willa Cather Scholarly Edition (Parker also contributed, but focused on lessons to be

imported from film editing to textual editing). D.C. Greetham, in this latter issue, explains the

change: “[I]n the U.S. at least the enormous production of Fredson Bowers (on Fielding,

Hawthorne, Stephen Crane, among others) and his influence over many other editions of

novelists and other prose writers (Melville, Dewey, Twain, Howells, Thoreau) and the

institutionalization of copy-text editing in the MLA's Center for Editions of American Authors

(later the Center for Committee on Scholarly Editions) together meant that by the mid-1970s

there was a dominant method, a dominant ideology, and a dominant critical assumption about the

editing of literary works, principally novels” (“If That Was Then” 429). This meant that

discussions of editing centered around Greg-Bowers, whether the textual critics involved

espoused its principles or railed against it. Twenty years later, the encounter with theory meant

that discussions opened out onto a variety of topics. As a result, the articles in the 1995 issue are

less polemical, more varied in approach, and broader in subject matter.

Today, new methods of digital editing have again changed the conversation. The ability

to view and move between multiple versions of a text simultaneously on a computer screen

makes the choice of copy-text and emendation of variants—concerns central to Greg-Bowers—

largely irrelevant. Meanwhile, new theoretical problems concerning the relationship between

author, text, editor, and reader have emerged because of this technology. From our vantage point,

then, CEAA editions may seem hopelessly outdated, and the arguments surrounding the niceties

of the Greg-Bowers method, so important in 1975, hopelessly insular and inconsequential.

However, the importance of CEAA editions in the scholarship of American literature cannot be

overstated. They are still the standard in graduate training and scholarly publishing. My own

initiation into graduate school was marked by a casual performance of expertise that invoked the

Another index of the opening up of textual criticism during this era is the number of essay collections that

have the interaction between editing and theory as their theme. These include Jerome McGann’s Textual Criticism

and Literary Interpretation (1985), George Bornstein’s Representing Modernist Texts: Editing as Interpretation

(1991), Philip Cohen’s Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory (1991), Bornstein and Ralph

Williams’s Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities (1993), and D.C. Greetham’s Margins of the Text

(1997). Greetham’s monograph Theories of the Text (1999) does more than perhaps any of these to explore the

relationship between textual criticism and literary theory.

authority of the CEAA. In my first graduate seminar at the University of Missouri, on Mark

Twain’s novels, a student asked Professor Tom Quirk which edition to use in the class. He

replied quite simply, “The California edition is the standard in Twain studies.” We all dutifully

made note of this, with no one questioning why it was so. Seminar papers that cite paperback

editions often receive marginal notes directing the writer to the CEAA edition in order to mirror

the dominant practice in scholarly journals. A survey of the journal Nineteenth-Century

Literature from 2006-2015, for example, reveals that of 33 articles about CEAA authors

(including Frederick Douglass), 27 out of 30 cite CEAA editions as their primary text when

available.

CEAA editions are also reprinted in paperback versions by publishers like Library of

America, Norton, Penguin, and others. For instance, the paperback Penguin Moby Dick that is

most widely available at Barnes and Noble and other large booksellers uses the CEAA text.

Thus, despite its seeming eclipse by digital editions in scholarly articles about editorial practice,

the CEAA still determines the texts we read, study, and teach.

The way that we conceive of new print and digital editions is largely a result of the

CEAA. Greg-Bowers was the first formalized editorial method in the U.S. The CEAA was the

first large-scale, publicly-funded humanities project. The CEAA’s deployment of the supposedly

objective Greg-Bowers, along with its controversial use of technology (in the form of the

Hinman collator, a large, expensive, space-age machine used to locate compositorial error and

Three of the articles are about texts that did not have CEAA or CSE editions at the time of publication:

Twain’s The Gilded Age and Pudd’nhead Wilson, which have not yet been published by the University of

California’s Mark Twain Project, and Melville’s Billy Budd, which was published by Northwestern University Press

in 2017.

type wear in original editions), makes the organization a precursor to the Office of Digital

Humanities and the current arguments over the relationship between science, technology, and the

humanities. Which authors receive editions; how those editions are funded; how textual evidence

is gathered, interpreted, and displayed: these are all questions that are increasingly relevant

today, and they are all questions that we have confronted once before in the arguments

surrounding the CEAA. Despite the looming importance of the CEAA, though, no one has yet

written an extended treatment of it.

After scholarly editing’s turn toward theory in the 1980s,

textual scholars either began to explore new methods (social-text theory, geneticism,

documentary editing, fluid-text editing) or to continue with Greg-Bowers, now unbothered by the

dissent that rankled its followers in the 60s and 70s. None of these scholars turned their attention

backward in an attempt to write a coherent narrative of the CEAA and the ways in which it

dictated the shape of their field. This means that to recover the importance of the CEAA in that

decade from 1966-1976 one must return to those insular, polemical arguments in the pages of

bibliographical journals, building a history that traces the effects of the organization to today. It

is the goal of this dissertation to do just that. Though Bowers was wrong about the twentieth

century being the “age of editing,” he and the CEAA do deserve a prominent place in the history

of American letters. In an effort to correct this omission, this project tells the story of the CEAA

from the publication of Bower’s Centenary Edition Scarlet Letter in 1962, through its

controversial rise in the 1960s, its reconstitution as the Committee on Scholarly Editions in 1976

The most exhaustive account of the CEAA so far is Amanda Gailey’s chapter “Cold War Editing and the

Rise of the ‘American Literature Industry,” from Proofs of Genius: Collected Editions from the American

Revolution to the Digital Age” (2015). This chapter appeared in shortened form as “Cold War Legacies in Digital

Editing,” Textual Cultures, vol. 7, no. 1, 2012, pp. 5-17.

and that organization’s role in the canon wars of the 80s and 90s, and finally its effects on

today’s digital editions.

Greg-Bowers Intentionalism and Social-Text Theory

In order to understand the importance of the CEAA and the CSE on the construction of

American authorship we must briefly define the goals and procedures of Greg-Bowers

intentionalism and contrast it with its most prominent competing editorial methodology, Jerome

McGann’s social-text theory. Greg-Bowers focuses exclusively on the author as the source of

meaning, consigning textual variants made by editors, publishers, compositors, friends and

family to an appendix at the back of each volume due to their status as “corruptions.” In 1963,

Fredson Bowers was able to quite flatly state, in his article on “Textual Criticism” in the MLA’s

Aims and Methods of Scholarship booklet, that “The recovery of the initial purity of an author's

text and of its revision (insofar as this is possible from the preserved documents), and the

preservation of this purity despite the usual corrupting process of reprint transmission, is the aim

of textual criticism” (24). Social-text theory, meanwhile, was propagated as a response to this

approach, fully articulated for the first time twenty years later in McGann’s 1983 Critique of

Modern Textual Criticism. It defines the publication of a text as a collaborative social “event”

that could not happen without the input of all those actors listed above, including, in some

variations, the paper-makers, book-binders, transportation networks, and booksellers responsible

for the distribution of texts. In this dissertation, I follow social-text theory (in a variation that I

call “hard” social-text theory) to critique the Greg-Bowers method’s objective stance and to

illustrate the ways in which CEAA editions are themselves socially produced within a network of

actors including individuals (scholarly editors) and institutions (MLA, CEAA, NEH, university

presses). In doing so, I also illustrate the ways in which the original publication histories of

CEAA texts are distorted through their presentation in approved editions.

The Greg-Bowers method is based on the editorial theory of W.W. Greg as laid out in his

1950 article “The Rationale of Copy-Text.” Greg's theory is seemingly modest. He saw that in

early modern printed plays, no two copies of any edition were guaranteed to be identical, as

changes were introduced throughout the print run. There was a tendency for compositors to take

liberties with the punctuation and capitalization (what Greg termed “accidentals”) of a text, as

orthography was not yet standardized. However, compositors were less likely to change words or

phrases (what he called “substantives”), unless an author explicitly requested changes during the

printing or in a subsequent edition. Greg's advice to editors is to choose the earliest possible copy

of the first edition as a “copy-text,” or base text, into which editorial emendations are to be

introduced. Locating the earliest copy of the first edition required the use of the Hinman collator,

which would, through a system of lenses, mirrors, and alternating lights, overlay the images of

the same page of two copies from that edition such that differences become noticeable through a

flicker or blur in the text. This allows the editor to relatively quickly note how the text changed

(whether by choice, error, or type wear) throughout the edition and to locate the earliest

document for use as “copy-text.” The editor should follow the accidentals of this text, and then

emend it with substantive changes that are deemed to be authorial from later copies or editions.

This results in a text in which both accidentals and substantives are said to most closely

approximate the author's intentions. Though simple at first glance, this “eclectic text” editing (so

termed because it results in a text made up of emendations taken from many primary sources)

revolutionized the editing of Renaissance drama and would eventually lead to the turbulent rise

of American scholarly editing.

Bowers’s achievement was to adapt this process to nineteenth-century American texts.

The documentary archive of the nineteenth century, including manuscripts, typescripts, galleys,

authors’ marked first editions, and authorial correspondence, meant that crucial decisions

regarding the application of Greg-Bowers had to be made. Bowers determined, among other

things, that the manuscript of a work constitutes a fully realized version whose accidentals

should be followed as opposed to the first edition.

This means that the originary moment of

composition is privileged above all else, and is seen as corrupted by the intervention of any

nonauthorial actor. Even in cases where the author can be shown to have anticipated, and even

welcomed, changes made by others, as in the case of a publisher’s house styling, the goal for

Greg-Bowers is to capture the unique authorial style represented by the accidentals of the

manuscript.

The adoption of this system led to significant pushback from a cadre of textual critics

who argued that the publishing industry of nineteenth-century America was different in kind, and

not simply degree, from that of Renaissance England. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, a

polemical argument raged in the pages of scholarly monographs and bibliographical journals

about the appropriateness of Greg-Bowers and its application by the CEAA. James Thorpe,

Philip Gaskell, Hans Zeller, and Donald Pizer each objected to Greg-Bowers, arguing in different

Other important decisions included how to proceed in the case of “radiating texts,” which are those texts

that have multiple versions with no clear priority, such as simultaneous or near-simultaneous publication of the same

short story in multiple magazines. Such situations were common after the subscription system of S.S. McClure

became popular at the end of the nineteenth century.

This issue presents us with an opportunity to share an example of Bowers’s polemical style: “One is foolish

to prefer a printing-house style,” he writes. “This distinction is not theory, but fact.” (“Some Principles” 226).

ways for the discrete nature of different versions over its eclectic procedure.

Pizer, in his 1971

article “On the Editing of Modern American Texts,” provides “five ways in which copy-text

theory is unresponsive to the distinctive qualities of modern American texts” (4), which neatly

summarize the arguments of this group of scholars.

First, Greg-Bowers’s preference for early copy-texts leads its editors, in the case of

American texts, to choose manuscripts, while American authors of the nineteenth century and

afterward often had close working relationships with their publishing firms and/or editors and

considered manuscripts to be merely working texts. In this scenario, the author’s acceptance of a

recommendation from their publisher or editor is “the equivalent of a creative act” (4), as writing

is considered to be in-progress until the book is published. This is a principle that would later be

termed “authorial expectation.”

Second, the preference for an eclectic text that blends together two or more source

documents ignores the fact that there were often multiple authorially-sanctioned versions of a

single work in the modern American context. By combining them, the scholarly editor destroys

the unique attributes of each version. Thus, each CEAA edition actually represents a loss of

historical material, as the “imaginative ‘feel’” (5) of each version is lost.

See Pizer, “On the Editing of Modern American Texts” (1971); Thorpe, Principles of Textual Criticism

(1972), especially Chapter One; Gaskell, New Introduction to Bibliography (1972) and From Writer to Reader

(1978); and Zeller, “A New Approach to the Critical Constitution of Literary Texts,” (1975). G.T. Tanselle wrote

defenses of Greg-Bowers (perhaps more accurately described as attacks on its critics) every five years from 1975-

2000 for Bowers’s journal Studies in Bibliography. These are collected in Textual Criticism Since Greg: A

Chronicle, 1950-2000 (2004).

Third, the sheer amount of historical documentation that still exists from the nineteenth

century makes a comprehensive representation of it in an edition’s apparatus all but impossible.

Pizer invites us to imagine a novel for which we have “a holograph, three revised typescripts

(often with paste-and-scissors revisions and evidence that several hands have helped revise the

typescripts), a magazine appearance in whole or in part, a revised galley proof, a revised page

proof, an annotated authorial copy of the first edition, and many printings in the author’s

lifetime,” a situation not at all uncommon after the rise of industrial publishing firms. He argues

that an appendix that includes all evidence from this wealth of material would be “so complex

and bulky that it would be all but unusable as a critical aid” (6).

Fourth, the uncritical inclusion of all the written work by an author in their collected

edition is a waste of time and energy on the part of the editor, of expense by the publisher and

purchaser, and creates an edition that is difficult to navigate for the reader. Ed Folsom has

echoed this complaint regarding the Whitman edition, for example, when he writes that “The

bulk of the Collected Writings will end up containing poor writing or hack writing, really the

Discarded Writings… In any case, it’s safe to say that when the project is completed, no other

major author will be represented by such a large and luxurious Collected Writings so filled with

intrinsically bad and flat writing.” (“The Whitman Project: A Review Essay” 374). Because in

nineteenth-century America, authors often had long careers in which serious literary work was

subsidized by journalism or hack work, this presents a situation materially different from the

major authors of the Renaissance period.

And the final issue with the CEAA’s adoption of Greg-Bowers is its insistence on clear-

text. Because it is more commercially viable to create an edition in which the main reading text

is “clear,” without annotations, footnotes, or variants presented on-page, each CEAA edition has

an apparatus relegated to the back of the book that contains all of this information. Pizer asks,

“how available to the reader is the logic behind a tendentious and problematic emendation when

he must juggle, both physically and mentally, the textual introduction, the text, the textual notes,

the editorial emendations, and the historical collation in order to discover the nature and basis of

an emendation which does not even bear a distinguishing mark on the clear-text page?” The

main clear-text would be licensed to commercial publishers without this material, leading Pizer

to again ask, “how available will this logic be to the teacher or student encountering clear-text

sans apparatus and textual introduction in a reprint intended for class use?” (8). These objections

present the main areas of contention for Americanist textual critics in the 1960 and 70s: choice of

copy-text, the nature of a “version” of a work, the navigation and presentation of the historical

archive when preparing an edition, the critical role of the editor in determining literary quality,

and the end-use of the edition (who will use it, how, and to what purpose).

Until the 1980s, these concerns were presented piecemeal by several textual critics and

theorists, but the hegemony of Greg-Bowers went materially unchallenged. Upon the publication

of McGann’s Critique, though, the situation changed: the success of his book gave definitive

shape to this strain of criticism, and from that point on the loose affiliation of dissenters in what

used to be called the “Thorpe-Gaskell” school would now be gathered under the banner of

“social-text theory.” McGann’s principle intervention was in locating the authority in a text in

the event of publication as opposed to the final intentions of the author. The passage in which he

describes the result of a focus on authorial intention is worth quoting in full:

As the very term “authority” suggests, the author is taken to be—for editorial and critical

purposes—the ultimate locus of a text’s authority, and literary works are consequently

viewed in the most personal and individual way. Furthermore, just as literary texts are

narrowly identified with an author, the identity of the author with respect to the work is

critically simplified through this process of individualization. The result is that the

dynamic social relations which always exist in literary production—the dialectic between

the historically located individual author and the historically developing institutions of

literary production—tends to become obscured in criticism. Authors lose their lives as

they gain such critical identities, and their works suffer a similar fate by being divorced

from the social relationships which gave them their lives (including their “textual” lives)

in the first place, and which sustain them through their future life in society. 81

There is here a critique of the distortion produced by locating full textual authority in the

historical person of the author, as knowledge of the author’s life informs interpretations of the

text and knowledge of the text informs interpretations of the author’s biography in a feedback

loop that ultimately reduces both author and text to caricature. The “dynamic social relations”

that are necessary for textual production in turn get pushed to the background. This can be seen

in Greg-Bowers’s neglect of the “bibliographical codes” (typography, book design, illustrations,

paper, binding, etc) in favor of “linguistic codes” (letters, punctuation, spaces). To address this

problem, authority is dispersed in social-text theory among the actors that produced the text,

including typographers, book designers, and etc. Adherents of Greg-Bowers perceive the social

dimension of textual production as “a process of contamination” of the text, but for McGann it is

“a process of training the poem for its appearance in the world” (51). In terms of editorial

practice, this means that the first edition is most suitable as copy-text, “since it can be expected

to contain what author and publishing institution together worked to put before the public” (125).

Scholarly editors must also be aware that they themselves form part of such a collaboration,

which means that they must be self-conscious of their role in their text’s “future life in society”

(81). For this reason, McGann espouses practical editions that are aimed at specific audiences

(scholars, students, the general public).

Throughout the 80s, the application of these ideas was forestalled because there simply

was not the technology extant to execute them in an effective way; applied social-text theory was

always in danger of looking suspiciously like standard documentary editing that would reproduce

in facsimile the first edition of any text under consideration. With the advent of digital editing in

the 90s, though, it was possible to create digital facsimiles that presented high-quality scans of

first editions, along with hyperlinks to further historical information about the publication

process. McGann’s involvement with the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced

Technology in the Humanities and his digital archive of the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti were

early indications of the potential for social-text theory in the digital space.

In terms of theory, this displacement of the author to the margins is in line with

movements that called for (or declared) the “death of the author.” However, the author

sometimes reappears to assert his or her authority in social-text theory as well. In these cases, it

is useful to distinguish between what I call a “soft” and a “hard” social-text theory. As we can

see in Pizer’s first criticism listed above, the author still features prominently in the Thorpe-

Gaskell school in its reliance on authorial expectation when justifying the choice of first edition

as copy-text. The author must expect that the publisher will introduce changes, or else approve of

the changes after they have been made. But what if an author is unhappy with the work of their

publisher? McGann makes concessions to the ultimate authority of the author in cases of “the

expurgation, suppression, and mutilation of texts” (126) by publishers. He gives three examples

of such situations: D.H. Lawrence’s publishers backing out of the publication of Women in Love

after the obscenity controversy surrounding The Rainbow, and the difficulties in publishing two

of John Cowper Powys’s novels. The first Powys novel, Weymouth Sands, had to be revised to

remove real place names before its publication in England (where it was renamed Jobber Skald)

to avoid a possible libel suit. The second one, Porius, was only made available in a drastically

shortened version because of the paper shortage during World War II. McGann avers that in

these cases, one should revert to authorial intention and publish Lawrence’s novels together in a

two-volume version “which Lawrence once expressed a desire to see published” (127), Powys’s

unrevised Weymouth Sands, and his longer Porius. McGann quite simply dismisses any

alternative: he writes that “Jobber Skald is not the version of this work any reasonable editor

would produce” (126) and that “No scholar—one would hope, no publisher—would today print

the published text of Porius; what needs to be issued is the version of the novel which survives in

Powys’s typescript” (127).

This position is a “soft” social-text theory because it assumes that there is a point beyond

which the vagaries of textual production—in the form of legal concerns, publishers’ imperatives,

or material-economic circumstances—do in fact constitute “a process of contamination” and the

manuscript therefore represents a more ideal form of the work because it is closer to the author’s

intentions for it. McGann doesn’t consider that these works as published do hold historical and

scholarly interest, as they showcase how censorship (in Lawrence), libel laws (in Jobber Skald)

and material conditions (in Porius) variously distort the stylistic content and narrative shape of a

text. One could imagine, for example, a reprint of the original version of Porius accompanied by

essays about its troubled publication history, the effects of its abridgement on its narrative

structure, Powys’s reaction to the situation, the critical response to the novel, etc. Such an

approach would constitute a “hard” social-text theory, in that it seeks to present and understand

the original context of publication with a view toward serving a specific (in this case, scholarly)

audience. It is important to note that, though I generally favor the hard social-text approach here,

both forms are valid and can produce useful editions. Ultimately, this is a matter of respecting

discrete versions as representative of historical events of publication, and choosing to publish a

manuscript for the first time in adherence to the soft social-text approach would produce another

legitimate version of that text.

Individual versus Collaborative Authorship

Before the advent and widespread advocacy of social-text theory, the primacy of

authorial intention was so ingrained in American scholarly editorial theory and practice that in

1976 George Thomas Tanselle, the foremost proponent of Greg-Bowers after Bowers himself,

could write that “Scholarly editors may disagree about many things, but they are in general

agreement that their goal is to discover exactly what an author wrote and to determine what form

of his work he wished the public to have. If the edition is to be a work of scholarship—a

historical reconstruction—the goal itself must involve the author's 'intention'” (“The Editorial

Problem of Final Authorial Intention” 167). In their insistence on privileging the final intentions

of one singular author, though, the proponents of Greg-Bowers were also taking a hardline stance

on the conservative side of an emerging debate about the historical construction of authorship

itself. This means that as a group, American scholarly editors agreed with the controversial

position of E.D. Hirsch, a colleague of Bowers’s at UVA, whose 1967 Validity in Interpretation

argued that “To banish the original author as the determiner of meaning was to reject the only

compelling normative principle that could lend validity to an interpretation” (5). This position

clashed with another strain of theory that was attempting to do away with the concept of the

author entirely. Just as the CEAA was coming into prominence in the late 60s, Michel Foucault

argued that the concept of the “author” as coterminous with a real historical person was not a

fundamental category, but rather a product of modernity. Foucault writes that “The coming into

being of the notion of ‘author’ constituted the privileged moment of individualization in the

history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy, and the sciences” (141). Foucault’s

elucidation of the historical contingency of the category of the author has since led critics to

decenter individual author-figures in favor of collaborative models.

Social-text theory, with its

focus on the various actors that contribute to the event of publication, was a catalyst for these

alternative models because it sees the multiple intentions that go into the production of a text as

fundamentally entangled. Any attempt to disentangle them, or to attribute the product as a whole

to one individual, distorts the historical reality of publication and, in the case of applied editorial

theory, distorts the resulting text itself.

Some theorists of collaborative authorship look toward works that make their

collaborative nature explicit on the title page in order to explore the complications such a

situation introduces into traditional interpretive practice. Wayne Koestenbaum, in his 1989 book

Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration, argues that “a text is most precisely

and satisfyingly collaborative if it is composed by two writers who admit the act by placing both

of their names on the title page. A double signature confers enormous interpretive freedom,”

though he also discusses well-known collaborative projects like Eliot and Pound’s The Waste

Beginning in the late 1980s, collaborative models of authorship saw increased critical attention. Lisa Ede

and Andrea Lunsford’s Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing (1990) examined its

implications for composition studies. Peter Jaszi and Martha Woodmansee’s The Construction of Authorship:

Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (1994) frames the issue through copyright law. Holly Laird organized

a special double-issue on collaborative authorship in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 13, no. 2 and vol. 14,

no. 1 (1994-95). The “Theories and Methodologies” sections of two issues of PMLA, vol. 116, nos. 2 &3 (2001),

were largely dedicated to this trend. Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson edited a collection of essays on various

types of two-person collaborations from the early modern period to the contemporary era in Literary Couplings:

Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship (2006). Note also the collaborative nature of

these texts themselves (Ede/Lunsford, Jaszi/Woodmansee, Stone/Thompson, as well as collaboratively produced

journal issues). The interest in collaborative authorship as a topic of scholarly inquiry may be inspired by, or inspire

in its turn, an increased awareness of the collaborative nature of scholarship itself.

Land that don’t follow this rule (2). Susanna Ashton, in Collaborators in Literary America,

1870-1920 (2003), similarly limits her definition to “texts that acknowledge joint production by

either a dual copyright or multiple names listed on a title page” (4). Other critics expand their

definition of collaboration somewhat. Holly Laird’s study of Women Coauthors (2000), for

instance, includes editors or close acquaintances whose input, both written and spoken, helped

shape the final product. Bette London’s Writing Double: Women’s Literary Partnerships (1999)

goes a step further in arguing that even the most exemplarily solitary writers, such as Emily

Dickinson, in fact worked within coteries of women writers. She spends much of her book

discussing automatic writing and mediumship as sharing characteristics of collaborative writing

from beyond the grave, as well. Jack Stillinger’s influential Multiple Authorship and the Myth of

Solitary Genius, from 1991, is perhaps the most catholic of this set, as he argues that “such

multiple authorship—the collaborative authorship of writings that we routinely consider the

work of a single author—is quite common” and that “the frequency with which this kind of

multiple authorship turns up, once one starts looking for it, is rather strikingly at odds with the

interpretive and editorial theorists’ almost universal concern with author and authorship as single

entities” (22).

Another model of collaborative authorship takes its cue more directly from Foucault’s

definition of literary works as discursive products that are only attributed to singular authors out

of relatively recent convention. Linda Karrell, in her 2002 book Writing Together/Writing Apart:

Collaboration in Western American Literature, includes in her definition of collaboration “acts

of writing in which one or even all of the writing subjects may not be aware of other writers,

being separated by distance, era, or even death.” In fact, she describes all writing as “inevitably

collaborative, both regardless of the circumstances of its authorship (that only one individual

literally ‘wrote’ a text, for example) and because of the circumstances of its authorship (that

authorship is actually a form of production that invariably reveals the presence of others)” (xx).

Karrell considers the sort of co-authorship or multiple authorship modeled in the examples above

to be merely “doubled individual authorship,” when in reality “absolute individual authority is

ultimately impossible; in its stead, we have collaboration—a multivoiced, multilayered process

intrinsic to the writing virtually all writers do regardless of their conscious intentions or

aspirations” (xxxiii). While recognizing that such an all-inclusive definition of collaboration

risks emptying the term of its analytical power, she argues that the overwhelming ubiquity of the

myth of solitary authorship makes an insistence on its inverse most productive: “approaching

writing, all writing, as collaborative renders its circumstances of authorship ever more complexly

revealing, particularly in terms of what it makes visible about how power circulates in specific

historical moments and circumstances” (xx).

In this dissertation, I follow Karrell’s more extreme model of collaborative writing over

those described earlier. However, my focus is shifted and doubled to accommodate the dual

timeframes that my project addresses. Karrell writes that

From a collaborative point of view, what was a fairly direct cause and effect scenario

(individual author + inspiration = original literary masterpiece) becomes something much

less clear: individual authors are always located within a shifting context of texts from

which they draw to produce, often with substantial and varied support in the form of

other writers, editors, spouses or partners, and institutions, a text that, depending on the

degree to which it meets certain established expectations of literary greatness, will be

termed “great” and “original.” xxi

This definition is based on the fact that so-called “original” texts are “always” actually “drawn”

from “a shifting context of [other] texts,” which is true enough. I would strengthen Karrell’s

claim by stating further that texts are always (not “often,” as she would have it) produced with

support from a cast of non-authorial actors including those listed above, along with compositors,

publishers, typographers, paper-makers, binders, booksellers, and others.

My own definition of

collaboration is thus shifted from Karrell’s discursive basis, which is focused on the nature of

originality, to a book-historical basis that seeks to recognize the collaborative nature of

publishing as well as of writing itself. The process of seeing a manuscript through editing,

printing, production, and distribution has a determinate relationship to the meaning that the final

product, in the form of a printed book, ultimately carries.

My definition of collaboration is doubled as well, meaning that in addition to the actors

that participated in the original publication of a work, I see every future version of that work as

an additional publishing event with its own set of actors that themselves contribute meaning to it.

Just as the editors, compositors, publishers, friends, and family of Frederick Douglass

participated in the construction of the 1892 Life and Times, for instance, the editors (John

McKivigan, Joseph McElrath, and Jesse Crisler), publisher (Yale University Press), funding

institution (National Historical Publications and Records Commission), advisory committee

(CSE), and a host of other actors came together to produce the 2012 Douglass Papers Edition of

that work. McGann makes a similar point when he suggests that “Kathleen Tillotson’s [Oliver

Twist] is a splendid edition of a great literary work, but perhaps we should want to argue that her

Thomas Inge provides a list of such actors, drawn from James L.W. West’s book American Authors and

the Literary Marketplace Since 1900: “These people include the author's agent, who places the manuscript with a

publisher; the acquisitions editor at the publisher, who looks for promising writers; the primary reader, who

evaluates and recommends the project for publication; the copyeditor, who prepares the text for the printer; the

typesetter at the printing firm; proofreaders sometimes at both the printing and the publishing offices; the promotion

and advertising director; the marketing manager and sales staff members; book reviewers for journals and

newspapers; wholesalers; and finally the bookstore owner, who puts the book in the hands of the reader”

(“Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship” 625).

edition is not the work of Charles Dickens… Tillotson’s edition stands in relation to Dickens’s

novel in the same kind of relation that (say) the Tate Gallery stands to the paintings of Turner. It

is far from the horizon under which Dickens and Turner originally worked. It is nonetheless, still,

an aesthetic and literary horizon” (“Socialization” 45-46). McGann’s argument that the

bibliographic codes of new editions create new contexts, or horizons, for the works that they

contain is a salutary rejoinder to Greg-Bowers’s single-minded attention to linguistic codes. But I

would go a step further and argue that, because works do not exist outside of their physical

manifestations as documents, new editions represent more than just a new context that informs

the work. New editions are new iterations of the work itself.

McGann’s metaphor refers obliquely to the old question, “If the ‘Mona Lisa’ is in the

Louvre, where is King Lear?” In his version, if the Tate contains and displays Turner’s

“Shipwreck,” then Tillotson’s edition contains and displays Oliver Twist—and each container

influences the meaning of the work. Let us update McGann’s metaphor by replacing JMW

Turner with a more modern artist: Sol Lewitt. Lewitt’s “Wall Drawings” consist of instructions

to a team of artists who would create a new version of each piece by drawing or painting directly

onto the wall of the gallery. His “Wall Drawing #797,” for instance, instructs its interpreters

thusly: “The first drafter has a black marker and makes an irregular horizontal line near the top

of the wall. Then the second drafter tries to copy it (without touching it) using a red marker. The

third drafter does the same, using a yellow marker. The fourth drafter does the same using a blue

marker. Then the second drafter followed by the third and fourth copies the last line drawn until

the bottom of the wall is reached.”

A Turner can be removed from the Tate, but a Lewitt Wall Drawing cannot be taken off

the wall, just as the linguistic content of an edition cannot be divorced from its bibliographic

elements. Further, a team of collaborators is necessary to create a Wall Drawing, and Wall

Drawings are often created even after Lewitt’s death. Original Wall Drawings—those created by

Lewitt with his own assistants—are prized most highly, just like Dickens’ first editions created

in collaboration with his illustrator Hablot Knight Browne (“Phiz”) and his publishers Chapman

and Hall are the most valuable. Still, Wall Drawings of varying quality proliferate like new

editions. The artist/author provides more or less specific instructions (draw lines like so, using

these colors; print these words in this order, including these illustrations). But ultimately the final

product is collaborative. The first drafter’s black marker determines the overall shape of the

image and the publisher determines the shape of the text. This suggests a different textual

Image 2: “Wall Drawing #797” at the University of Arizona Museum of Art (left) and the

Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas (right). From

artmuseum.arizona.edu/events/event/sol-lewitt-days and

www.improvisedlife.com/2015/11/30/sol-lewitts-wall-drawing-797/

ontology: The Chapman and Hall Oliver Twist is not the work of Charles Dickens, but the work

of Dickens, Phiz, his publishers, book designers, and so on. Tillotson’s Oliver Twist is a product

of the collaboration between herself, Dickens, and the relevant figures at Clarendon Press.

One of the major criticisms of the CEAA to be found here is the general lack of self-

consciousness exhibited by its editors as they create their editions; their claims to objectivity and

scientism are constantly belied by the very subjective and interpretive changes that they make

both linguistically and bibliographically to them. Put another way, CEAA editors see themselves

as Turner’s curators, and not Lewitt’s collaborators. As Stillinger remarks, “The Greg-Bowers

scheme, emerging as the result of major advances in our knowledge of printing and publishing

practices, ought to have found room for at least some the elements of collaborative creativity”

(199). The lack of awareness (or purposeful refusal) of the collaborative nature of writing and of

publication is one of the weakest points of Greg-Bowers eclecticism, and one that version-

oriented methods like a hard social-text theory are more suited to address. This dissertation, then,

recognizes each version of a work as its own discrete entity with its own network of

collaborators, ranging from the nominal author to those actors responsible for bringing the final

product into being. While addressing the full range of these collaborators is impossible in a

project of this (or perhaps any) size, attention will be paid to a variety of figures. These are the

scholarly editors of CEAA editions first and foremost, but also a selection of other actors,

including Rufus Griswold as Edgar Allan Poe’s first posthumous editor, Sylvester Betts as the

publisher of Frederick Douglass’s third autobiography, and Edith Lewis as editor of Willa

Cather’s novels. Ultimately, the deployment of the collaborative model of authorship here is

made for political reasons. This is not only to critique the hierarchical model that Greg-Bowers

implies (wherein the author’s ultimate authority is safeguarded by the expertise of scholarly

editors and then translated to the passive reader), but to draw attention to marginalized figures in

publication history that have traditionally been overlooked. As Karrell remarks, “The effects of

gender, race, and sexuality on the text become substantially more visible when reading with

collaboration in mind” (xl). Thus, the collaborative model provides new insight into Douglass’s

negotiations with his white publishers or Cather’s working relationship with her lesbian partner

Edith Lewis.

Creating the Cold War Canon

As its title makes clear, this dissertation has as its background two subjects of ongoing

scholarly interest, the shaping of the American canon and the cultural Cold War. “Creating the

Cold War Canon” describes the CEAA as a project of canon formation whose contours were

shaped by the governmental imperatives of the cultural Cold War. In this section, I provide an

overview of the importance of the collected edition to the process of canonization from the era of

the industrial book to the beginnings of the CEAA. I then describe how the CEAA was funded in

a context in which the hard sciences came to dominate the American university during the rise of

the ‘military-industrial-intellectual complex.’ It was chosen by the NEH over other literary

programs because Greg-Bowers was presented as an objective way to reproduce the American

classics as they were meant to be read, thereby avoiding potentially problematic interpretations

that would accompany works of literary theory or history.

Finally, I show how, in a context in

which the opposition between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. was often reduced to an opposition

between the abstract concepts of “individual freedom” versus “totalitarianism,” the notion that

the products of individual authors’ inherent freedom of expression could be recovered from the

historical record was ideologically aligned with propaganda efforts that began in the 1950s. It

was crucial to showcase the U.S.’s deep cultural history and to encourage the nascent discipline

of American literary studies through the creation of large, imposing editions of its most esteemed

authors. But the rhetoric of individual freedom and the denigration of collective effort as

“corruption” were just as important to the idea of American literary production that CEAA

editions fostered.

Since the canon wars of the late 1980s and 90s, the academic discourse surrounding

canonization has largely centered around those authors that appear in literary anthologies and on

Works of American literary history were sent to United States Information Services libraries abroad

during the Cold War, but they were hand-selected from those already published to present a favorable view of the

U.S. and/or democracy. Funding the writing of new such works sight unseen would present a potential pitfall.

Government officials were particularly concerned with interpretations that might, wittingly or not, provide support

for communistic repurposing of key American authors. J. Edgar Hoover himself was anxious about the political ends

to which authors were being put. In his 1958 book Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How

to Fight It, Hoover wrote that “In literature [the Communists] seek to pervert such writers as Walt Whitman and

Mark Twain, claiming, for instance, that Whitman’s love of freedom is the story of their own aims.” For more on the

battle for Whitman between the Left and Right of the 1950s, see Alan Filreis, Counterrevolution of the Word: The

Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960, Chapter Five.

college syllabuses, rather than in collected editions.

However, due to the status it confers on its

author, the collected edition has long been a prominent part of the process of canonization. After

the industrialization of book production in the 1830s made large, high-quality editions affordable

to more people, both publishers and authors saw them as opportunities to assert the importance

of their back catalogs and oeuvres. Michael Anesko has noted that this trend reached its height at

the turn of the twentieth century, after Charles Dickens’s example encouraged publishers such as

Scribner and Houghton Mifflin to issue collected sets of their most successful authors. He writes

that “the proliferation and growing respectability of collected editions [in this period] suggest

that books were accruing a cultural value as objects transcending their intrinsic contents” (187).

The physical characteristics of the editions were a crucial element of their popularity. The

elegant, uniform bindings made possible by industrial book-making led consumers that could

afford to do so to fill their “home libraries with conspicuous, space-consuming displays of their

own education and good taste” (Gailey 7). In particular, “American collected editions were

evidence of patriotically minded reading habits, with handsome editions of Lowell and Whitman

prominently asserting the owner’s familiarity with American literature” (7). To counter the

association of these collected editions with the overbearing sameness of industrial products,

In the context of American literature, important considerations of the canon that focus on classroom

syllabuses and/or anthologies include Adelaide Morris, “Dick, Jane, and American Literature: Fighting with

Canons” (1985); The Canon in the Classroom: The Pedagogical Implications of Canon Revision In American

Literature, edited by John Alberti (1995); and Canons by Consensus: Critical Trends and American Literature

Anthologies, by Joseph Csicsila (2004). This focus on the academic contexts of canon-creation only makes sense, as

challenges to the canon arose from university campuses and those writing about the issue are primarily academics

themselves.

unique touches such as authorial autographs or numbered copies would guarantee the

authenticity and limited quantity of deluxe editions.

Importantly, these characteristics informed the reception of the authors under

consideration. Because “uniform binding reinforced the suggestion that a set of works written by

a single author were figuratively and literally bound together,” Gailey notes, “the author became

a convenient organizing principle for combining multiple works, reinforced by and reinforcing

the Romantic conception of the author as the best way to understand literature” (3). A manuscript

page or autograph included in a deluxe edition would further strengthen the correspondence

between the physical body of the author and the content of the volumes. The fact that an author

was worth the outlay on the part of both publisher and consumer was strong evidence that they

belonged in the pantheon of the nation’s greatest writers. Thus, in addition to publishers,

collected editions of this era were also spearheaded by authors themselves or their friends who

understood their importance in the process of canonization. In Henry James’s New York Edition

(1907-1909) he famously revised his novels extensively, provided them with new prefaces, and

omitted those works that he considered inferior. The first collected edition of Walt Whitman, the

Complete Writings of 1902, was overseen by his “disciples” Thomas Harned, Maurice Bucke,

and Horace Trauble, while a popular edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Houghton Mifflin, 1909-

1914) was edited by his son and grandson, Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson

The most interesting example of this, and the most maddening to scholars of Frank Norris, is the Argonaut

Manuscript Limited Edition of Frank Norris’s Works, published by Doubleday, Doran and Co. in 1928. The first

volume of each set of this edition included one page of the original manuscript of McTeague, effectively dispersing

this important document across the globe in 245 pieces.

Forbes. Instances of this kind can be multiplied through the first half of the twentieth century; it

wasn’t until after World War II that university presses took over the role of commercial

publishers and professional editors replaced friends and family in the production of collected

editions.

The principles of scholarly editing began to be applied to editions of American authors

first with The Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier (Johns Hopkins, 1946), and then

with Harvard’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955). As these editions bookend the publication

of Greg’s “Rationale,” they form a rough guide to the emergence of the Greg-Bowers method.

The Johns Hopkins Lanier uses R.B. McKerrow’s earlier method, applied not by a scholarly

editor but by Lanier’s distant cousin Charles Anderson. It is therefore an intermediate step

between the old tradition of friendly or familial editors and the new fashion for intensive

scholarly work. The Harvard Dickinson represents the first (imperfect, idiosyncratic, but

influential) application of Greg’s work to an American writer. This edition was done closely

enough to CEAA standards that the organization saw a new edition as redundant, thus leaving it

with its list of fifteen men. Then, Bowers’s Centenary Scarlet Letter of 1962 fully formalized a

system of editing that was meant to update Greg for the American context. His edition was the

exemplar of all future CEAA editions, but the expense of Greg-Bowers meant that outside

funding would be necessary for the project to continue. The early proponents of the CEAA thus

emphasized the canonizing potential of collected editions in their bid to the U.S. government’s

newly founded National Endowment for the Humanities in 1965.

In the postwar era, when the United States was entering the world stage as a superpower

and its cultural products were becoming an important asset for cultural diplomacy, multiple

groups approached the NEH with plans for collected editions of American authors. Notably,

Edmund Wilson presented his plan based on France’s Bibliothèque de la Pléiade and apparently

received the promise of funds, but ultimately lost out to the CEAA. The Greg-Bowers method,

with its use of the physically impressive Hinman collator and its claims to empirical truth,

provided an opportunity for the U.S. to showcase its techno-scientific prowess as well as its

cultural tradition. Despite the extra expense, it was important to the NEH to support a project that

would be seen as scientific. The decision to fund “supposedly depoliticized, scientifically edited,

esoteric volumes” was a direct result of “Cold War opinions about the purposes of academic

research and the government’s role in supporting it” (Gailey 89-90). According to Rebecca

Lowen’s history of Stanford during the Cold War, the military-industrial-intellectual complex

that arose after the military began funding pure research at universities affected the broader

system of funding across disciplines. “Scientism—a stance of political and value neutrality and

an emphasis on description, explanation, and verification—became dominant after the war,

accompanied by the privileging of particular methodologies” (191). Lowen marks this shift in the

social sciences, including international relations, Soviet studies, East Asian studies, and cultural

anthropology, and it extends to the CEAA as well. The knowledge produced by the research

program at the root of Greg-Bowers was thought to be enough to eliminate the need for any

future editing of its authors, such that private publishers could license CEAA texts for

publication sans apparatus and slowly replace the “corrupted” texts in circulation with

empirically correct ones. Thus, the CEAA was structured on the same public/private relationship

that dictated funding in other fields—basic research that would ordinarily be too expensive for

private companies would be funded by the government, and its fruits would then be made

available for private use.

Gailey argues that “What was needed [by the NEH] was a humanist enterprise that was

seemingly free of ideology but that affirmed American history and cultural accomplishment in a

way that evaded ideological, political, and cultural scrutiny by politicians and the public” (86).

Of course, the CEAA was not free of ideology, but rather upheld two of the most important

ideological tenets of the Cold War: freedom and individualism. In his study of the effects of the

cultural Cold War on American modernism, Greg Barnhisel writes that “Cold War-era

arguments in the United States held that the cultural and economic liberties of the West allowed

for individuals to express their essential freedom and self-determination…. [while] the Soviet

Union radically curtailed the freedom of the individual in favor of the desires of the state and

party” (45-46). Literature was a particularly fraught area of cultural production in this regard. No

less a figure than Lenin himself wrote that “Literature cannot be… an individual undertaking,

independent of the common cause of the proletariat. Down with non-partisan writers!” (qtd in

Barnhisel 48). In this context, the CEAA’s claim to restore an individual author’s freedom of

self-expression works not only to canonize those authors involved, but to bolster a larger

ideological argument in favor of core Western ideals.

Many of the authors and works included in the CEAA can be seen as upholding these

ideals. Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” Thoreau’s Walden, and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass are all

exemplary of an individualism that can be considered uniquely American. As Donald Pease

shows, even Ishmael’s survival of Ahab’s totalitarian rule on the ship of state of the Pequod in

Melville’s Moby Dick was most commonly read as an anti-communistic, pro-individualistic

parable during the Cold War (243-244). However, Greg-Bowers’s overarching logic was able to

subsume dissenting texts as well, turning even works of problematic anti-American sentiment

into examples of the individual author’s freedom of expression. The version of freedom espoused

within Cold War liberalism drew on the Lockean tradition of individual liberties, in particular its

“focus on the heroic, dissenting artist free to create as his conscience directs him” (Barnhisel 44).

Within the hundreds of volumes overseen by the CEAA or CSE, the minority of texts that were

critical of U.S. government or politics registered as the healthy product of a democratic process

of dissent and debate. Rather than a clunky attempt at pruning out negative portrayals of the

American way of life and opening itself up to accusations of censorship, the U.S. government,

through the CEAA, was able to empty out the specific content of anti-American texts and to turn

their very existence into evidence of uniquely American freedoms. CEAA authors, like the jazz

ambassadors and abstract expressionists that Barnhisel covers, were drafted into the cultural

Cold War.

One would think that the canonical works represented in CEAA editions should have

been celebrated as evidence of the full functioning of the nineteenth-century capitalistic

marketplace that produced them, including the collaboration of the full field of workers from

author to bookseller. However, this collaborative picture began to resemble a socialistic united

workers’ front. As Pease argues in his analysis of the Cold War scene of cultural persuasion, the

dual nature of the conflict between the superpowers—individual freedom in the U.S. held up

against its supposed loss in the totalitarian domination of the U.S.S.R.—flattened nuanced

political arguments into propagandistic caricatures representing the fundamental ideologies of

each side. Writing in the 1980s, Pease remarks that the Cold War scene displaces “potentially

disorienting political arguments onto a context where the unquestioned ground—the ideological

subtext justifying political dissent—can empty them of their historical specificity and replace

them with ideological principles,” which are “America’s freedom as opposed to Soviet

totalitarianism in the case of the Cold War” (245). The result of this logic within scholarly

editing is that, paradoxically for the teams of CEAA editors working together to produce

government-funded editions, collaborative authorship shades into communistic deindividuation

and editorial oversight looks more like faceless censorship.

The elisions that Greg-Bowers enters into the historical record can thus be read as

originating from and supporting the U.S.’s investment in the ideology of individual freedom of

self-expression. As with the nineteenth-century original publications, so too with the twentieth-

century scholarly editions. Large, collaborative, government-sponsored editions that

substantially change the texts of American classics are too reminiscent of Soviet governmental

censorship without the compensatory ideological edge provided by the image of the unfettered

Romantic author. By denigrating the original literary editors’ input as “corruptions” while

describing the CEAA editors’ work as recovering authorial intention, the Greg-Bowers method

presents itself as objective while upholding this image. Rather than a government-funded, newly

emended text, they present a professionally-sanctioned, “original” text, recovered for the first

time from the injurious overreach of past non-authorial agents who would corrupt the purity of

an original American voice. The realities of the publishing business—including the fact that

changes were often made to texts with the very capitalistic goals of increased audiences and

increased profits in mind—are, in the process, distorted or erased entirely in favor of the

Romantic author, the inspired genius asserting his individuality through unmediated self-

expression. This dissertation explores how this vision of American publishing history was

inscribed in CEAA editions, and how it distorts or elides important aspects of that history as

viewed through the lens of a social-text framework.

Overview of Chapters

“Creating the Cold War Canon” is presented in two halves, with Chapters One and Two

focusing on the rise of the Center for Editions of American Authors through the

professionalization of scholarly editing and the institutional nexus in which the CEAA operated,

respectively. Chapters Three and Four then trace the effects of the CEAA by examining the

persistence of Greg-Bowers into the precepts of the Committee on Scholarly Editions beginning

in 1976 and then by comparing stable, definitive CEAA editions with current digital “fluid-text”

editions. Each chapter pairs two important editions that mutually illuminate the topic under

discussion. Proceeding chronologically, the chapters interpret relevant literary works as they are

represented in the edition under scrutiny. Chapter One, “'A Respectable Occupation at Long

Last': The Professionalization of American Scholarly Editing,” compares the opposed editorial

positions taken by Fredson Bowers in his Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel

Hawthorne (Ohio State, 1963-94) and Thomas Mabbott in his Harvard edition of Edgar Allan

Poe's Collected Works (1969-78). Bowers’s adaptation of Greg’s method to nineteenth-century

American works in his edition of The Scarlet Letter presented a strong argument for the

professionalization of scholarly editing in America. This was during a time when literary critics

were reading Hawthorne’s theory of the “romance” as a powerful indictment of professionalism

itself in a bid for increased visibility and legitimacy (and, paradoxically, increased professional

status). Through a close reading of “The Custom-House,” I argue that The Scarlet Letter was

crucial for both critics and editors as they each used it for their professional ends. Critics

mirrored Hawthorne’s professional anxieties as they appropriated the “romance” as a cornerstone

of the American canon that they were uniquely suited to study, while editors pointed to the text’s

corruption as evidence that their expertise was needed to maintain the canon’s material existence.

Mabbott, by contrast with Bowers, located editorial authority in subjective expertise rather than

external method. By the time his edition of Poe was published, however, Greg-Bowers had

become de rigueur and reviewers were critical of his “undisciplined” approach. By examining

Mabbott’s archives, I reveal that he purposefully avoided Greg-Bowers in order to use his edition

to restore the reputation of Poe’s maligned literary executor and editor Rufus Griswold.

In 1968, the CEAA's reliance on scientism came under attack in a series of articles by the

historian Lewis Mumford and the writer and critic Edmund Wilson in the New York Review of

Books. Mumford took Harvard's edition of Emerson's Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks

(1960-82) to be emblematic of “the preconceptions and the mock-scientific assumptions

governing the pursuit of the humanities today.” The ensuing controversy is the catalyst for

Chapter Two, “Ralph Waldo Emerson © Harvard: The CEAA and the Institutionalization of the

American Canon,” which analyzes the Journals along with Harvard's edition of Emerson's

Collected Works to discuss the effect of the institutional support that these editions received from

the MLA, NEH, and contemporary copyright law. The example of Emerson's essay “Nature”

illustrates how the application of Greg-Bowers, made necessary by NEH funding requirements,

dictates the available interpretations of the text. By conflating two different versions of the essay

into one, which was then leased to private publishers as the “definitive” version, a singular

coherent “Emerson” emerges and circulates in the marketplace, despite the two original versions

of “Nature” being incompatible with one another. Because of the importance of the CEAA to the

U.S.’s cultural-diplomatic efforts during the Cold War, an increased need for productivity caused

the mechanical application of Greg-Bowers to a larger variety of texts in the late 60s, causing

such situations to be a frequent (and frequently remarked-upon) problem.

After the CEAA reorganized as the Committee on Scholarly Editions in 1976, it

expanded its coverage to include editions from authors of any country or era. Still, its canonizing

impulse remained conservative along gender and racial lines. In 1994, W. Speed Hill, chairman

of the CSE, claimed that “If you feel history has been unfair to you, if it has suppressed or

marginalized you, muffled your voice and co-opted your autonomy, denied you and people like

you their rightful identity, you are not likely to become a scholarly editor” (98). Chapter Three,

“Editing Minority and Women’s Writing: The Canon Wars and the Committee on Scholarly

Editions,” uncovers institutional barriers to the establishment of minority texts through a

discussion of the only two CEAA/CSE-approved editions of American minority or woman

writers: Yale's Frederick Douglass Papers Edition (1973-present) and the University of

Nebraska's Willa Cather Scholarly Edition (1992-present). The Yale edition’s editors present

their version of Douglass’s third autobiography, Life and Times (2012), as recovering Douglass’s

voice from a text corrupted by house styling and publishers’ interference. I discuss the complex

publication history of this text to argue that this assertion rests on thin evidence, and in fact

obscures the myriad ways that Douglass negotiated with his publishers to control bibliographic

aspects of this book including paper quality, illustrations, binding, and typography. The editors’

dedication to the Greg-Bowers method neglects Douglass’s agency in these matters with its

exclusive focus on house styling and authorial “voice,” when Douglass himself registered no

complaint regarding the text of this last autobiography. At issue, then, is the differing

conceptions of “liberty” that Greg-Bowers and social-text theory support.

Long after the intentionalism of the Greg-Bowers method fell out of favor, Nebraska's

Cather edition was funded because of its adherence to it. A conservative methodology sufficed

when Cather's claims to canonicity did not merit funding on their own. More recently, the

Scholarly Edition has self-consciously shifted more toward social-text theory and a collaborative

model of authorship. Upon the 2002 publication of Nebraska’s Willa Cather Scholarly Edition

volume of Cather’s important novel The Professor’s House, however, the dictates of Greg-

Bowers still held sway. The second half of Chapter Three discusses the ways in which the

Nebraska editors neglect the important work of Edith Lewis on Cather’s novel The Professor’s

House. Even after The Professor’s House formed the keystone of feminist and lesbian readings

of Cather’s oeuvre, the Nebraska editors present it as the product of Cather as a singular,

independent author. Work by feminist scholars like Melissa Homestead suggest what a more

socialized approach to an edition might look like; because it was helmed by a critic on the

conservative side of the debate about Cather’s sexuality in the 1980s and 90s, though, the

Nebraska edition’s supplementary materials rely on evidentiary standards that prohibit a feminist

reading of her life and work. This provides the context for an exploration of the political

ramifications of the CEAA/CSE’s evidentiary standards as represented in their editions’

apparatuses.

With the advent of digital editions, the focus of scholarly editing has shifted from final

authorial intention to the process of composition. In Chapter Four, “‘At the time When I wrote

the following pages were written”: From Definitive Edition to Fluid Text,” I return to the CEAA

proper by comparing the Princeton Writings of Henry David Thoreau version of Walden (1971)

with the recent fluid-text edition of the work hosted by the Digital Thoreau Project at SUNY-

Geneseo. The Princeton editors used the page proofs of Walden with Thoreau’s corrections as

copy-text, while Geneseo’s fluid text of the work displays all seven stages of Thoreau’s

manuscript side-by-side to allow the reader to trace his compositional process over nearly a

decade. The former presents an ideal version of the book that solves textual cruxes and

eliminates uncertainties in the historical record through reference to Thoreau’s final intentions,

while the latter preserves such variation and places the authority in navigating them with the

reader. Thus, Thoreau is no longer in his “works,” conceived as ideal representations of his

intentions; he is now in his “texts,” the historical record of all the documents on which his works

are inscribed. This is a signal change for scholarly editors, who now imagine themselves as

facilitators to the readers’ interpretations rather than as arbiters of the text’s final meaning.

Digital editions are popular with professors and English departments because they build public-

facing digital tools and garner large grants for their home universities. However, a survey of

recent scholarship reveals that, though it is the most complete and successful fluid-text edition of

its kind, the Digital Thoreau Project’s Walden has a had a minimal impact on published

scholarship. To address this concern, I model interpretive practices within this digital space

through passages from “Economy,” the first chapter of Walden, that are available through the

fluid-text edition but not the Princeton version. I end with a recent controversy on this subject

centered around an editorial in the Los Angeles Review of Books, arguing that it exhibits many of

the same characteristics as the debate a half-century earlier about the CEAA in the New York

Review of Books. In this way, the lessons of the CEAA are crucially relevant today. It would

behoove us, as we move forward with new types of digital editions, to look backward at the

founding moment of American scholarly editing that the Center for Editions of American

Authors represents. It is the goal of this dissertation to trace a coherent narrative from that

moment to ours.

CHAPTER ONE: “A RESPECTABLE OCCUPATION AT LONG LAST”: THE

PROFESSIONALIZATION OF AMERICAN SCHOLARLY EDITING

The Center for Editions of American Authors represents the culmination of the rise of

American scholarly editing—the point at which it became a fully institutionalized,

bureaucratized, and professionalized academic discipline. In the 1960s, the CEAA was the latest

development in an ongoing struggle between scholars and critics over the identity and purpose of

American English departments. Earlier editors were commonly related to or chosen by their

authors and worked according to aesthetic judgment and moral propriety. The new scholarly

editors, however, took an objective approach to their subjects, marshaling new technologies and

seemingly scientific methodologies in order to recreate texts according to what they claimed

were their authors' final intentions. The documentation of this process in the textual notes and

apparatuses of CEAA editions evidenced a movement away from the previous generation's

aesthetic humanism and toward technological scientism. The CEAA organization, funded by the

U.S. government as part of the cultural Cold War, was structured as a hierarchical bureaucracy

involving the NEH, the Modern Language Association, and university English departments and

presses. Gone were the days of the amateur gentlemen-editor; to produce a collected edition now

required extensive training, expensive tools, and powerful institutional support.

The most influential figure in the professionalization of scholarly editing is Fredson Bowers,

University of Virginia professor and foremost proponent of the scholarly movement known as

the New Bibliography. Though Bowers never served as president of the CEAA, the Center

operated in his long shadow. The CEAA's methodology, Greg-Bowers intentionalism, consisted

of Bowers's application of Renaissance scholar W.W. Greg's work to nineteenth-century

American texts. The Hinman collator, the costly collating machine required to fulfill the dictates

of the Greg-Bowers method, was invented by Bowers's Ph.D candidate Charlton Hinman, who

also served under Bowers in a naval intelligence group during World War II. Though there were

forerunners to the rigorous style of editing that Bowers espoused, including Thomas Johnson's

The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Harvard, 1955), the scholarly editing of American literature was

not fully formalized until Bowers's Centenary Edition volume of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The

Scarlet Letter (Ohio State, 1962). This volume served as the blueprint for all CEAA editions to

follow. And finally, as an outspoken proponent of scholarly editing in his public lectures and

publications, Bowers did more than anyone else to argue for its status as a foundational

discipline in the humanities. By the end of the 1960s, Bowers's influence was felt in the structure

of English literary studies itself. Graduate students could earn work-study funding at a CEAA

edition by learning to use the Hinman collator and to apply the Greg-Bowers method, after which

they could build a career in scholarly editing themselves. In fact, the systematic

professionalization of American scholarly editing was one of Bowers's explicit aims. He closed

his 1964 treatise on American scholarly editing with a call to end the era of unmethodical

amateur editing: “When scholars editing American literature will bring to their task the careful

effort that has been established as necessary for English Renaissance texts, say, then the editing

of American texts will become a respectable occupation at long last, and not a piece of hack

work for the paperbacks” (“Some Principles” 228).

The changes that Bowers introduced into English departments were not uncontroversial.

Detractors from both inside and outside the academy lamented his growing influence and the

concomitant rise of the CEAA. From outside, a group of New York intellectuals bemoaned the

loss of what they considered their role as the custodians of literary culture. Inside academia,

literary critics considered the CEAA to be exemplary of the bureaucratic excess and resultant

resistance to political action that had come to define literary studies. This chapter will examine

these dual critiques as different iterations of the same anti-professional stance. After an overview

of Bowers's efforts to professionalize scholarly editing, I will turn to Stanley Fish and Bruce

Robbins's analyses of anti-professional rhetoric in order to contextualize the CEAA within the

history of English literary studies. I argue that the CEAA was the target of such attacks because

its proponents so explicitly called for the professionalization of their discipline, while

intellectuals and literary critics were suspicious of the growing academicization and

bureaucratization of literary studies. As Fish and Robbins argue, however, such suspicions were

themselves underwritten by the ideology of professionalization in which these critics operated.

I then turn to the “Custom-House” introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

to examine how the ideology of professionalization inflects his definition of the romance. In his

anti-professional screed against the bureaucrats of the Salem custom-house, Hawthorne espouses

romance as a discourse that functions apart from the worldly concerns of business, politics,

history, or of other professions. In the mid-twentieth century, literary critics adapted

Hawthornian romance to their own ends in order to define American fiction against British

fiction—and to professionalize its study. Bowers's introduction to his edition of The Scarlet

Letter does not partake in any such anti-professional rhetoric, instead deploying specialized

language to announce his explicit intention to professionalize according to a logic that

Hawthorne and his twentieth-century critics explicitly reject. I end by turning to a much different

editor of a much different author, with an analysis of Thomas Ollive Mabbott's edition of Edgar

Allan Poe. Mabbott's Poe, which was accused of being unmethodical compared with Bowers's

Hawthorne, received unfavorable reviews after Greg-Bowers became de rigeur in the field of

scholarly editing. An analysis of Mabbott's working papers, however, reveals that he had his own

goals for his edition, and thus foregrounds the multiple intentions at play in the production of any

edited text. A comparison between Bowers and Mabbott, then, illustrates the extent to which

Bowers's project of professionalization was successful, as editors in Mabbott's line were more

and more excluded from the burgeoning discipline of scholarly editing.

Fredson Bowers, the New Bibliography, and the Foundational Discipline

In Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Gerald Graff traces the evolution of

English studies through the interactions of two groups initially called investigators and

generalists and, later, scholars and critics. Daniel Coit Gilman's gambit as the first president of

Johns Hopkins University in 1876 was to press for a graduate college—he would have preferred

to forego undergraduate education completely—that would focus on investigation and research.

His model was German philology, with its focus on rigorous empirical research over aesthetics

or pedagogy. Other universities, including Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago,

followed suit, making Gilman's research model of graduate education a national trend (55-58). A

generalist backlash soon followed, led by professors of the older college tradition of appreciation

and charismatic teaching. The generalists, however, lacked a rigorous method that would

demonstrate their expertise and justify their position. They countered instead that the

investigators' pure accumulation of facts without an organizing concept was worse than useless,

and that their philological work was valuable only as a prelude to interpretation (67-72, 74-76).

The generalists' need for a method was solved in large part with the advent of the New

Criticism in the 1930s and 1940s. By this point, critics and scholars had reached a sort of detente

wherein “critics dealt with literary works 'in themselves' in an 'intrinsic' fashion, while historians

dealt with their 'extrinsic background'... Though the words 'scholar' and 'critic' continued to

denote different principles and methods (as they still do at times), it was increasingly understood

that the difference was one of emphasis rather than an inherent conflict in principles” (183).

However, this was an uneasy truce at best, for “as long as the dualism was accepted between

intrinsic and extrinsic, the work itself and its historical background, there remained a tension at

the conceptual level that mirrored unresolved institutional tensions” (184). Graff goes on to chart

the developments of this tension until the battle lines were re-drawn with the rise of theory, at

which point the relevant camps became “scholar-critics” and “theorists.”

Some of the most prominent players on the side of scholarship, the founders and

adherents of the New Bibliography, are omitted from the otherwise exhaustive histories of

English literature as a discipline. For example, Graff charts the lineage of the generalists and

investigators at Harvard but does not include Bowers among the investigators. The generalists

branch off from Charles Eliot Norton (1871-98) to Irving Babbitt (1892-1933) to Bliss Perry

(1907-30). One line of their genealogy ends with the prominent New York intellectual Lionel

Trilling, who was a student of John Erskine's at Columbia in the 1920s. Erskine was a student of

George Woodberry at Columbia (1891-1904), who in turn was a student of Norton's at Harvard

(82). The most powerful voice on the side of the investigators at Harvard during this era was

George Lyman Kittredge (1888-1936), whose defenses of scholarship against the incursion of

criticism made him the enemy of many generalists. Babbitt records that the philologists were

“better organized than the dilettantes, and command[ed] the approaches to the higher positions

through their control of the machinery of the doctor's degree.” Babbitt is in turned described as

feeling “bitterly the way in which Kittredge and one or two others had 'blocked his advancement'

at Harvard” (88). Stuart Sherman, a Harvard Ph.D student, blamed Kittredge for “turning

students into 'zealous bibliographers and compilers of card indexes'” and called him “a potent

force in bringing about the present sterilizing divorce of philology from general ideas” (109-10).

Bowers, perhaps Kittredge's most devoted student, deserves a prominent place in this

genealogy. Bowers's influence on the CEAA brought him into conflict with New York

intellectuals in a sequel to the contests at Harvard at the turn of the century. In a charge that

echoes that of Sherman's against Kittredge, Edmund Wilson writes that Bowers's lectures were

“so thrilling that young students often leave them with no other ambition than to become master

bibliographers. But I have found no reason to believe that he is otherwise much interested in

literature. It has been said, in fact, I believe, by someone in the academic world that, in editing

Leaves of Grass, he had done everything for it but read it.” Bowers came by this reputation

honestly, both through his astoundingly productive output and his polemical lectures and

writings in defense of bibliography and scholarly editing. And, though his defenders would balk

at the suggestion that he was anything but a careful reader, the sense that Bowers's editorial

methodology does away with interpretation—or alternatively, denies its actual reliance upon

interpretation—would come to haunt the CEAA as well.

Bowers was a Renaissance man in more than one sense; as a scholar of Renaissance

drama, he wrote an important book on Elizabethan revenge tragedy, but he also had a wide range

of interests befitting the metaphorical Renaissance Man, from dog breeding to music criticism to

philately (Tanselle, “Life and Work” 15-23; 79-87). G.T. Tanselle connects Bowers's varied

interests with his professional endeavors, writing in connection to his dog breeding, “That

Bowers should have involved himself actively in this matter [of creating a guide to the ideal Irish

wolfhound] is not surprising, for his mind was attracted to categorization and systematization,

and the problem was not unlike the bibliographical question he later addressed concerning the

description of 'ideal' copies of books, abstracted from the idiosyncrasies of actual surviving

copies” (21). Each of his hobbies were evidence, for Tanselle, of “his drive toward

professionalism, or at least mastery and authority, in any field that captured his attention” (15).

And indeed, each of his hobbies shares with bibliography the classification of objects according

to shared traits, whether they be dogs, records, or stamps.

Bowers's most lasting influence was ultimately as a bibliographer, as evidenced both by

his landmark 1949 book Principles of Bibliographical Description and his founding and

editorship of the journal Studies in Bibliography. Compared to these pursuits, the editing of

American literature was almost an afterthought. He took on the editorship of the Centenary

Hawthorne at the invitation of William Charvat and his former dissertation candidate, Matthew

Bruccoli, at Ohio State University. But the impact of his work on this edition was immense, as

Tanselle attests, because “By agreeing to undertake the Hawthorne work, Bowers initiated a new

era in the editing of writings of recent times, for his presence (and, in short order, his practice)

announced to the scholarly world that the editing of nineteenth-century literature required the

same rigorous bibliographical investigations as did the literature of the hand-press period... In its

editorial rationale and its presentation of apparatus, [the Centenary Scarlet Letter] set a pattern

that strongly influenced the work of a whole generation of editors” (88). Despite the tremendous

influence of this edition, though, Bowers considered his work in American literature as only one

facet of a larger project to further the cause of the New Bibliography. Bowers was responsible

for bringing the New Bibliography stateside after its founding in England at the turn of the

century by the Renaissance scholars A.W. Pollard, W.W. Greg, and R.B. McKerrow. The New

Bibliography sought to combine the physical examination of books with textual criticism in

order to establish the genealogies of texts. David Hall summarizes its goal as

discern[ing] the sequences of editions and the changes a text had undergone as it was

transmitted from author to printer and through successive printings, the end in view being

to remove corruptions from the text as intended by the author... Another foundational

assumption was the priority of 'internal' evidence: in the absence of autograph

manuscripts, the material text contained within itself the means of accounting for most if

not all of the variants from one printing to another. As a method of research, the new

bibliography was exacting, for in the absence of an authorially sanctioned text or

manuscript—no such animal existed in the case of Shakespeare—the bibliographer-cum-

textual editor had to collect variant readings from a wide range of copies as the only

means of dealing with changes from one sheet to the next in the process of printing and

reprinting. 248

Though Bowers's contributions to this field are many, three are particularly relevant to the rise of

the CEAA—in addition to his creation of the Greg-Bowers method of intentionalist editing, he

also adopted his student Charlton Hinman's collating machine and championed scholarly editing

as a foundational discipline.

In order to follow Greg-Bowers, as Hall notes, the editor must gather variant readings

from many copies of the same edition in order to locate the earliest version as copy-text.

Collating the requisite number of copies of each edition by hand would be an almost

insurmountable task, but Charlton Hinman, Bowers's first Ph.D candidate at the University of

Virginia, invented the Hinman collator in order to speed the process along. A historian of the

machine, Steven Escar Smith, notes that Hinman estimated that his collation of the seventy-nine

copies of Shakespeare's First Folio at the Folger Library would have taken forty years without

the aid of his invention (130). After receiving his Ph.D in 1941, Hinman's research was

interrupted by World War II. However, this did not interrupt his thinking about the problem of

hand-collating the Shakespeare folios, and in fact may have assisted him. Bowers, coincidentally,

became his commanding officer after Hinman trained as a cryptanalyst for a code-breaking unit

in Washington, D.C. This unit, it would turn out, was full of future bibliographers, who under

Bowers's influence were able to turn their analytical minds toward bibliographic codes after the

war (136). While on assignment in Australia, Hinman heard tell of reconnaissance missions in

which aerial photographs were taken of enemy targets before and after each bombing. These

photographs would then be viewed alternately in rapid succession through a projector, leaving

untouched areas apparently motionless but creating a flickering effect where bombs had done

damage. These stories turned out to be false—aerial photographs simply could not be taken from

exactly the same position and in the same conditions at different intervals in order for them to

line up properly—but the underlying principle would inform Hinman's approach to mechanical

collation (136).

In his account of the invention of the

collator, Smith points out that this

apocryphal bombing story, often recounted,

has eclipsed important antecedents that

Hinman would have been familiar with.

Among these are the blink comparator,

which was used to compare images of the

night sky to track the movements of

celestial bodies. Smith writes that “The

basic principle behind the blink comparator is the same as that of the Hinman. Two objects, in

this case photographs of the same star field taken on different dates, are set up in the machine,

superimposed, and then viewed alternately. Any difference between the images calls attention to

Image 3: Fredson Bowers supervises Matthew

Bruccoli at the Hinman collator at the University of

Virginia. From encyclopediavirginia.org.

itself by appearing, just as on the Hinman, to dance or move about” (138). Hinman's collator

would, like the comparator, use a series of mirrors to superimpose images of the same page from

two copies from the same edition of a work. Illuminating these pages in rapid succession with

lights from above would then cause these images to alternate quickly, causing small differences

between the pages to flicker and draw the user's attention. In this way, pages could be collated

relatively easily. Though it's now been superseded by digital collation tools, the Hinman

remained the most viable way of collating large numbers of

texts for decades after its invention.

Another factor in its success was “its sheer

impressiveness as a physical object. The Hinman stands just

under six feet tall, five feet wide, and in its final form

weighed 450 pounds. Its switches, binocular optics, flashing

lights, chrome trim, and metal sides gives it an appearance

more appropriate to a Buck Rogers movie than a library

alcove... Its hulking, metal exterior reminds us that it was

invented in a great age of rocket ships, robots, and other

types of imaginative technology - so much so that one would not be surprised to find it featured

on the cover of Astounding Science Fiction or some other futuristic fantasy rag” (Smith 146; see

Images 3 and 4). For many, this intimidating machine represented the technologized, scientific

focus of the New Bibliography. Smith writes that “One commentator even referred to the collator

as an 'electronic Bowers.' Though offered in jest, this description is particularly apt. The machine

descends directly from the most important aspect of the New Bibliography—its rigorous

Image 4: The author at the same

Hinman collator at the University of

Virginia.

emphasis on physical evidence and specifically the evidence found in the very objects under

investigation... In a sense, it is indeed an electronic New Bibliographer” (132-33).

Image 5:Arthur Johnson, builder of the Hinman collator, delivers a machine to William Charvat

and Roy Harvey Pearce at Ohio State University for use on the Centenary Hawthorne. Note the price of

the machine and the unfortunate typo in the title. From Smith, plate 6 after p. 136.

Bowers integrated the Hinman collator into the Greg-Bowers method as applied to

nineteenth-century American literature. In his editing of The Scarlet Letter, he collated eight

copies of the first edition as well as several copies of the second and third editions (Bowers, “Old

Wine” 10). William M. Gibson and Edwin H. Cady then “singled out the use of the Hinman on

the Centenary Hawthorne as an indication of high editorial standards” (Smith 152). They made

collation via the Hinman a requisite for the establishment of textual variants in the editing of all

CEAA editions (CEAA, Statement 2-3). Thus, Bowers introduced to American prose the

standards that had been designed for editing Renaissance drama, greatly increasing the barriers to

entry for publishing standard editions.

The disparity between publishing practices in these two eras led detractors to argue that

they require different editorial rationales. The rise of large publishing companies, the invention

of electrotyping and other publishing technologies, and the much larger surviving archive of

nineteenth-century manuscripts, printer's galleys, and other documents complicated the editing of

these later works immensely. However, Bowers insisted that the same process of collation,

comparison, and emendation was applicable to any text produced at any time. Shortly after the

release of his Scarlet Letter, Bowers wrote an essay on “Textual Criticism” for the 1963 MLA

pamphlet The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures. Here, he

applies his method “to all periods of modern English, with examples drawn from Shakespeare,

Dekker, Dryden, Fielding, Sheridan, Shelley, Hawthorne, Whitman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and

Sinclair Lewis, among others” (Tanselle, “Life and Work” 90-91). His goal was to establish the

Greg-Bowers method as the fundamental scholarly act that must precede any further

interpretation. It was crucial for Bowers that the New Bibliography, exemplified in the marriage

between analytical bibliography and scholarly editing, become foundational to literary study.

This created a mutual antagonism between himself and the New Critics, the contingent that he

saw as most threatening to traditional textual scholarship.

In his writings and lectures, Bowers was not afraid to directly attack the New Critics

while he recruited for the New Bibliography. One example of this tendency is his 1958 Sandars

Lectures in Bibliography, in which he quite flatly states that “Literary criticism is viewed as

directly dependent upon expert textual criticism” (Textual and Literary Criticism vii). He singles

out the New Criticism in particular when he writes that “The current games of intellectual chess,

of subjectively drawn tensions, ambiguities, and discordia concors, too often overlook or overlay

that simple act of love, which the textual critic may help us toward in his concern for the

childhood and adolescence, awkward or charming, of the living seed of a writer” (17-18). His

disdain for the subjectivity of criticism, and for the New-Critical keywords of tension and

ambiguity, were not lost on the audience at his lectures or the readers of the published version of

them in Textual and Literary Criticism. Tanselle provides a summary of the negative reactions to

Bowers's polemics. The Times Literary Supplement, in a review of the lectures entitled “The

Critics Criticized,” complained that “in spite of the urbanity of approach which one would expect

from a visitor from Charlottesville the critics came in for some rough handling.” In her review of

the book, Alice Walker argues that “This book... is not, as a whole, agreeable work. The status of

bibliography is not increased by belittling other studies which play an essential part in textual

criticism.” D.F McKenzie noted that “the manner here adopted towards critics seems more

calculated to arouse resentment than to encourage patronage.” Joseph S. M. Chang, himself a

formalist, objected particularly to the attacks on the New Criticism: “One might find his

withering contempt for critics who are not particular about the editions they use less

objectionable if it was not so singularly aimed at the students of imagery and ambiguity.” (“Life

and Work” 58-59). The Sandars lectures presaged a career-long effort to propagandize for textual

criticism at the expense of literary criticism.

As much as was possible, then, Bowers argued for

the priority of careful textual scholarship over subjective literary criticism, in the process fanning

the flames of the long-running contest between scholars and critics into which the CEAA would

figure so prominently.

Intellectuals vs. Critics vs. Editors: The CEAA and Anti-Professional Discourse

Public intellectuals and literary critics were both quick to criticize the scholarly editors

who followed Bowers in his attention to objective bibliographical and textual research over

subjective literary interpretation. After the CEAA built their organization around the Greg-

Bowers method using the MLA's influence and the NEH's funding, those within the organization

were open to charges of blind careerism. Historian and New York intellectual Lewis Mumford

complained in a 1968 attack on the CEAA, published in the New York Review of Books, that “as

professors and heads of departments, [CEAA editors] perpetuate their principles in selecting and

promoting their younger colleagues... who are in effect being conditioned to give the major share

of their time, their energies, and their thoughts to the minutiae of scholarship, and who will

eventually lose all interest in the form and content and purpose of literature, except as an excuse

for exercising their professional expertise.” This attack initiated a controversy that would last

In his presidential address at the Society for Textual Scholarship in 1988, at the end of his career, Bowers

denigrates Jerome McGann's approach to editing: “I regret to say that, to me, this is the language of literary criticism

(I do not use the term pejoratively!), not of strict textual criticism, and certainly not of that applied form of textual

criticism that we may call editorial theory” (“Unfinished Business” 8). Despite his parenthetical protestation—or

rather, because of it—we can see that Bowers is still guarding the enclave of scholarly editing by reducing to mere

“literary criticism” any approach that he sees as lacking the rigor of his own method.

throughout 1968, which serves as the most extended and contentious public debate about the

CEAA and its effect on the publication of American literature.

On one side of the debate, public intellectuals like Mumford and Wilson argued that the

CEAA was marked by a careerism that ignored the true purpose of literary study. On the other,

scholarly editors defended their strides toward professionalization by insisting on its

inevitability. Gordon Ray, Thackeray scholar and head of the Guggenheim Foundation, retorted

in the CEAA's pamphlet Professional Standards and American Editions: A Response to Edmund

Wilson that “this attack derives in part from the alarm of amateurs at seeing rigorous professional

standards applied to a subject in which they have a vested interest.” Ray defends the CEAA by

using the same dichotomy of amateur/professional that Mumford and Wilson have suggested,

and then merely asserting the primacy of the professional. “As the American learned world has

come to full maturity since the second World War, a similar animus has shown itself and been

discredited in field after field from botany to folklore,” he states. “In the long run professional

standards always prevail.” This sentiment was so unquestionable to those associated with the

CEAA that G.T. Tanselle, as their most vocal proponent, summarized the NYRB controversy

years later by writing that Ray's short statement should have been “all that was necessary” as a

reply to Wilson (“Greg's Theory” 200).

And yet, the terms “amateur” and “professional” go undefined in this exchange. If a

publisher hired Mumford or Wilson to edit an edition, as Wilson was campaigning for, would

they not then be professional editors themselves? By criticizing the professionalization of

scholarly editing in the academy, Mumford and Wilson implicitly take on the role of “amateur”

and elide their own professional restraints. As Bruce Robbins asks in his critique of the New

York intellectuals’ anti-professional rhetoric, “Why is working for a university less 'independent'

than working for Time?” (Secular 9). The implied answer is, of course, that it is not, but it was

expedient for Mumford, Wilson, and their followers to frame their narrative in these terms.

Surprisingly, literary critics within the academy took a very similar tack. What follows is a

comparison of the narratives that the intellectuals and literary critics formed around the

emergence of scholarly editors as a professional class to be reckoned with. This analysis argues

that “literature” as such is defined by social and institutional circumstances, that anti-

professionalism is intrinsic to professionalization itself, and that these narratives are motivated

by the need of those within the professions to legitimate their work through public approval.

Though they are at loggerheads in their debate, Mumford, Wilson, and the proponents of

the CEAA are actually all in agreement with the powerful narrative of the “academicization” of

the public sphere. Using Karl Mannheim's concept of a “free-floating intelligentsia” as its

motivating concept, this narrative recasts the rise of the university as the fall of the public

intellectual. As Bruce Robbins observes, this narrative has been deployed by writers on both the

political left and right, inside and outside the academy. Writers as diverse as Shelby Steele,

Russell Jacoby, and Cornel West criticize the professionalization of the public intellectual for

various reasons (Secular 2-3). In each of its iterations, however, the moral of the story is the

same: “we have fallen into lamentable specialization from a formerly higher, more public, and

more adversarial estate” (“Oppositional” 5). In Terry Eagleton's The Function of Criticism: From

'The Spectator' to Poststructuralism, for instance, Eagleton argues that “The academicization of

criticism provided it with an institutional basis and professional structure; but by the same token

it signaled its final sequestration from the public realm” (65). However, Robbins notes that in

fact, “[Eagleton's] book describes a series of sequestrations from the public realm... from the

exemplary public sphere of Addison and Steele... from Samuel Johnson, then from the Victorian

man of letters, and then from Leavis and Scrutiny. [...] The repetition of these sequestrations

from the public realm indicates that criticism successfully withdrew from the public realm

neither in the first act nor, more importantly, in the last” (“Oppositional” 6-7, italics in original).

This is a narrative of a fall, and as such, there has to be an Edenic state to fall from. Yet the

applicability of the narrative to such a diverse range of periods and places suggests that

everywhere can be an Eden, depending on one's perspective.

The place that the New York intellectuals inhabited in the cultural milieu of the 1950s

was one such Eden. Their fall into the restrictive professionalism represented by Bowers, Ray,

and the CEAA is thus another repetition of a narrative that can be mapped onto any of a series of

historical transformations. Mumford and Wilson established the terms of this narrative as applied

to themselves, which the next generation of commentators took up in the 1980s. James Atlas, in

an article in the New York Times Magazine in 1985, described the New York intellectuals as

“Luftmensch,” or “air men,” for their ability to survive outside of any institutional barriers and

without any apparent support.

Robbins argues that this metaphor “distracts attention from a

serious, indeed paralyzing, incapacity to say how the New York intellectuals actually earned a

living, or even that they did” (Secular 7, italics in original). The “air men” must be grounded in

the material reality in which they wrote, for if none of the transformations from the public to the

professional are total, then what is elided in these narratives of the fall is the fact that “there is no

Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals: The Age of Academe (1987) provides a book-length version of this

argument.

clear opposition between the public and the professional” (“Oppositional” 7, italics in original).

The narrative obscures the institutional restraints on one class of workers in order to emphasize

those of another, without specifying what forms those restraints take in either case.

If the New York intellectuals and those that chronicled them decried the fall into

academicization as an abandonment of literary value and a loss of the political power that comes

from professional independence, then oddly enough the academic critics of the CEAA agreed

with them. For both groups, scholarly editing and the bureaucratic apparatus that surrounded it in

the form of the NEH, MLA, and CEAA represented a willful abdication of effective political

power. Marxist literary critic Richard Ohmann, writing in the wake of the 1968 NYRB

controversy and the simultaneous political protests at that year's MLA conference, cited the

CEAA as exemplary of the confused resistance to politics endemic to the MLA at the time.

Referring to Gordon Ray's remarks on professionalism quoted above, Ohmann remarks on “the

conclusiveness that is supposed to attach to the word 'professional.' If you can appropriate that

word for your side, you have quite flatly won the argument, so Mr. Ray implies. He is not alone,

of course. The whole culture says with one voice that professionalism is good, and the literary

academic man is no dissenter” (338, italics in original). This is problematic, Ohmann goes on to

say, because for many members of the MLA professionalism and politics were mutually

exclusive. Ohmann quotes one member who wrote in regard to the protests at the 1968 meeting,

“I resent the fact that the MLA staff is doing nothing to prevent the Association from becoming a

political rather than a professional organization” (qtd in Ohmann 338). Ohmann responds by

pointing out that the MLA has always been a political organization. The CEAA is the best

evidence of this: “[The MLA] lobbied successfully for the establishment of a National

Endowment for the Humanities, and now that the NEH exists, the MLA petitions it for funds for

the Center for Editions of American Authors, and uses funds of the MLA to defend the CEAA

against Edmund Wilson, and thus protect the source of income” (343, italics in original).

Ohmann is right to question the conclusiveness attached to the term “professional,” as

well as to insist on the political nature of an organization like the MLA. However, despite his

determined historicism, he opposes the MLA's willfully apolitical bureaucracy with an idealized,

ahistorical vision of literature's oppositional power. Ohmann enumerates the forms of

bureaucratic resistance to the type of literary study he espouses, sounding much like the New

York intellectuals concurrently criticizing the MLA and CEAA: “Our computerized

bibliographies, our fragmented 'fields,' our hundreds of literary journals and 30,000 books and

articles, our systems of information storage and retrieval, our survey courses and historical

pigeon-holes, our scramble for light loads and graduate students, our 67 sections and 67 seminars

[at 1969's MLA conference], our emphasis on technique and procedure, our hierarchy of

scholarly achievement, our jealous pursuit of social neutrality and political vacuity—in all this I

see a retreat from criticism, and into more comfortable ways of life” (346). The way to reverse

this retreat is through literature itself, as Ohmann avers that “every good poem or fiction,

properly read, is revolutionary, in that it strikes through well-grooved habits of vision and

understanding, thus overthrowing part of consciousness” (346). Stanley Fish comments on the

slippage into a conservative ahistoricism here, accusing Ohmann of harboring an “essential

essentialism” (102) and, what's worse, of being “a right-wing intellectual in disguise” (101). “It

is tempting to linger over the obviously Neoplatonic sources of this supposedly revolutionary

doctrine and to point out how traditional and how Romantic a conception of literature this is,”

Fish remarks, “but for our purposes it is enough to observe that the entire program rests on the

hope (and the possibility) of a self that can rise above its historical situation to a state where the

false imperatives of merely institutional forms will be exchanged for the true imperatives that

can now be spied by a newly cleaned vision—that is, by a newly free self” (100).

Literature does not exist outside of the social structures that enable it, but is instead

defined by those structures. Ohmann's call to return to literature as the source of revolutionary

political action thus reverts to a traditional anti-professionalism in which institutions are attacked

from a position outside of history. “The case is particularly pure,” suggests Fish, “because it is a

literary one; for while in other disciplines anti-professionalism requires a conscious effort to

detach the service or commodity from the social and cultural contexts in which it seems

inextricably embedded, in literary studies, at least as they have been practiced for much of this

century, the commodity is defined by its independence of those same contexts and anti-

professionalism is the very content of the profession itself” (99). Proceeding from Magali Sarfatti

Larson's concept of the “ideology of professionalism,” Fish understands anti-professionalism as

constitutive of professionalism in that it enables the individual to declare an identity separate

from and independent of the social and institutional structures that in fact brought it into being.

The ideology of professionalism shares with democratic liberalism “the notion that 'the

individual is essentially the proprietor of his own person and capacities, for which he owes

nothing to society'” (Larson 221-22). It is therefore incumbent on the professional to

simultaneously operate within professional structures and to distance himself from them.

According to Fish,

The way he finds is anti-professionalism. As we have seen again and again, anti-

professionalism is by and large a protest against those aspects of professionalism that

constitute a threat to individual freedom, true merit, genuine authority. It is therefore the

strongest representation within the professional community of the ideals which give that

community its (ideological) form. Far from being a stance taken at the margins or the

periphery, anti-professionalism is the very center of the professional ethos, constituting

by the very rigor of its opposition the true form of that which it opposes... its presence is

a continual assertion and sign of the purity of the profession's intentions. 106, italics in

original

The odd consequence of this paradoxical position is that academics often gain in professional

status by criticizing the very bureaucracy that grants it. Robbins points to Brian McCrae's book

Addison and Steele are Dead: The English Department, Its Canon, and the Professionalization

of Literary Criticism as an example of this process. McCrae complains that “To achieve

autonomy, professional groups forfeit their public role, their influence outside the professional

group” (qtd in Secular 19). McCrae calls English criticism “a-public,” and, like Eagleton,

identifies Addison and Steele as exemplary of the public intellectual role from which English

departments have fallen. However, this is a self-interested move, as Robbins points out, because

“It is his critique of the present that bestows value upon the eighteenth-century object of his

research; it is because their public-ness is missing from the present that it is now useful, and not

mere antiquarianism, to recall them. And, in a piece of self-promotion that is noticeable if also

normal and blameless, the researcher claims the value bestowed on the object of research.” In

this way, “Public-ness is transmitted from the object criticized to the professional critic, who

claims implicitly to be serving or representing the public even as he also claims that his own

profession has become 'a-public.'” (Secular 19). Ohmann's criticism of the MLA and CEAA also

follows this pattern, making him the public voice crying out in the wilderness of a

bureaucratized, apolitical academy.

For Robbins as well as for Larson, professions are legitimated through public consent.

Larson writes that “Persuasion tends to be typically directed to the outside—that is, to the

relevant elites, the potential public or publics, and the political authorities” (xii). Critics and

scholarly editors each appealed to these groups in different ways in order to professionalize

during the early years of the Cold War, thereby instituting “American literature” in divergent but

interdependent ways. Critics narrativized American literary history through metaphors such as

F.O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance, Leslie Fiedler's love and death, R.W.B. Lewis's

American Adam, Henry Nash Smith's virgin land, and Leo Marx's machine in the garden. These

works implicitly claimed their value by providing frameworks through which the American

canon could be understood as distinctly “American,” at a time when such narratives were sorely

needed to establish American literary studies as an independent academic discipline. Meanwhile,

editors working for the CEAA made explicit claims as to the potential of their work to represent

American authors' true intentions in definitive editions that would never have to be edited again.

They made the critical canon definitive, visible, and available to the general public.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter proved crucial for both undertakings.

Hawthorne's definition of “romance,” which he used in order to professionalize as an author of

imaginative works in the nineteenth century, gave critics a way to describe what was

characteristic in American literature, thereby professionalizing themselves in the twentieth. For

editors, The Scarlet Letter was the first nineteenth-century American text to be edited according

to the newly developed Greg-Bowers system, thus providing them with proof that their work

required the professional expertise that was lacking in previous generations of American editors.

Importantly, however, Hawthornian romance as appropriated by critics was predicated on anti-

professional logic much as Fish and Robbins describe it, while the Greg-Bowers method was

used to appeal to the public via explicitly professional language. This difference gave rise to

much mutual misunderstanding between critics and scholarly editors as the CEAA came to

prominence as a professional force in the late 1960s and early 70s.

Hawthornian Romance and Anti-Professionalism

Postwar critics turned to Hawthorne's prefaces to argue that writing realistic novels in the

style of British authors was impossible in early America due to a lack of historical social

institutions and settled class divisions, which led American writers to turn to the symbolic

romance form. Nina Baym has since shown that Hawthorne's use of “romance” is idiosyncratic

and that the “romance/novel” dichotomy was not consistent in literary reviews of the 1840s and

50s. Still, she remarks that the idea of Hawthornian romance was, as of the early 1980s, “perhaps

the single most powerful theoretical concept in modern American literary history and criticism”

(426). But why did Hawthornian romance hold such appeal for postwar critics? Michael Davitt

Bell remarks that

One can hardly help speculating about why American romance, a kind of literary

embarrassment up to World War II, suddenly became a matter of national pride and an

arena of critical consensus. Perhaps, having emerged from the war as a world power, we

had to discover a tradition of our own, and the claims of Hawthorne and some of his

contemporaries that they wrote romances rather than novels were too convenient to be

ignored. During these same years, it is worth noting, the study of American literature as a

distinct subject first gained general acceptance in American colleges and universities. 33

He hints at an answer here—the U.S. surely did have to find a literary tradition of its own, and

the study of American literature did gain acceptance at the university level during these years.

But his use of the passive voice obscures the agency of those critics who created the discipline of

American literary studies by narrativizing a canon that could be held up as the “American

literary tradition.” Once the issue is framed in terms of the critics' professionalization, it becomes

clear that Hawthornian romance was convenient for their project because it allowed them an

adversarial, anti-professional stance even as they joined the bureaucratic ranks of academic

institutions.

By the time of Baym's article, “Most specialists in American literature [had] accepted the

idea that in the absence of history (or a sense of history) as well as a social field, our literature

has consistently taken an ahistorical, mythical shape for which the term 'romance' is formally and

historically appropriate” (427). Bell traces critics' appropriation of Hawthorne's use of the term

“romance” to Lionel Trilling's 1947 article “Manners, Morals, and the Novel,” where he writes

that “American writers of genius have not turned their minds to society” and that “Hawthorne

was acute when he insisted that he did not write novels but romances—he thus expressed his

awareness of the lack of social texture in his work” (qtd in Bell 32). The argument that romance

was a uniquely American genre was then picked up by Perry Miller in his 1956 lectures on “The

Romance and the Novel” and by Richard Chase in The American Novel and Its Tradition. By

1968, Joel Porte was able to assume in The Romance in America that “It no longer seems

necessary to argue for the importance of romance as a nineteenth-century American genre” (qtd

in Bell 32). Baym includes Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land (1950) and R.W.B. Lewis's The

American Adam (1955) with those works that expand on the notion of American romance, and

Gerald Graff adds to the list Charles Feidelson's Symbolism and American Literature (1953),

Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), Leo Marx's The Machine in the

Garden (1965), and Richard Poirier's A World Elsewhere (1966). The dualisms of these studies

(innocence versus experience in Lewis, pastoral versus technology in Marx, male community

versus the larger society in Fiedler) “were seen to correspond to a formal dualism between

American romance, symbolism, and preoccupation with a 'world elsewhere' of art... over against

socially grounded European realism. The theory of the American symbolic romance made a kind

of virtue of the perennial complaint leveled at America by nineteenth-century American writers

that the country's inherent poverty of social experience had put them at a disadvantage” (Graff

218).

In these postwar critics' work, argues Irving Howe, there is an “apolitical politics,” which

is “not the usual struggle among contending classes nor the interplay and mechanics of power,

but a politics concerned with the idea of society itself, a politics that dares consider whether

society is good and—still more wonderful question—whether society is necessary” (qtd in Graff

219). Graff argues further that “To read the American canon as a tragic romance was to see it as

a critique not just of 'traditional' institutions... but of any institutions” (219). If the romance

narrative of the American canon enabled an “apolitical politics” that critiqued any institutions

even as the critics responsible rose in the ranks of academic institutions, then this process was

abetted by the very logic of anti-professional discourse that Larson finds in the ideology of

professionalism. Critics pointed to romance's—and thus American literature's—position outside

of traditional social institutions, and even outside of society itself. This privileged position

allowed for a wholesale critique of American institutions. The value of this critique then accrued

to the critics themselves, as they gained authority as the interpreters of the fundamental anti-

institutional thread thought to run through the American literary tradition.

Howard Mumford Jones criticized the New Critical Americanists by stating that “once it

is granted that the only parts of a usable past for Americans of the mid-twentieth century are

those that are precisely like the values and anxieties of the twentieth century... the cultural

purpose of historical studies weakens or vanishes” (qtd in Graff 220). Warner Berthoff similarly

noted that the entire canon used to justify the romance theory of American literature was

extremely small, made up of the “limited number of authors and titles” that would serve as “the

contents of a year’s course in the American classics” (qtd in Graff 221). More particularly, I

would suggest that the limited number of texts selected by Americanist critics were chosen not

based on “the values and anxieties of the twentieth century” but on the professional values and

anxieties of the critics themselves. Hawthorne's prefaces, especially the “Custom-House” preface

to The Scarlet Letter, reflected these critics' values and anxieties precisely because Hawthorne's

need to professionalize mirrored their own.

Bell argues that Hawthorne's prefaces are performances designed to elide any

straightforward definition of romance in view of his audience's general distrust of non-didactic

fiction, exemplified by Thomas Jefferson's opinion that such novels result in “a bloated

imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust toward all the real businesses of life” (qtd in Bell 37).

Bell extends this proscription, made in a private letter in 1818, to Hawthorne's entire audience up

to The Marble Faun in 1860. Though Jefferson's sentiment is unlikely to have reflected the

views of fiction readers in the 1850s, the question of the “real businesses of life” was certainly

on Hawthorne's mind as he wrote “The Custom-House.” His performance here, rather than

suppressing a true definition of romance in the face of a suspicious 1810s audience, is in service

to his attempt to legitimate romance-writing as a profession during the publishing boom of mid-

century. He must claim a value for romance that would justify its circulation as a commodity,

even as he insists on its absolute difference from other commodities. “A writer of story-books!”

Hawthorne imagines his ghostly Jeffersonian forefathers muttering about his chosen career,

“What kind of a business in life,—what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind

in his day and generation,—may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a

fiddler!” (10). In order to validate the writing of “story-books,” Hawthorne assigns them a value

outside of, and in opposition to, the traditional businesses in life that he sought to critique.

Hawthorne is thus professionalizing according to the dictates of the ideology of

professionalism—through anti-professional rhetoric. Throughout “The Custom-House,” we see

Hawthorne insisting on romance's oppositional quality, its status outside of the businesslike

discourses of law, commerce, and other professions that have come to dominate the public

sphere during America's market revolution. At the same time, however, Hawthorne insinuates

that romance should be profitable enough to be professionally viable, thus turning his novel itself

into a commodity and closing the paradoxical loop of anti-professionalism.

The narrator of “The Custom-House” finds himself less able to write the longer that he

stays employed as a surveyor, as the faculties of imaginative composition simply cannot coexist

with the market logic that his position is predicated upon. “So little adapted is the atmosphere of

a Custom-House to the delicate harvest of fancy and sensibility, that, had I remained there

through ten Presidencies yet to come, I doubt whether the tale of 'The Scarlet Letter' would ever

have been brought before the public eye. My imagination was a tarnished mirror” (34), he attests.

“An entire class of susceptibilities, and a gift connected with them,—of no great richness or

value, but the best I had,—was gone from me” (36). Instead of gaining fame as an author of

imaginative works, Hawthorne's name goes out into the world attached to commodities, as “the

Custom-House marker imprinted it, with a stencil and black paint, on pepper-bags, and baskets

of anatto, and cigar-boxes, and bales of all kinds of dutiable merchandise, in testimony that these

commodities had paid the impost, and gone regularly through the office. Borne on such a queer

vehicle of fame, a knowledge of my existence, so far as a name conveys it, was carried where it

had never been before” (27). The discourse of business had appropriated the literary name of

Nathaniel Hawthorne and made it a commercial one, circulating it abroad according to the

dictates of the market.

However, Hawthorne’s narrator is occasionally able to harness his lingering aesthetic

sensibilities to transform the facile rhetoric of business into an oppositional mode, when “once in

a great while, the thoughts, that had seemed so vital and so active, yet had been put to rest so

quietly, revived again” (27). He tells how he determined which of the mass of bureaucratic

papers and official documents in the custom-house attic would provide suitable material for a

romance. The narrator navigates this bureaucratic archive intuitively rather than rationally. Upon

encountering the scarlet letter with Surveyor Pue's manuscript, he writes that “it strangely

interested me. My eyes fastened themselves upon the old scarlet letter and would not be turned

aside. Certainly, there was some deep meaning in it, most worthy of interpretation, and which, as

it were, streamed forth from the mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities,

but evading the analysis of my mind” (31). His selection of his text is based on its ability to be

interpreted rather than explained, and on its attractiveness to his aesthetic sensibilities rather than

his analytical capabilities. The way out of the deadening maze of bureaucratic paperwork, it

seems, is spontaneous rather than logical, based on aesthetic preference rather than market

utility.

Hawthorne's narrator compares the accumulation of commercial papers in the custom-

house attic to that of literary manuscripts hidden away in the nation's desks and cabinets:

It was sorrowful to think how many days, and weeks, and months, and years of toil, had

been wasted on these musty papers, which were now only an encumbrance on earth, and

were hidden away in this forgotten corner never more to be glanced at by human eyes.

But, then, what reams of other manuscripts—filled not with the dulness of official

formalities but with the thought of inventive brains and the rich effusion of deep hearts—

had gone equally to oblivion; and that, moreover, without serving a purpose in their day,

as these heaped-up papers had, and—saddest of all—without purchasing for their writers

the comfortable livelihood which the clerks of the Custom-House had gained by these

worthless scratchings of the pen! 28

Economic value is represented in an inverse relationship to imaginative or creative value, as the

“worthless scratchings” of the clerks earn them a “comfortable livelihood” even as the products

of “inventive brains” and “deep hearts” go “equally to oblivion” without remuneration.

Bureaucratic utility has become the dominant logic under market capitalism, leaving no room for

works that do not serve an economic “purpose.” If names are to be broadcast, they must be

attached to a commodity. Hawthorne's double bind is that he must retain the imaginative value of

his fiction while earning the comfortable livelihood associated with the degraded discourse of

commodity trading. He does this by simultaneously arguing for the commodification of romantic

fiction and for the exemption of romance from the language of commodities. To adapt Fish's

formulation, “the commodity [of romance] is defined by its independence of those same

contexts” that govern the circulation of other commodities.

As Maurice Lee argues, Hawthorne's narrator “resents the commercial nature of the

custom-house records, thereby linking the antebellum information explosion with Americas

ongoing market revolution” (758). In “The Custom-House,” Hawthorne comments on the

difficulty, and the importance, of writing romance under conditions of market overreach that

threatened to turn all discourse into professional discourse. He created his unique definition of

“romance” in order to sever his work from any discourse that relied on the cold logic of the

marketplace. Paradoxically, in doing so, he also professionalized the writing of romances by

insisting on their profitability. He vouches for the historical basis of Hester Prynne's story only

as a joke:

The original papers, together with the scarlet letter itself—a most curious relic—are still

in my possession, and shall be freely exhibited to whomsoever, induced by the great

interest of the narrative, may desire a sight of them. I must not be understood affirming

that, in the dressing up of the tale, and imagining the motives and modes of passion that

influenced the characters who figure in it, I have invariably confined myself within the

limits of the old Surveyor's half-a-dozen sheets of foolscap. On the contrary, I have

allowed myself, as to such points, nearly, or altogether, as much license as if the facts had

been entirely of my own invention. What I contend for is the authenticity of the outline.

Bell notes that “this curiously casual progression—from 'nearly' to 'altogether' (presented as if

they were interchangeable synonyms) to 'entirely of my own invention'—nicely deflates the

pretense of factual authenticity. It reminds us that Hawthorne is having fun with us, that his

comments are often comic performances.” (42-43). By claiming that he only wants to take his

“true position as editor [of Surveryor Pue's manuscripts], or very little more,” (4) Hawthorne “is

claiming for his story the very sort of authority his culture approved” (Bell 39). But, by doing so

ironically, Hawthorne makes clear that the true value of the scarlet letter and The Scarlet Letter

are their status as purely imaginative constructs. Any actual reality, historical or otherwise, is

destructive of romance, and what's worse, unprofitable. The rest of Surveyor Pue's notes can be

made “into a regular history of Salem,” by anyone willing “to take the unprofitable labor off [of

Hawthorne's] hands” (31). The ghostly form of Surveyor Pue, on the other hand, promises that a

romance would be profitable: “'Do this,' said the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue, emphatically

nodding the head that looked so imposing within its memorable wig; 'do this, and the profit shall

be all your own. You will shortly need it; for it is not in your days as it was in mine, when a

man's office was a life-lease, and oftentimes an heirloom'” (33). In the face of his imminent

firing from his lucrative sinecure, Hawthorne receives advice from a specter much different from

that of his forefathers—an apparition that insists that the writing of story-books could indeed be

a profitable profession, and a sorely needed one as the hereditary model of former generations is

being replaced by a far more unstable one based on shifting political allegiances.

Postwar critics selected “The Custom-House” to underwrite the symbolic romance theory

of American literature because it reflects the process of selection and interpretation itself. In

crafting the story of choosing the scarlet A from the mass of documents residing in the custom-

house attic, Hawthorne is aware of the arbitrariness of the archive, and calls attention to the

overdetermination of any historiography that relies for its narrative on the selection of one

document over a mass of others. Hawthornian romance, with its privileging of the imaginative

effort inherent in any narrative creation, is thus itself privileged over the official discourses of

history, business, politics, or law. This is a subversive stance, as it gives the lie to the authority of

these official discourses by revealing them to be predicated on narrative more than any sense of

“objective” expertise. Hawthorne simultaneously argues that the profits from writing romances

should be able to replace the salary of a custom-house clerk. Thus, it is also an anti-professional

stance in the ideological sense proposed by Larson and elaborated by Fish: The Scarlet Letter

will be turned into a commodity and sold for profit, with Hawthorne's name stamped on it just

like the baskets of anatto that ship from the custom-house. Not coincidentally, it is The Scarlet

Letter that does more than anything else to professionalize Hawthorne as a writer. It is only due

to the relative success of the novel that Hawthorne feels he has escaped the fate of the “obscurest

man of letters in America,” and it is in large part due to “The Custom-House” that The Scarlet

Letter became so popular.

Lee writes that “In addition to being an adequate bureaucrat who serves his country

through mundane tasks, the narrator of 'The Custom-House' shows himself to be the only suitable

person to recover the scarlet letter and its history. Literary scholars may feel similarly defensive

and self-important when vindicating themselves before skeptical townsfolk” (761). If professions

are legitimated through public consent, Hawthorne in the custom-house provides a powerful

model to justify the work of professors in the university. Postwar critics argued for a

“comfortable livelihood” from narrativizing American literary history through subjective

aesthetic expertise, just as Hawthorne's narrator wrote his romance based on his selection of

Pue's manuscript from the overwhelming accumulation of unsuitable commercial papers in the

custom-house attic. The materials best suited for romances are those that call forth from the

accumulated dross of bureaucratic institutions to speak to those with the sensibility to understand

them. The materials best suited for an American literary history were, for postwar critics, those

romances that insisted on their complete divorce from restrictive institutional forms.

It is understandable, then, that Bowers's use of The Scarlet Letter to build an entire

institutional apparatus for the professionalization of a completely different kind of literary study

would be met with criticism from those that considered American literature itself to be anti-

institutional. Bowers's textual introduction to the Centenary Edition is in many ways the opposite

of the interpretative work done by those critics that elevated it to canonical status in the first

place. In the “Preface to the Text” of his edition, Bowers outlines the Greg-Bowers method, from

mechanical collation with the Hinman to the rules governing the choice of copy-text to the

process of emendation. He defines his key terms, including “accidentals” versus “substantives,”

“substantive texts” versus “derived texts,” “authority,” “corruption,” “critical,” “unmodernized,”

and others. He then provides an explanation of the apparatus and how to use it: each volume of

the Centenary Hawthorne features sections including “Variants in the First Edition,” “Editorial

Emendations,” “Textual Notes,” “Historical Collation,” and a “Line-End Hyphenation List.”

Navigating and understanding each of these sections, with the exception of the “Textual Notes,”

requires patient and sustained attention to familiarize oneself with the calculus-like presentation

of the relevant information. The following is an example of an editorial emendation made for the

first time in the Centenary Scarlet Letter:

*262.25 sombre-hued] Centenary; sobre-hued 18501-2(s), E, L; sober-hued III-VII

At line 25 on page 262, the word “sombre-hued” appears in the Centenary, whereas it

appeared as “sobre-hued” in the first edition of 1850, identified with a superscript “1,” and the

standing type of the second edition, identified with a superscript “2(s).” The first English edition

(E) and the 1960 Levin Riverside paperback from 1960 (L) follow this reading, while the third

edition (III) through the 1900 Autograph Edition (VII) feature an emended “sober-hued.” The

asterisk preceding this entry indicates that there is a textual note that goes into further detail

about this particular emendation.

This type of information, simple enough to scholars familiar with scholarly editing, was

very much new to literary critics who didn't particularly care about the textual history of their

chosen works. The situation was only worsened with the “Textual Introduction” to The Scarlet

Letter itself, which features passages such as this description of the collation of the second

edition:

The collation for the second edition reads, 8°: [a]2 b2 1-208 212; 166 leaves, pp. [2]

[i-iii] iv [v] vi, [1] 2-54 [55] 56-322 [323-324] (variant: not numbering p. 9 in OU 1, ViU

2). The first two pages and the last two of the book are blank; p. i is the title page, p. ii

holds the copyright and printer's notice, pp. iii-iv the Preface, pp. v-vi the Contents. The

Preface was added for the first time in this edition. Both preliminary quires a and b were

typeset in duplicate, presumably to be printed together in one large 16-page forme. No

standing type from the first edition appears in either gathering. The two settings may be

identified as follows:

Gathering a. State y1: p. ii—In the printer's notice the "L"of "METCALF" is

directly beneath the "C" of "CAMBRIDGE".

State y2: p. ii—The "A" of "METCALF" is beneath the "C".

Gathering b. State z1: p. iv—In line 10 a comma is set after "public".

State z2: p. iv—No punctuation is set after "public".

The binding-up of the gatherings is not consistent. For example, in the three copies

of the second edition collated throughout on the Hinman Machine (ViU 1, Taylor

[506614]; ViU 2, Lawford [254970]; ViU 3, McGregor [282796]) the pattern y 1 z 1 is

seen in ViU 1, y 1 z 2 in ViU3, and y 2 z 2 in ViU 2. The two OU copies checked for these

settings show y 2 z 1 (OU 1 [PS1868.A1. 1850a]) and y 1 z 2 (OU 2 [copy 2]), and the

University of Chicago copy y 2 z 2. lii-liii

After sixteen pages of similar information, Bowers presents his grim prognosis: “The

history of the corruption of The Scarlet Letter text, as may be seen in the Historical Collation, is

a particularly sorry one. It suggests the need for the Centenary establishment of the documentary

as well as the literary form of this masterpiece of Hawthorne's narrative and atmospheric art”

(lxv). It takes a bibliographer to understand the evidence, but the evidence is clear: the Greg-

Bowers method is needed to establish a definitive form of The Scarlet Letter. And what's more,

the entirety of the American canon would have to go through a similar vetting by the

professional scholarly editors of the CEAA.

Compared to the paradoxical anti-professional professionalism practiced in the relatively

advanced institution of American literary criticism, the fledgling profession of scholarly editing

thus made a rather straightforward case for itself. In their early stages, professions arise out of

“struggle and persuasion,” and “ultimately depend upon the power of the state, [as] they

originally emerge by the grace of powerful protectors” (Larson xii). This is commonly done

through claims to expertise and claims to public utility. The CEAA’s deployment of the technical

language of descriptive bibliography served the former, while its distribution of “definitive” texts

to the public during the Cold War served the latter. Its NEH funding made it literally dependent

upon the state and thus unlikely to criticize itself, making the CEAA a foil for the

bureaucratophobic literary critics ensconced in the older profession of literary scholarship. So,

while literary critics made use of The Scarlet Letter for their anti-professional ends, they also

objected strenuously to the use to which Bowers put it as an exemplar of the technical knowledge

necessary for a “respectable occupation.”

The CEAA's requirement of employing a team of scholars to create an editorial apparatus

that was of use to only a select few readers caused an uproar in critical circles. Tanselle, as the

CEAA's most vocal defender, dismissed such objections: “When one understands Greg's theory

and the CEAA's implementation of it, one cannot help regarding many of the recent discussions

(both favorable and unfavorable) of this joint subject as naive and parochial, and frequently as

uninformed or misinformed” (“Greg's Theory” 197). After addressing complaints from Edmund

Wilson, Donald Pizer, John Freehafer, Morse Peckham, and others, he ends by stating that “the

view that editors who follow Greg are engaged in a mysterious, complex procedure with an

elaborate, arcane terminology can only be regarded as an invention of those who are

temperamentally disinclined to perform editorial work, for it would be uncharitable to believe

that they actually find these concepts and terms a strain on the intelligence” (228). For CEAA

editors, the work of collation and emendation via Greg-Bowers was the obvious and

straightforward method of sorting through historical evidence to recover authorial intention, but

for critics without a background in bibliography this process was cloaked in the jargon of

specialists. The CEAA was so successful in its bid for the professionalization of scholarly

editing, however, that editing according to any other method was quickly becoming impossible.

One of the few major editions to be produced during this era without following Greg-Bowers,

Thomas Ollive Mabbott's Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, illustrates what is at stake when

editorial dogma precludes other approaches.

Mabbott's Poe and Editorial Intention

Thomas Ollive Mabbott (called TOM by his close acquaintances), editor of the Harvard

University Press Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, was only seven years older than Fredson

Bowers, and was similar to the younger scholar in many respects. As an avid collector of coins,

nineteenth-century magazines and newspapers, and fifteenth-century prints; a lover of the

theater; and a scholar of Milton, Whitman, and Poe, one can't help but think that Mabbott would

have enjoyed the company of Bowers, who shared so many of the same interests.

Despite these

similarities, however, Mabbott and Bowers were opposed in their respective approaches to

scholarship and editing. Whereas Bowers insisted on a rigorous universal method, Mabbott

persisted in locating his editorial practice in subjective experience. These opposing tendencies

can perhaps be seen in their seemingly similar hobbies as well: the philatelist elaborated a system

for dating and organizing his stamps, while the numismatist relied on instinct and intuition when

collecting his coins. Mabbott's wife and collaborator, Maureen Cobb Mabbott, makes a

connection between TOM's collecting and his editing that is similar to Tanselle's remarks on that

For an analysis of Mabbott's coin collecting and its relationship to his editing of Poe, see Gerber, 134-148.

between Bowers's dog breeding and editing.

“First recognized by his fellow numismatists, he

had early shown a remarkable feeling for authenticity,” she remarks. “This talent, more intuitive

than learned, was formed and developed by being constantly with the subject, first with ancient

coins, and then with Poe manuscripts, texts, and life studies. It was from this long background of

study and proven 'rightness' that he made the decision not to follow for his Poe texts the Greg-

Bowers textual methodology” (29). Mabbott thus fell outside of the circle of ascendant scholarly

editors that professionalized via the CEAA, becoming one of the last of the traditional editors

who saw their projects as related, but not central, to their research and pedagogy. Instead, he

used his edition as a project for restoring the maligned reputation of Rufus Wilmot Griswold,

Poe’s literary executor who was long considered a poor first editor of his collected works.

Mabbott believed that Griswold in fact had access to primary materials that have since been lost,

and he uses his edition to elaborate this hypothesis. When discussing Mabbott’s Poe, it thus

behooves us to color our interpretation with Mabbott’s stated goals. His subjective experience

led him to postulate an argument about the textual history of Poe’s work, which led to a very

different type of edition than a Greg-Bowers approach that would rely on the mastery of an

external method.

See also Tanselle, “Life and Work” p. 86, where he compares Bowers's stamp collecting to bibliography:

“Most interesting from a bibliographical point of view, however, was his list of "Current HPO Steels" (January and

November 1957, February 1958), in which he worked out a system for describing postmarks—an analogous

problem to title-page transcription in bibliographical description... That Bowers should have been interested in

stamps is not surprising, since—like books—they are printed artifacts that require, for their study, a detailed

knowledge of the process by which they are produced and an understanding of the kinds of variation in the finished

product that can result from it.”

Mabbott's interest in Poe began as a teenager, when he realized that his grandfather's

copies of Godey's Lady's Book and other nineteenth-century magazines would one day be

valuable. Recognizing a “buyer's market” for such publications, he began seeking out copies

featuring Poe's poems and stories (M. Mabbott 4). In college, he began long correspondences

with Poe scholars J.H. Whitty, Mary E. Phillips, and Killis Campbell. Using their connections to

the rare book dealers and special collections throughout New York City, Mabbott began

transcribing and collating rare Poe prints and manuscripts for them, and for himself. As early as

1918, when Mabbott was only twenty years old, Whitty suggested to him that “Some day there

must be a better and more complete set of Poe’s works; you are young and if you feel like it,

persevere; no doubt you may have something to say when that time comes” (M. Mabbott 7).

After he graduated with an edition of Poe's previously unpublished play Politian as his Ph.D

dissertation in 1923, the long-term project of a new Poe edition began to take shape. By 1928, he

thought that he could rely on Columbia University Press to sponsor his edition; when that

agreement fell through, “TOM at this time made the decision to go forward, at his own pace and

at his own expense, collecting materials for an edition of the works of Poe” (M. Mabbott 21). As

a result, “The work on the texts had not been done by a committee formed for the purpose and

federally or institutionally funded, but privately 'by the one man best equipped to do it'” (29).

Eventually, Harvard University Press contracted with Mabbott to publish his three-volume

edition of Poe's Collected Works. Unfortunately, as the first volume was going through the

proofing stage in 1968, Mabbott passed away, leaving the rest of the edition's work to Maureen

Cobb Mabbott, his Harvard University Press editor Eleanor Kewer, and a few of his former

students. The Collected Works thus became a family affair, as his wife and close associates

completed the decade of work necessary to publish volumes two and three in 1978. Rather than

the committees that would have been available to complete the work through the CEAA, those

closest to Mabbott took on the authority of the project because of their long association with him.

Mabbott's edition was meant to supersede James A. Harrison's 1902 Complete Works by

adding twenty percent more Poe material that had subsequently been attributed to him. Mabbott's

main editorial intervention, however, was in reverting for copy-text to Griswold's infamous four-

volume Works of Edgar Allan Poe from 1850-56, which served as the basis for editions of Poe

throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. Burton Pollin outlines the extent of Griswold's

influence in the textual note to his 1994 edition of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, but his

remarks hold true for Griswold’s edition as a whole. “The importance of [Griswold’s] text can be

gauged from the eighteen reprints, of 1857 through 1884, under the imprint of Redfield or of W.

J. Widdleton, W. C. Bush, or A. C. Armstrong. Even wider currency has been given to the errors

and arbitrary changes in the Griswold edition through its use by almost every major edition of

the novel since the 1880s” (40). Griswold's edition is traditionally maligned for its “errors and

arbitrary changes,” but has remained a part of Poe's legacy due to its persistent use as copy-text

for later editions: “in the United States the 1856 edition has continued to exert its influence

through a succession of purportedly accurate and sound texts. In 1895 George Woodberry and E.

C. Stedman produced the first American collected edition having any serviceable notes and

critical apparatus. Unfortunately, they accepted Griswold’s text as authoritative and also asserted

their right to correct 'errors... to accord with later usage and taste'” (42). Harrison, in his 1902

Complete Works, was the first to use Poe's magazine publications (usually from the Broadway

Journal) as copy-text, only reverting to Griswold's edition when alternative texts were

unavailable.

To the dismay of Poe critics and editors Harrison's apparent progress was reversed with

the Collected Works, which treats each of Poe's pieces on an individual basis, but relies for its

copy-texts more often than not on Griswold. Mabbott's choice of Griswold for his copy-texts was

met with criticism from reviewers who by this point had come to expect meticulous adherence to

Greg-Bowers. “Instead of choosing the text closest to the author's hand,” complained Thomas

Philbrick, “Mabbott and his successors have in most instances chosen, from the texts with which

Poe may have had anything at all to do, the one that lies farthest from the author's manuscript”

(403). Joseph Moldenhauer, in his comprehensive treatment of the copy-text problem, notes that

“Mabbott’s principles of copy-text choice are the direct inverse of those being used today by

most, if not all, scholarly editors of American authors. Mabbott begins with the last text in the

line of transmission, while they begin with the first” (43). Moldenhauer’s complaint regarding

Griswold summarizes the issue nicely:

Where Griswold’s text shows substantive differences from the antecedent printed form

(again, no marked copies of the latter surviving), Mabbott usually takes Griswold as

copy-text, assuming that Griswold found marked magazine copy, now lost, in Poe’s trunk

and employed this as his printer’s copy (II, xxviii). Frequently this supposition seems

justified; at other times the Griswold variants in a given piece are all “indifferent” or

attributable to a printer as easily as to Poe, or some variants appear indifferent while

others are evidently authorial. But Mabbott makes no distinction between probably

authorial and conceivably authorial variants in his texts from Griswold, a hazardous

policy in view of what we know about the desperate haste and typographical sloppiness

with which the first two Griswold volumes were produced. 43, italics in original

Mabbott's papers, which are held at the Special Collections of the University of Iowa’s Main

Library, provide some clue as to why he chose Griswold’s apparently desperately hasty and

typographically sloppy edition as his copy-text. Mabbott’s papers provide a running conversation

between himself, Maureen, Pollin, and others regarding the editorial policies that were later

questioned by Moldenhauer and others. He believed first that Griswold had access to now-lost

copies of magazine texts annotated by Poe, and second, that R.A. Stewart, who wrote the

annotations for Harrison, lacked a consistent method of recording errors. The resulting textual

notes in Harrison’s edition, which did not accurately reflect the discrepancies between Griswold

and the Broadway Journal texts, led to Griswold’s reputation as a poor editor.

Mabbott notes, in a memo written on June 22, 1952, that “Recently I have examined the

readings of the Griswold texts of Poe’s tales. I have relied on Stewart’s notes in Harrison (which

I suspect are not impeccable) and generally regarded only verbal variants. [...] I am convinced

that Griswold had a copy of the Broadway Journal with pencil notes by Poe, and also clippings

from several magazines. [...] The changes rarely involve more than one or two words. A few are

obvious misprints. But in many cases the word or words changed is a subtle stylistic

improvement” (“Texts of the Tales”). These “stylistic improvements” are often the deciding

factor in which text he uses. Maureen Mabbott, in a memo titled “General Observations on

Comparison of Mabbott (Griswold) and Harrison (B.J.) Texts,” points out two instances of such

decisions. “One good example of an author’s change is in ‘The Pit and the Pendulum,’ where in

paragraph 22 the Griswold text substitutes ‘I counted the rushing oscillations of the steel’

(pendulum) for the Broadway Journal’s ‘I counted the rushing vibrations of the steel.’ [...]

Probably the place where the change (which T.O.M. considered an author’s change) stands out

most is in ‘Some Words With a Mummy.’ Griswold, paragraph 60, has ‘I am really astonished to

hear you talk in this style.’ Both Godey’s and B.J. have ‘ashamed.’ Harrison in his text silently

changes ‘ashamed’ to ‘astonished’ (‘ashamed’ is rather silly here). Stewart gives no variant, nor

is it in his Godey’s list” (3-4).

This latter point, that Harrison adopts Griswold’s changes silently because Stewart fails

to record them, is the cause of Mabbott’s consternation with the 1902 edition. Clarence Gohdes,

in a note to Maureen Mabbott dated January 19, 1971, remarks that “I remember that Tom in his

‘Annals’ mentioned his belief that Griswold had been too maligned—and I am thus interested in

the evidence which you provide in your ‘Comparison.’” Maureen proceeds to explain T.O.M.’s

project to defend Griswold’s reputation. “The following comparisons do record [typographical

errors], as well as verbal differences, in order to set the record straight about Stewart’s statement

(Harrison, II, 299) that Griswold is ‘very defective in typography.’ (Also, to help correct the

many assumptions that Griswold had a bad text. The latest I have read is Edmund Wilson’s.)

Beside these words in the margin of his copy of Harrison, T.O.M. had written, ‘Not so!’”

(“General Observations” 1). Her explanation of Stewart’s method is that “Many B.J. errors are

not recorded and I am led to believe that Stewart was sometimes comparing, not the original B.J.

text, but Harrison’s corrected one in his ‘Variations of Griswold from the Text.’ What seems to

happen is that Harrison chooses a B.J. text, corrects it and sometimes a change gets recorded,

sometimes not.” The result is that the changes are recorded “with never a hint that B.J. was

wrong—only Griswold” (“General Observations” 2-3). A large part of Mabbott’s project in

editing Poe, then, was restoring Griswold’s reputation. His edition is a reaction against

Harrison’s, one that seeks to cast it as an aberration and restore Griswold’s text as the most

definitive contemporary edition.

His editorial method, though inconsistent and indefensible according to the principles of

eclectic editing as laid out by W.W. Greg’s “Rationale of Copy-Text,” operated (often invisibly)

according to this goal. The context in which Mabbott’s edition was published, in the wake of the

CEAA’s prescriptions for standard practices, was one that was hardly receptive to such an

approach. Indeed, certain reviewers commended Mabbott on his refusal to follow CEAA

guidelines. J. Albert Robbins describes the first volume as “an edition of the poems that is

massive and important. And also idiosyncratic, garrulous, and antiquarian. How different from

the latter-day antiseptic, characterless editions produced by teams of scholars and carrying the

official seal of editorial conformity!” (246). However, the more common refrain echoed

Moldenhauer’s reproachful review:

Some dozens of large-scale editorial projects, involving hundreds of scholars and

receiving vast amounts of material aid from federal agencies and educational institutions,

are turning out books that reflect the new textual methodology... When Mabbott planned

his edition in the 1920’s... these developments were yet undreamed of; but in the fifteen

years before his death, while the edition was his major enterprise, the new textual

criticism raised a formidable challenge to earlier, less formal editorial approaches.

Nothing in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe suggests that he recognized the

challenge. Mabbott was either oblivious of, or indifferent to, the work in progress around

him; or, possibly, he found it so alien to his established habits that he rejected even its

vocabulary. 42

Mabbott’s assumption that Griswold had access to annotated copies of magazine texts that were

subsequently lost requires an imaginative leap, and is obviously divergent from the CEAA’s

prescriptions. However, his treatment of Griswold’s changes is still not unaccountable.

Ultimately what was more important for Mabbott was that whatever discrepancies exist between

Griswold and the magazine sources should be made transparent in the apparatus of his edition

(unlike in Harrison). Griswold’s revisions to Poe’s texts are an important piece of the textual

Mabbott turned out to be right about the Griswold edition. After collating the Griswold against the

Brooklyn Journal texts, Maureen Mabbott uncovered only 93 typographical errors in the former compared to 129 in

the latter. She writes, “TOM was right in his cryptic “Not so!” but we spent a great deal of time compiling the

evidence to prove him right” (31).

history of his work, and it was Mabbott’s first prerogative to present this history. That Mabbott

saw these revisions as improvements on the originals, and the critical backlash that his edition

then received, are further steps in a textual history that has yet to be fully described.

Mabbott’s belief in Griswold’s “lost” manuscripts diverts attention from what is actually

happening when he chooses Griswold’s substantive changes, for instance in “The Pit and the

Pendulum” and “Some Words With a Mummy.” Whether these changes are authorial or not,

Mabbott is making a choice regarding what James Thorpe has termed “the aesthetics of textual

criticism”: “the choice in these cases seems to be between the better word and the words of the

author. Such a choice was not likely to arise under an earlier view of textual study which

assumed that the authorial version was always the ‘best’ reading” (466). Mabbott’s choices of

“oscillations” over “vibrations” (one cannot, after all, count the vibrations of a piece of steel) and

“astonished” over “ashamed” (which suits the context of the story) are, without regard to the

likelihood of either choice’s authority, a marker of the overlapping intentions that are present in

any edited text. According to Thorpe, “This editorial activity [of introducing changes to the text]

results in the embodiment of the editor's intentions in the work of art. In a complex way, the

integrity of the work of art is thereby, in some measure, the effect of a juncture of intentions”

(471). The further away from the author one gets, the more complex this “juncture of intentions”

becomes. In the case of this edition, this includes the intentions of Poe himself, Griswold,

Harrison, and Mabbott. “Whatever complexities we agree to ignore in our daily encounters with

works of art, it remains a fact that the literary work is a mingling of human intentions about

which distinctions should be made,” Thorpe notes. “Its status as a work of art is not affected by

whether these intentions all belong to the titular author; even collaborative authorship does not

alter that status” (475). Thorpe, writing in 1965, was prescient of many of the concerns currently

facing editorial theorists. Author-centric editions, as later theorists like Jerome McGann and John

Bryant have argued, too often ignore the complex networks of agents responsible for the

production of a text. The narrow conception of the author-figure as a “solitary genius” that

operates outside the exigencies of the print marketplace has led to the treatment of Griswold’s

changes as errata to Poe’s original texts. However, if we consider Griswold as one element in a

complex field of conflicting authorial and editorial intentions, we can begin to construct what

John Bryant has called a “revision narrative” of Poe’s posthumous texts. This revision narrative

removes Poe as the focal point of the critical edition in order to make the complex textual history

of his works more apparent. In 1902, R.A. Stewart noted that “Poe was unfortunate in having as

the first editor of his collected works a man so entirely lacking in sympathy for him as was

Griswold, and the result was an edition incomplete in matter and very defective in typography”

(Complete Works II:299). Whether or not Stewart was correct, that statement itself has had a

tremendous impact on the revision narrative of Poe’s work in the twentieth century. Thomas

Mabbott dedicated much of his career to reversing this opinion of Griswold, and subsequent

editors (Mabbott’s protege Burton Pollin among them) then attempted to expunge Griswold from

the record once again. The story can be glimpsed in the footnotes and annotations of critical

editions, but removing Poe from the center of his own collected works will allow this hidden

revision narrative, with its complex networks of competing and contradictory intentions, to come

to the fore.

CEAA editions were preferred over editions like Mabbott's that were “idiosyncratic,

garrulous, and antiquarian” because the Greg-Bowers method, with its reliance on the Hinman

collator and its complicated bibliographical calculus, obscured editorial intention in favor of a

seemingly objective process. However, in Bowers's introduction to the Centenary Hawthorne we

can see how editorial judgment is always at play in determining authorial intention. He writes

that “In this situation any alteration believed to be Hawthorne's must be adopted, regardless of

critical estimate of its literary worth, although, of course, an editor's literary judgment is one of

the various criteria that operate to establish any alteration as a Hawthorne variant instead of the

printer's. On the other hand, not all Hawthorne revisions are literary in their nature. When

Hawthorne softened his original satire, or excised sections for personal reasons as with the

passage on saloons in The Blithedale Romance revised in the print, presumably in deference to

his wife's prejudices, the unrevised version has been retained in the established text as more

faithfully representing Hawthorne's true intentions than the results of censorship, even though

self-imposed” (xxxvi). The question of literary worth is deferred in favor of authorial intention,

but the question of what constitutes the author's “true intentions” is up to the editor to decide.

Thus, we get a conflict of authority: Hawthorne leaves a passage out, and Bowers puts it back in.

Where Mabbott would cite aesthetic judgment or personal expertise in making such a decision,

Bowers cites authorial intention, thus removing himself from the revision narrative of the text.

The result is an “editorial death-wish” that caused CEAA editors to erase their own role in the

creation of their editions. As the bureaucracy of the NEH, MLA, and CEAA required that Greg-

Bowers be applied more and more indiscriminately to a wider variety of texts in order to make

funding deadlines, editors deferred to the concept of authorial intention as defined by their

methodology and downplayed their own editorial intention. The effects of this process will be

explored at greater length in the next chapter.

CHAPTER TWO: RALPH WALDO EMERSON © HARVARD: THE CEAA AND THE

INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF THE AMERICAN CANON

In January of 1968, the historian and critic Lewis Mumford took to the pages of the New

York Review of Books to lambast The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo

Emerson, the sixth volume of which had recently been published by the Belknap Press of

Harvard University Press. For Mumford, the Journals represented a troubling trend in humanities

research. The edition was edited without regard for aesthetic unity or ease of use. Rather, it

presented Emerson's journals largely un-edited, at least in terms of content; the editors merely

sought to translate the entirety of the journals from manuscript into print via a maddening

proliferation of diacritical marks. This was purely an academic exercise, produced by and for an

exclusive cadre of scholars who paid no heed to the general public's desire for a judiciously

selected and manageable edition of Emerson's private writings.

What seems like common sense for Mumford and many of his readers in fact exposes a

larger set of tensions in the institutional status of literary scholarship, criticism, and editing. By

1968, the Center for Editions of American Authors had built a network of academic,

governmental and legal safeguards that would make such apparently uneconomical and specialist

editions not only feasible, but profitable. Indeed, many sympathetic respondents to Mumford's

attack accused the CEAA of monopolizing the publication of the American literary canon

through this institutional network. The result was a controversy that featured in the NYRB

throughout the year and involved prominent voices on both sides, including the author and critic

Edmund Wilson in support of Mumford and the director of the CEAA, William Gibson,

defending the organization. At base, the controversy centered around the apparent irruption of

specialist discourse into the humanities. Mumford and Wilson were leery of the academic

professionalization of scholarly editors, a role previously reserved for public intellectuals like

themselves.

This chapter will discuss Harvard's two CEAA-sponsored Emerson editions, the

intentionalist Collected Works and the genetic Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, in order

to explicate the nexus of academic, governmental, and legal supports on which the CEAA relied,

and which drew the ire of Mumford and other commentators. CEAA editions reified the popular

Romantic conception of authorship as an individualistic, self-expressive enterprise, reinforcing

the currency of this idea in the U.S. throughout the 1960s and 70s. They are the end-product of a

process wherein CEAA editors re-inscribed canonical American texts through the application of

Greg-Bowers intentionalism while simultaneously eliding their role in the creation of the text in

an instance of what is termed the “editorial death-wish.” The newly-founded National

Endowment for the Humanities funded this endeavor, in turn appropriating the techno-scientific

rhetoric of the Greg-Bowers method to justify their spending with a project that was visible,

productive, and apparently free of problematic ideological interpretation. Finally, the expense

and effort dedicated to these editions is protected by copyright due to a contemporary copyright

regime that featured low barriers of originality despite its claims to protect the creative output of

the individual. The CEAA thus enters current debates about the rights of the creator versus the

utility of the public domain. After an overview of the public controversy that began with

Mumford's NYRB article, I will consider each institution in turn: How did the CEAA's editing

practice, developed and prescribed by the MLA, produce a “new” Emerson? How did

government funding through the NEH influence the production of these editions? And by what

logic can an institution like Harvard University claim ownership in a public-domain author's

works?

Mumford considered Harvard's edition of Emerson's Journals to be a symptom of a larger

movement toward a misguided scientism in the humanities. He complains in his review, titled

“Emerson Behind Barbed Wire,” that “it is the preconceptions and the mock-scientific

assumptions governing the pursuit of the humanities today that so adroitly ensured the

miscarriage of this great effort, and turned it into a repulsive caricature of the sober scholarly

virtues it sought to exemplify.” The failure of the Journals is a sign of the “technological

extravagance and human destitution [that] is of course the fashionable mode of our day,” he

continues. “In the present case, nothing has been lost by this process—except Emerson: Emerson

and the many potential readers who have been prevented by this automated editing from having

direct access to his mind.” Mumford dramatizes this denial of access via an extended metaphor

of imprisonment:

Oh! but Emerson is there! One sees his figure at a distance, through a barbed wire

entanglement of diacritical marks; the searchlight from the control tower, meant to keep

Emerson from escaping, or even making a movement without being noticed by the

guards, keeps on sweeping into the reader’s eyes and blinding him: the voice in which

Emerson faintly calls out to one is drowned by the whirring of the critical helicopter,

hovering over the scene; while, with sympathetic anguish, one sees Emerson himself,

sentenced to fatigue duty, laboriously picking up and reassorting the rejected scraps he

had once thrown away. Yes: Emerson is there. But after an hour or two of trying to find

an unguarded place in the scholarly enclosure where one may get near enough to him for

a little uninterrupted conversation, one gives up in despair, and departs, as one might

from a futile visit to a friend in a concentration camp. Thus these Journals have now

performed current American scholarship’s ultimate homage to a writer of genius: they

have made him unreadable.

He pardons the “editors as individuals” for this wrongful imprisonment in order to point to “a

greater culprit, the Academic Establishment of which they are a part.” The diacritical marks of

the Harvard Journals metonymize this Establishment: technologically extravagant, humanly

destitute, needlessly automated and heedlessly aspirational to the status of a science. What is at

stake is the liberty and freedom of expression of a “writer of genius.” Mumford turns the

edition's textual apparatus into an Althusserian repressive state apparatus, complete with barbed

wire, control tower, and helicopter—evocative images of state control during the Cold War. In

doing so, he gives expression to the growing anxiety that the state-sponsored cultural ascendancy

of the university leaves no room for public intellectuals like himself. The so-called “military-

intellectual complex” was encroaching upon the study of literature, as it had already done in the

hard sciences and in soft sciences like sociology, anthropology, and area studies.

This nightmarish assessment of the threat to the humanities found a sympathetic audience

in many readers of the NYRB. Perhaps most sympathetic was Edmund Wilson, the public

intellectual who had the best reason to resent the proliferation of large-scale, university-

sponsored editions like the Harvard Journals. In August of 1962, Wilson had written a letter to

Jason Epstein, editorial director at Random House, and sent copies of it to other prominent

figures including President Kennedy, W.H. Auden, Perry Miller, and Lionel Trilling. In it, he

outlined his plan for a series of collected editions of American authors following the model of

the French Editions de la Pléiade then being published by Gallimard. “I am told that it would be

necessary to apply for a government subsidy,” he wrote, “but I do not see why this should not be

done. If we can squander billions of dollars on space rockets, nuclear weapons and subsidies to

backward countries, why should not the United States government do something to make

American literature available?” (qtd in “Fruits I”). In a published response to Mumford's review,

Wilson explained the fate of his endeavor: “I was given not long ago to understand that a sum of

money had been allotted for my project by the National Endowment for the Humanities. My

supporters and I were all ready to go into action. But then I was told that the project had been

'tabled' for reasons that were not explained, and that the Modern Language Association had

somehow succeeded in having this money assigned to themselves” (“Writers”). The government

funding that Wilson sought for his humanistic literary project was appropriated instead by

another institution—the CEAA, with its techno-scientific methodology and a team of scholars

ready to put it into practice.

Wilson went on to publish his own two-part attack on the CEAA, “The Fruits of the

MLA,” in the September and October issues of the NYRB, in which he roundly criticizes each

institution that provides support to the CEAA. These institutions, in Wilson's view, are

consolidating power for the “Academic Establishment” that Mumford criticizes. Wilson

describes the MLA as “in its way a formidable organization, to which, it would seem, almost

every teacher of literature or language is obliged to belong.” (“Fruits I”). Wilson argues that the

MLA's journal PMLA and its annual conferences work together as institutional barriers to

university employment; he calls the MLA an “employment agency.” In response to a private

letter from an unnamed CEAA editor, Wilson then blames the MLA for misappropriating

government support: “This boondoggling [of using government funds to pay graduate assistants],

the writer of the letter explains, is a natural consequence of a new federal program called 'work-

study,' by which the government puts up 85 percent of what the students earn by academic work.

But who decides the kind of work they do? The MLA acting through the government?” Finally,

Wilson questions the CEAA's use of copyright in its editions. Arguing for a new series of

editions that will compete with the CEAA's, he notes that “Contrary to arguments used by

sponsors of the MLA, there are few difficulties of copyright, because almost all this material is

now in the public domain.” In Wilson's view, the MLA was extending itself dangerously into

fields outside its purview—academic employment, government funding, and copyright control.

Wilson's article inspired even more respondents than Mumford's review—enough to

warrant the NYRB's publication of a separate pamphlet documenting the entire exchange. One of

those most critical of the CEAA was William H.Y. Hackett Jr., the vice-president of Bobbs-

Merrill Publishing. Hackett, like Mumford, sees humanities research slipping dangerously into

an authoritarian mode. He compares the MLA to Mayor Richard Daley's brutal handling of the

Chicago riots in April and August of that year: “It seems appropriate that Edmund Wilson’s

commentary on MLA, CEAA, and PMLA... appeared in the same issue with various evaluations

of the 'overreaction' in Chicago. As Mayor Daley displayed his authoritarian personality by the

distortion of institutional authority, it seems to me, in like manner, certain MLA authorities have

perverted their role of teacher-scholar.” He then buttresses Wilson's concerns with his own,

mixing his metaphors of institutional power along the way:

While their desire to “purify” the texts of American literature is both legitimate and

worthy, they have used their standing as scholars and their positions in the university

establishment to create a monopoly on what is in reality a national resource, in the public

domain. They hold that passing a public domain text such as The Scarlet Letter through

the Hinman Collating Machine gives them copyright protection; they choose to forget

their action restricts the free use of a national treasure that is our common property.

The Federal government, recognizing the value of authoritative texts of Hawthorne,

Melville, Howells, Twain and other great American authors has appropriated funds to

help accomplish this program. With the acquisition of such funds, some scholars, by

changing hats and becoming administrators, have lost perspective in the heady

atmosphere of money, influence, and power. Perhaps, defensively or in unconsciousness

awareness that most academics turned administrator will trade an ounce of power for a

pound of principle, they have joined forces and retreated to their own medieval castle of

academic respectability. The moat is MLA, PMLA, and CEAA; the wall, cooperating

university presses (supported by tax exemptions); the portcullis, scholarship; and the

keep, the CEAA imprimatur and copyright. (Is the Hinman Collating Machine alive?

Does it breath? [sic] Is it an author?...)

These MLA “cops” are slugging with their billy clubs of bibliographic obfuscation and

cordoning off their ivory tower from all of us yippies. Popishly, they have issued an

encyclical establishing the forbidden ground for editors and publishers alike. With good

behavior, a publisher might qualify for their blessing and be allowed to display their

sacred seal. Needless to say, the recipient must pay tribute to CEAA.

Here, the same concerns with academic, governmental, and legal institutions appear variously in

the guises of medieval fortress, police, and church. What's common in Mumford, Wilson, and

Hackett's denunciations of the CEAA is a mistrust of a seeming consolidation of power that

relies on institutional resources that are unavailable to private citizens. If one needs access to a

Hinman collator, copyright registration, government funding, and MLA approval in order to

publish a new edition of Melville or Hawthorne, then control over the shared “national treasure”

moves from private corporations to state-approved entities in a way that was uncomfortably

reminiscent of authoritarian states in the tense political climate of 1968.

Mumford's attack on the editorial method that produced the Harvard Journals took the

most obvious aspects of editorial intrusion, including diacritical marks and footnotes, as evidence

of the scientific-academic establishment's overreach into literary studies. Wilson's attack,

meanwhile, expanded this attack to include the more common clear-text editions of the CEAA.

The conflation of these twin attacks into a single controversy confuses key points of the issue.

The Journals project, having been started in 1960, pre-dates the CEAA. They began being sealed

by the CEAA in 1969, but were not yet overseen by the Center at the time that Wilson took

Mumford's review as occasion to denounce the organization as a whole. The Journals are also

For instance, D.C. Greetham confuses the substance of the two attacks, attributing Mumford's critique of

the Journals to Wilson. See his Theories of the Text, p. 310-11.

one of the few CEAA editions that do not provide clear text. Clear-text editions produce stable,

standard texts, free from diacritical marks or footnotes, that can be easily reproduced by (paying

and permitted) private publishers. However, in cases in which the audience consists mainly of

scholars or in which the primary documents are unpublished, the CEAA calls for genetic editions

like the Journals, which attempt to represent the manuscript page in print. Albert von Frank

defends this decision by arguing that such genetic editions still take the “author's final

intentions” as their subject by “reproducing directly in the text all the author's corrections and

emendations—that is to say, all the remaining physical evidence of the process whereby the

author arrived at the language that finally satisfied him” (5). In this sense, the crisis of authority

that results from an editor attempting to represent an author's final intentions is present in both

types of approved CEAA editions, but is represented differently in each. The Journals thus

provides a helpful foil against which to gauge the practices of the CEAA in its other

intentionalist editions. The Journals foreground editorial intervention in the running text, while

the CEAA's preferred method of Greg-Bowers intentionalism effaces editorial activity by

consigning such evidence to separate apparatuses. These apparatuses are integral for both

revivifying the author and enacting the “death-wish” of the editor.

Greg-Bowers and the Death-Wish of the Editor

The previous edition of Emerson's journals (Houghton Mifflin, 1909-1914) was edited by

his son, Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson, and his grandson, Waldo Emerson Forbes. In his review of

the Harvard Journals, Mumford praises this edition because of the transparency it provides to

Emerson's “mind.” Though their work was “severely selective [...] they had the editorial courage

and skill to put together a coherent series of books that not only sounded the ringing metal of

Emerson’s mind, but exposed the mine pit and the ore from which so much of the final product

had come.” In contrast, the Harvard edition suffers from “the psychological idiosyncrasy known

as total recall,” and its inclusion of all of Emerson's surviving journals and notebooks only

“regurgitate[s] the undigested contents of Emerson’s mind.” The original edition's design, too,

allowed for a direct rendering of Emerson's thought: “These widely leaded type pages had some

of the spaciousness and luminosity of Emerson’s own mind; and the footnotes and summaries of

books read were so unobtrusive, so easily skippable, that nothing stood in the way of intimate

intercourse with Emerson’s mind.” Whereas the 1909-14 edition “provoked a continuous

dialogue between Emerson and myself,” the use of diacritical marks within the running text of

the 1960s volumes represents “a process of ruthless typographic mutilation” that causes the text

to “spit and sputter at the reader.” In this dual critique of the Harvard edition's selection (or non-

selection) of materials and its typographical layout, Mumford makes the paradoxical claim that

to gain direct access to Emerson's mind requires active intervention—even courage—on the part

of the editors. However, this intervention should not appear on the page itself, lest the editor's

presence interfere with the dialogue between author and reader.

Mumford is here describing an editorial thanatos that is actually presupposed in the

theory of editing used by the CEAA in most of its editions. William Gibson, the director of the

CEAA, was quick to point out in his response to Mumford that the CEAA generally produced

clear-text editions that avoid such editorial interference.

Clear-text editions like the Harvard

Works, by burying the record of emendations in a separate (and separable) apparatus, downplay

Gibson also promises Mumford that a clear-text edition of the Journals is forthcoming, though it would not

be available until Joel Porte's 1982 Emerson in His Journals.

the editorial intervention that brought their texts into being. When the text is then reproduced in a

trade paperback, as CEAA texts often are, the apparatus is suppressed entirely and the text is

presented as a transparent, authoritative representation of the work—much as Mumford seems to

be calling for.

However, the creation and subsequent suppression of the editorial apparatus only

elides the crisis of authority between editor and author present in any scholarly edition. E. Talbot

Donaldson calls this bibliographic elision of editorial authority “the editorial death-wish” (qtd in

Greetham, Pleasures 76). D.C. Greetham describes the phenomenon as “a desire to conceal the

evidence of one's editorial handiwork so that the resulting clueless text acquires transparency and

authority, seeming not to depend on the demonstrable intervention of a fallible editor's many

choices among often contradictory pieces of evidence” (Pleasures 76). The methodological and

bibliographical principles necessitated by the CEAA, in its adoption of Greg-Bowers and its

requirement for discrete editorial apparatuses, demands the editor's suppression of his own role

in constructing the author to whom he cedes the authority of the text. The text as re-written

through Greg-Bowers, however, is by definition new, and would be unrecognizable in its

particularities to the historical person of the author in question. The author that the editor

envisages as being responsible for the text, therefore, is not identical with the author as he

existed at any one historical moment, but is rather a biographical creation extrapolated from

CEAA texts were used for many of the early volumes in the Library of America series, which, ironically,

followed Edmund Wilson's original plans for the series which the CEAA superseded. For more on the Library of

America, see Wayne Franklin, “The ‘Library of America’ and the Welter of American Books” and Paul Wright,

“The Library of America: An American Pléiade.” CEAA texts were also licensed by popular trade paperback

publishers such as Penguin, Norton, Viking, Harper and Row, and Charles E. Merrill, among others. Penguin and

Norton are among those who continue to license CEAA texts, though a complete survey of CEAA texts still in print

in trade paperback versions has yet to be completed.

historical documents as demanded by the assumptions about authorship that inhere in the

application of Greg-Bowers.

The editorial death-wish determines the editors' interpretation of the material evidence on

which they base their editions, and this interpretation cannot help but be profoundly

biographical. James L.W. West III, editor of the CSE-approved editions of Theodore Dreiser's

Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, compares the editor's construction of the author to that of a

biographer: “What scholarly editors do as they analyze their variants is in fact to practice

biography. They construct in their minds a conception of the author's creative personality that

will undergird all that they, as editors, wish to do to the texts” (295). West notes that “Sometimes

the process is almost entirely inductive because editors decide ahead of time how they wish to

edit a given text.” For instance, the editor might

choose to depict an author as a young innocent, ignorant of the ways of the publishing

industry, powerless in dealing with its bureaucracy, and anxious to make whatever

concessions might be necessary to see a work appear between hard covers. This authorial

personality would require an editing style valuing early, untainted intention over later

compromise. Alternately one might portray this same young novelist as talented but

callow, inclined to produce overwrought and sophomoric writing, grateful (especially in

retrospect) for the guiding hand of the older, wiser trade editor, pleased that his excesses

were curbed or her writing toned down for public consumption. Such an authorial

personality would justify an editing strategy designed to validate the received text and to

rid it only of mechanical error. 296-97

In the case of Greg-Bowers as applied by the CEAA, the editors often cede decisions about the

constructed author to the methodology. A uniform set of assumptions about nineteenth-century

authorship is applied to a variety of circumstances, resulting in the conflation of multiple texts in

every instance. The authors whose works are edited according to Greg-Bowers thus emerge from

their CEAA editions with strikingly similar biographies: frustrated by the marketplace, and even

by the very materiality of their writing, they attempt again and again to accurately represent their

imagined work in print, but instead produce a series of texts that are all corrupted in some way—

either by the interference of non-authorial actors or by the process of revision itself. It is the

scholarly editor's task to recover the ideal “text of the work” from these material “texts of

documents,” and in so doing present the singular, coherent work that the exigencies of history

have thus far suppressed.

In order to parse the logic behind this conflation and determine what it means for the

construction of Emerson as an author, we must turn to the terms “work” and “text” as they are

defined in Greg-Bowers intentionalism. Although the real work of editors—interpreting and

emending texts—necessitates editorial subjectivity, the Greg-Bowers definitions of these key

terms allow CEAA editors to efface themselves from the process according to the editorial death-

wish. George Thomas Tanselle, the foremost proponent of Greg-Bowers and an editor of the

CEAA-approved Northwestern-Newberry Melville, considers the “work” to be a Platonic ideal

that arises out of the author's intentionality. “The real work” can be said to be “hovering

somehow behind the physical text, which [serves] as an occasionally unreliable, but always

indispensable, guide to it” (A Rationale 14-15). “Texts” are sequences of symbols (letters,

numbers, punctuation, spaces) that attempt to represent this ideal “work.” Texts are always

corrupted by their transition into a material form. “Every verbal text, whether spoken or written

down, is an attempt to convey a work” (68, emphasis mine). However, texts don't have to be tied

to a material (or spoken) form; there are also “texts of the mind,” in Tanselle's terminology.

Thus, it can be said that the “text of a work” is the text that perfectly represents the ideal that

existed in the author's mind and that was subsequently corrupted in the process of its

materialization.

In this sense, the physical act of writing itself distorts the work. “When one tries to create

a work of verbal art, one aims for perfection, for the objectivity of an independent entity,

expelled from the mind to exist in a space where (one hopes) other receptive minds can find it.

But the vehicles required, from neural pathways to pens and inks, are uncooperative.” The

resulting text suffers from “slips, false starts, cancellations, and revisions (and second and third

revisions) or copyists' misreadings and erasures; and we have printed books that show how

difficult it is for typesetters to set the right pieces of type. The world of documents is a world of

imperfection” (65). This is a truly Romantic notion of authorship, comparable to Shelley's

dictum that “when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline; and the most

glorious poetry that has been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the

original conceptions of the poet.” Enter other actors with other intentionalities, in the person of

the editor and publisher, and the text becomes exponentially corrupted from its ideal form. It is

possible that a physical text is actually successful in perfectly communicating the work, but it is

in the nature of works that such a circumstance would be unknowable and unverifiable. Still, in

their insistence that it is their goal to recover the “original conceptions” of the author by way of

their regretfully material instantiations, CEAA editors efface their subjective interpretation in

favor of its product: authorial coherence.

Charles Ross notes that “In structuralist terms, Tanselle envisages textual change as

diachronic: a work gives rise to texts that retain their identity by remaining tied to an author's

'intentions.' Yet, in Jonathan Culler's summary of Saussure, 'When we speak of the

transformation of a word and postulate a diachronic identity, we are in fact summarizing a

parleyed series of synchronic identities... Historical filiations are derived from synchronic

identities.' From a structuralist perspective, then, texts give rise retrospectively to works;

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therefore, editorial choice is never constrained by works” (362). Greg-Bowers intentionalism

conflates the synchronic historical evidence represented in physical documents that may have

been created years or decades apart, referring each back to an imagined integral ideal work. Yet,

this process is precisely backwards; it is only through the proliferation of texts that a work can be

said to exist.

We can widen this structuralist perspective and say that just as texts give rise to works,

they give rise to authors. The “author” is in fact a summary of synchronic identities that has its

ontological basis in the cumulative material record and not, as Greg-Bowers would have it, in a

diachronic and coherent intentionality (an “Emerson” that exists outside of the Nature of 1836

and the Nature of 1849, from which one can gauge the relative merits of each). As D.F.

McKenzie reminds us, the editions that are produced through Greg-Bowers themselves become

part of the historical record—the cumulative versions of a text that go to make up a work. The

author as posited by Greg-Bowers, with his knowable and recoverable intentionality as presented

in CEAA editions, merely takes his place at the back of the line, so to speak, as the most recent

synchronic material instance from which a version of the author emerges. The constant tension

between an imagined diachronic unity and each material synchronic iteration means that in each

text the author is always re-imagined and re-represented with reference to previous texts. Greg-

Bowers seeks to collapse these relationships through the conflation of all relevant texts, yet only

adds one more synchronic instance to the historical record that produces the author.

The first volume of the Harvard edition of Emerson's Collected Works exemplifies the

process of biographical construction by conflating texts in the face of evidence that the historical

author intended them as discrete entities. The editor of this volume, Alfred Ferguson, points to

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evidence that in fact suggests Emerson's preference for his later revision. In 1844 Emerson

declined the London publisher John Chapman's request to republish his early papers unless he

could revise them substantially. Emerson wrote that “I should not like to have them reprinted

without a careful revision & correction by myself” (qtd in Collected Works xxxi). By the end of

the decade, Emerson did in fact turn to his old pieces to revise them, for Nature; Addresses and

Lectures (1849). Ferguson quotes from Emerson's journals, where he records his impressions as

he returns to his older work. “In correcting old discourses to retain only what is alive I discover a

good deal of matter which a strong common sense would exclude. I seem however to discover in

the same passages which I condemn the commendation of the ideal & holy life & hence am

annoyed by a discrepancy betwixt the two states” (Journals VII, 253, qtd in xxxii). Emerson here

recognizes the discrete nature of his texts, as he finds his early and late writings

incommensurable. Despite his annoyance at the differences between his younger and older

styles, Emerson does substantially revise his early texts—Ferguson records that Emerson's

“strong common sense” prevails more often than not, creating “an Emerson somewhat muted and

moderated” (xxxii) in the 1849 version.

However, according to Ferguson, “[t]o accept all of Emerson's revisions or to incorporate

them uncritically into the text of this edition would lead to error or to a critical failure in the

relation between reader and writer” (xxix-xxx). What does this critical failure consist in? Greg-

Bowers conceives of writing as a teleological process that results in one stable text, and it is the

editor's goal to produce, out of the sequence of imperfect products of this process, the one “text

of the work.” Adopting either the early texts of these essays or the 1849 text of Nature;

Addresses and Lectures would fail to represent the work behind the material text. Ferguson

continues with a comparison to works that famously appear in discrete versions:

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Is the deathbed edition of Whitman to be read, with all the choices of the Good Grey Poet

looking back over his pose and his work, or shall we read the versions of 1855 or 1860?

Shall we read The American as Henry James printed it in 1877 or as it appeared in the

New York Edition more than thirty years later in a style developed through various stages

of attenuation and qualification and a point of view modified by his single-minded

pursuit of art, fame, and fortune? The question in diminished form faces the editor of

Emerson's early work. xxx

The existence of multiple texts presents a problem that must be solved—only one text can

represent the work. Ferguson's solution is to adapt Greg-Bowers according to a “maximalist”

ideal that incorporates as much of Emerson's text as possible. He explains that “[o]ur principle is

to present the fullest version of the early writings. Hence when later corrections cut the copy-text

they are refused.... When the revision added to the original by expansion or clarification, it is

accepted” (xxxii-xxxiii). Because Greg-Bowers calls for the conflation of texts, Emerson's later

revisions are only partially accepted, and this according to a rule that suits Ferguson's maximalist

ideal more than Emerson's stated intention. Emerson's own insistence that his early pieces be

revised before republication, as well as his annoyance at the difficulty of matching his later,

subtler style to his earlier, more polemical content, are interpreted in such a way as to support

this editorial agenda.

The result is a text that does not present Emerson's thought as it existed at any one

historical moment. The European trip that partly inspired the 1836 writing of Nature has a

counterpart in the trip Emerson took to England in 1847-48 that resulted in his decision to edit

his early writings. Richard Lee Francis suggests that Emerson's attendance of lectures at the

Geologic Society, the Royal Institution, and the Royal College of Surgeons led to changes in his

thinking that, in addition to the many pirated editions of Nature available in England, caused him

to revise his early essays for a new authoritative edition. He wrote to his brother William in 1849

that “I am just reprinting my first little book of 'Nature' with various 'Orations, lectures' etc. that

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have not been collected here before, into a volume of the size of the Essays, and it gives me a

chance to make many important corrections” (qtd in Francis 231). Among these corrections is a

new epigraph for Nature, which Francis argues is the key to understanding the change in

Emerson's thinking and the resulting “important corrections” in the text. The epigraph for the

1836 version is a quote attributed to Plotinus: “Nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom,

the last thing of the soul; nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know.” The

progression of Emerson's thought since 1836 drew him away from the notion expressed in the

second half of this inscription, as he came more and more to see “doing” and “knowing” as

interrelated (Francis 232). For the 1849 version, he replaced this epigraph with an original poem:

A subtle chain of countless rings

The next unto the farthest brings;

The eye reads omens where it goes,

And speaks all languages the rose;

And, striving to be man, the worm

Mounts through all the spires of form.

The shift in focus from “man” to “worm” in the last two lines reflects a dynamic,

evolutionary model of thought that came to replace Emerson's original static, Platonic conception

in the 1840s.

This new model is the basis for several revisions. One such revision is the deletion of the

following sentence from the “Language” section of the essay: “Thus is nature an interpreter, by

whose means man converses with his fellow men” (CW 1:20). Francis argues that “The idea of

Nature as an intermediary between men facilitating communications is, by 1849, not consistent

with the complex concept of Nature that evolved in the essays. Man is the interpreter, as surely

members of the Geologic Society impressed on Emerson” (234). Another change is the

emendation of this sentence from “Beauty,” in which Emerson describes the desire for beauty:

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“Extend this element to the uttermost, and I call it an ultimate end” (CW 1:17). In 1849, Emerson

reduced this phrase to “This element I call an ultimate end.” According to Francis, “the

metaphoric implications of the statement were difficult to reconcile with his metaphoric scheme

at this point. To 'extend' is a linear concept that must either work on a horizontal, time plane,

which for Emerson is illogical; or it works on a vertical, spatial plane, which is incongruent with

the dual spheres contained within the sphere of the Soul that constitutes Emerson's ultimate

scheme” (235). The changes made to the 1849 version thus represent Emerson's thinking at the

moment of revision. Emerson replaced his old epigraph with a new poem and deleted or

emended sentences that no longer accorded with his thinking. This version allows for Francis's

reading, but in conflating it with the 1836 version according to his maximalist ideal, Ferguson

creates a third text that erases the traces of this change in Emerson's thinking and makes such a

reading incoherent, as the published text in the Collected Works includes the new poem, restores

the deleted sentence, and reverses the emendation of the other.

The shape of Emerson's thought is thus transformed by Ferguson's interference while the

record of this interference is buried in the back of the book or, in licensed paperback

publications, separated from the text entirely. The CEAA's reliance on the NEH established this

process as a permanent feature of their editions by making Greg-Bowers a requirement for

funding new editions. Ferguson adapted Greg-Bowers into a maximalist mode rather than

creating a genetic text because he was working within an institutional structure that determined,

to a large extent, the approach taken to any single text.

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The CEAA, the NEH, and the Institutionalization of Greg-Bowers

The CEAA, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, operated according to

the strictures of the United States' cultural-diplomatic goals and was thus subject to the logic of

“Big Scholarship”: the humanistic arm of the military-intellectual complex that supported the

analysis and restoration of historical American cultural products.

In 1966, the newly-founded

NEH was self-conscious of its need to justify its budget, and the CEAA met this need by

providing a project whose progress could be objectively measured and whose products could be

publicized and distributed to the public. David Nordloh, a CEAA editor, recounts that “NEH

gave a substantial annual appropriation directly to MLA for CEAA; CEAA, not NEH,

determined how the money would be allocated to each edition; CEAA in turn provided NEH,

extremely sensitive to taxpayer concerns about the productive use of tax dollars, with both

production figures and intellectual accountability” (“Theory” 149). He notes elsewhere that “the

NEH, on its side, seems to me to have seen opportunity in the MLA affiliation, not principle.

Here was an immediate, fully developed funding venture, a way to prove that, despite doubts to

the contrary, money could be spent reputably and substantially on the humanities” (“Creating”

120). The early success of the CEAA was due, in large part, to its ability to adapt to the

Evan Kindley has called the funding of large-scale literary projects by private and public foundations after

World War II “Big Criticism.” Kindley compares big criticism with government-funded university science programs

in the context of the military-intellectual complex: “As with the case of experimental science—though admittedly on

a much smaller scale—a number of large and powerful institutions began to take a newfound interest in the

development of American literature and literary criticism in the postwar period” (p. 73, and note 7). The CEAA, as a

scholarly enterprise focused on historical research and the establishment of canonized texts rather than a critical one

focused on interpretation and the creation of new texts, aligned itself more self-consciously with objective scientific

rhetoric.

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institutional demands of the NEH. These demands were in turn shaped by the U.S. government's

increasing interest in literature's role in the cultural Cold War; this was the era of State

Department-sponsored tours by William Faulkner and John Updike to strategically important

countries.

The CEAA's adoption of Greg-Bowers was thus convenient to the U.S. government on an

ideological basis. Amanda Gailey remarks that “Government funds had tended to support

scientific knowledge, but humanistic inquiry presented a thornier subject, because it often dealt

directly with studying and interpreting ideology, and was thereby quite difficult to present as

value-neutral” (86). The CEAA's promise that Greg-Bowers would purge corrupt texts from

error and in so doing restore their authors' intentions appealed to patriotic impulses while

avoiding the appearance of propaganda. In its annual reports to the President, the NEH echoed

such claims in order to justify what was, at the time, its flagship funding venture. In this way, the

NEH and the CEAA became mutually dependent on one another, until Greg-Bowers was being

applied mechanically in order to meet NEH deadlines. “This wedding of money and bureaucracy

yielded efficiency and even minimal consistency and accuracy,” notes Nordloh. “It also

encouraged a discouraging level of mechanical scholarship... and virtually legislated the theory

underlying the textual program: it canonized [Greg-Bowers] copy-text” (“Theory” 151).

The patriotic language that appealed to, and was subsequently appropriated by, the NEH

was present in the first published statement of what would become the CEAA. William Gibson

and Edwin Cady summarized their goals in a survey published in PMLA in 1963 after the initial

planning session for the organization:

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Suppose many of the public, school, and university libraries of the United States and all

the chief United States Information Service libraries abroad had on their shelves good

complete editions of fifteen American literary masters. What then? We venture one

prediction. American readers of these texts would know more clearly than ever before

"the curious fate" of being an American. Readers abroad would come to understand more

discriminatingly and to respect more justly the country that bred such men. 8

Knowingly or not, by imagining their editions on the shelves of USIS libraries the founders of

the CEAA aligned their project with the aims of cultural-diplomatic book programs like those

spearheaded by the Information Center Service. The potential for books to operate as propaganda

was established by the U.S. government during the high Cold War years of the 1950s. An Office

of War Information memo advises that “Books do not have their impact upon the mass mind but

upon the minds of those who would mould the mass mind—upon leaders of thought and

formulators of public opinion. Books are the most enduring propaganda of all” (qtd in Barnhisel

96). The Operations Coordinating Board noted that “Books and related materials reach relatively

small segments of any national population,” but “the coincidence between 'leadership' groups

and those who read, however, enhances the validity of books as instruments of understanding

and persuasion” (qtd in Barnhisel 99). USIS libraries were recognized as the most effective mode

of distributing books to these leadership groups. Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs

William Benton noted of the Cairo library that it “is of particular effectiveness because of the

influential character of many of those who use it. University professors and other educators,

government officials in positions of authority...” (qtd in Barnhisel 106). William and Cady's

invocation of USIS libraries as the most effective scene for the propagation of American cultural

ideals through literature would thus have been a familiar idea to the NEH as it sought out

programs to fund in its early years.

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In its first annual report, the NEH explained its decision to fund the CEAA using similar

language:

Another of the Endowment's initial actions was to devise a program of support for the

production of 'pure' texts of the major American authors. The rational for such a program

seemed manifest. Emerson is the most revered non-Asiatic philosopher-writer in Asia; in

Europe, Whitman is credited with freeing poetry from the shackles of verbal and

technical conventions; Twain and Melville are counted among the world's greatest

novelists. That uncorrupted texts of the works of such men do not exist is a diminution of

their stature and an impoverishment of the American cultural and literary heritage. Their

works are monuments; yet the monuments are defaced and eroded. NEH 1966, 13

The language of the cultural Cold War is here intertwined with the language of Greg-Bowers.

The terms “pure” and “uncorrupted” as applied to edited texts is adapted from official statements

on Greg-Bowers by Fredson Bowers and Matthew Bruccoli. The emergence of American

literature as a global phenomenon—Emerson in Asia, Whitman in Europe, Twain and Melville

around the world—argues for the importance of presenting these authors in authoritative editions

to foreign audiences. And finally, these editions are imagined as monuments: both figurative

monuments that serve to memorialize the American literary tradition and literal monuments in

the form of imposing multi-volume editions that will represent that tradition in international

libraries.

The mutual dependence of the CEAA and NEH reached its peak in 1968, when the NEH

dedicated its largest amount of funds ($300,000) to the CEAA. This was also the year that the

most space was dedicated to the CEAA in the NEH's annual report, and perhaps not

coincidentally, the same year that the CEAA most needed to be defended from critics like

Mumford and Wilson. Dated January 13, 1969, the report dedicates four pages to a section

entitled “Literature of the Young Republic,” which argues for the importance of presenting

accurate texts of American authors as American literature is becoming more important on the

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world stage. “The project is in part recognition of the change in the seriousness with which

American writers have come to be taken,” the report explains. “Earlier in this century British

authors were considered the standard masters of the English language, even in American

schools... But since World War II, 'American studies' have flourished not only in the United

States but abroad” (NEH 1968, 15). Following this explanation of the importance of American

literature at home and abroad, there is a photograph of an NEH staff member stacking volumes

of Whitman, Hawthorne, the Journals and Works of Emerson, and Mark Twain—visual

testament to the productivity of the CEAA project.

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Image 6: NEH staff member Nancy McCall stacks CEAA volumes to illustrate the organization's

productivity. From the NEH's Third Annual Report to the President, dated January 13, 1969, page 16.

Accessed from catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000553517.

As the NEH took on new funding opportunities, they dedicated less space to the CEAA in

their annual reports, though they continued to mention the program each year. The reports for

1970 and 1971 repeat the claim, crucial to the rationale for implementing Greg-Bowers, that

once these editions were produced the works of the selected authors “should never have to be

reedited” (NEH 1970, 31; 1971, 24). The 1970 report praises the “ancillary benefit” that the

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CEAA will have on the study of American literature, because “through the involvement of young

scholars and graduate students in the program, a whole new generation of solidly trained

American textual editors will have been produced when this undertaking is completed” (32).

This is, of course, one of Mumford's main concerns when he complains that “as professors and

heads of departments, [CEAA editors] perpetuate their principles in selecting and promoting

their younger colleagues... who are in effect being conditioned to give the major share of their

time, their energies, and their thoughts to the minutiae of scholarship.” What the NEH espouses

as a virtue of public funding, Mumford sees as a major obstacle to the pursuit of humanities

research. For Mumford, the public intellectuals of the future are being actively professionalized

into an academy that has been co-opted by the CEAA's appropriation of government funding.

Some of those working within the CEAA shared similar concerns about the quality of

research being done under its auspices, however. Edmund Wilson was correct when he wrote

that “I am told that these MLA editors are the constant recipients of edicts in which the

management lays down to them the principles on which they must proceed in their work, and

that they are sometimes as much bored and annoyed as the reviewer is by these exactions”

(“Fruits I”). Nordloh describes the effect that an unthinking application of Greg-Bowers had on

its editions:

As defined and enforced by CEAA and supported by NEH, editing became in too many

instances an avenue of advancement for those with little intellectual commitment and less

sensitivity to textual issues... At the center of this functional absolutism, unfortunately,

lay copy-text... CEAA liked it, and NEH looked for it, and for too many editors it became

a statement of fact, not a theory; it overrode evidence which contradicted it or, if not that,

formed a doctrine of faith which any heretical position had to justify itself against.

“Theory” 151-152

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As an example, he takes Henry James's The American, one of the works that Alfred Ferguson

cited in his list of those that present problems with regard to a definitive text. “It is not

antagonistic to copy-text theory to propose that Henry James' The American, for example,

revised in minor ways several times up through the English edition of 1883, and then

exhaustively revised for the New York edition of 1907-09, could in fact be edited to two points

of completion, representing the earlier and later revisions, with both of them tracing the process

of revision through the same early texts” (“Theory” 153). Intentionalism as Greg imagined it,

Nordloh, argues, is not “what the author in some kind of aesthetic bliss absolutely wanted or

achieved in the last text revised,” but rather “a way of referring to the accumulation of revisions

actually made” (153). However, in a context in which “the only important question became

'Have they chosen the correct copy-text?” and in which “Inspectors urged editors to revise their

'heresies' to conform to the faith” (152), the productive application of Greg-Bowers took

precedence over any questioning of its theoretical validity. Ferguson's skewed adaptation of

Greg-Bowers to a textual situation “which is not easily dealt with according to Sir Walter Greg's

theory of copy-text” (xxix) was born of this institutional context.

As shown above, the result was a series of texts that their respective authors would never

have encountered. These new texts were eligible for copyright protection according to the legal

definition of originality in use at the time. Even as CEAA editors attempted to erase their own

agency in recovering the intentions of their authors through the application of Greg-Bowers, they

relied on a legal system that recognized their original contributions as such. The CEAA thus

operated in the gap between the popular conception of originality as the production of new

ideas—the original productions of their authors which they purported to recover—and the legal

definition of originality as merely the “sweat of the brow” of the compiler of facts. In so doing,

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they played on a tension which defines the history of copyright in American literature: that

between the right of the public to the free use of its cultural heritage and the right of the creator

to the sanctity of his work.

In 1991, the Supreme Court ruled in Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service

Co. that the white pages of the telephone directory are not subject to copyright. The unanimous

decision negated the so-called “sweat of the brow” doctrine that previously served as the

argument for the protectability of similar collections of facts. According to the “sweat of the

brow” doctrine, first articulated in the 1922 case Jeweler's Circular Publishing Co. v. Keystone

Publishing Co., “the right to copyright a book upon which one has expended labor in its

preparation does not depend upon whether the materials which he has collected... show literary

skill or originality, either in thought or language, or anything more than industrious collection.

The man who goes through the streets of a town and puts down the names of each of the

inhabitants, with their occupations and their street number, acquires material of which he is the

author.” The Feist decision, in overturning this doctrine, asserts that facts themselves are not

subject to copyright protection, but that protection does extend to originality in the selection and

arrangement of facts. An alphabetical listing of telephone numbers is not copyrightable because

the alphabet is a pre-existing system of organization, and thus shows no creativity on the part of

the compiler.

In the wake of the Feist decision, the Committee for Scholarly Editions held a meeting

with intellectual-property lawyers concerning its possible effects on scholarly editing. As David

Greetham, a CSE editor at the time, writes, “it seemed possible that the most common type of

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CSE-approved edition—a 'clear-text' with pages of text physically separated from pages

containing various apparatuses and tables that sustained its readings—would in practice be much

more susceptible to a form of piracy such as that described in Feist than would an 'inclusive text'

edition, in which the editor littered the page with the record of variants, deletions, interlineations,

and so on” (54). The CEAA/CSE's original requirement for clear text, based on the premise that

they would sell the rights to this text sans apparatus to private publishers, made their editions

quite simply easier to photocopy without making the source of the text obvious. More

importantly, though, Greetham notes a resulting irony: “the more an edition, especially a clear-

text edition, claims 'definitiveness' and 'historical fact' for its text, the more like the white pages it

becomes and the less protectable. On the other hand, the more an edition openly avows its

speculative, personal, and critical nature, even its own failure to achieve 'definitiveness'... the less

like the white pages it becomes and the more protectable” (“Telephone” 54). Greg-Bowers

intentionalism was chosen by the CEAA based on its supposed ability to objectively present an

author's original intention as a matter of fact. However, if CEAA editors are correct in this

assertion, they are merely organizing facts (gleaned from the documentary record of an author's

manuscript and printed output) according to a pre-existing system of organization (Greg-

Bowers). Greetham ends by slyly suggesting that the only way to determine the matter legally

would be for someone to photocopy the clear-text pages of Cambridge University Press's then-

recent edition of D.H. Lawrence and “wait for Cambridge to jump” (68).

Without going so far as to instigate a lawsuit, we can still use the language of copyright

theory to elucidate the logic by which university presses claimed ownership of otherwise public-

domain texts before the 1991 Feist decision, and to examine how this logic was at odds with the

general cultural consensus regarding originality and authorship. William Hackett's criticism of

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the CEAA's apparent attempt to monopolize public domain works through copyright—“Is the

Hinman Collating Machine alive? Does it breath? [sic] Is it an author?”—in fact quite neatly

encapsulates the tension between the cultural and legal definitions of originality current at the

time. According to “sweat of the brow,” the Hinman collator did indeed bestow the status of

authorship on its users. By using the collator to recognize differences in copies within relevant

editions of works, CEAA editors were establishing facts that granted them copyright protection

over the resulting texts. Through their use of the Hinman collator, these editors were made the

equivalent of a man going through the streets of a town, marking down the names of its

inhabitants.

In the twentieth century there existed a substantial distance between the concept of

originality in copyright law and that of originality as it pertained within the cultural imagination

of Romantic authorship. It is within this gap between legal and cultural discourses that CEAA

editions were able to simultaneously posit the integrity of their construction of Romantic

authorship, built on the idea of the author's original genius, and to copyright the resulting text,

which by their own account was not original in the slightest. Scholarly work has tended to

conflate these different interpretations of originality. In the 1980s, work in the history of

authorship took seriously the premise of Michel Foucault's foundational essay “What Is an

Author?,” which argues that the commonly accepted notion of authorship is in fact contingent on

a number of historical circumstances, among them the power of the state to punish or reward the

production of texts, and the resultant need to identify their creators. Mark Rose, Martha

Woodmansee, and Carla Hesse each tie the rise of the idea of individual authorship in England,

Germany, and France, respectively, to the emergence of those countries' intellectual property

laws. In a characteristic passage, Rose argues that the cultural conditions through which the idea

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of the individual author as proprietor of his own works could be articulated included “the

emergence of the mass market for books, the valorization of original genius, and the

development of the Lockean discourse of possessive individualism.” These conditions arose “in

the same period as the long legal and commercial struggle over copyright [in eighteenth century

England].” Further, he argues that “it was in the course of that struggle under the particular

pressures of the requirements of legal argumentation that the blending of the Lockean discourse

and the aesthetic discourse of originality occurred and the modern representation of the author as

proprietor was formed” (56).

This account of Romantic authorship as a product of the convergence of economic,

aesthetic, and legal conditions was predominant in New Historicist authorship studies. However,

the legal scholar Oren Bracha notes that literary scholars make a crucial misstep in assuming that

the cultural idea of original authorship as it emerged in tandem with copyright in the late

eighteenth century persisted without change into the legal structure of copyright in the twentieth

century. On the contrary, Bracha argues that throughout the nineteenth century, a series of cases

in the United States reduced the actual originality requirement for copyright protection to

nothing, even as the theoretical justification for copyright protection continued to invoke the

language of originality. According to Bracha's analysis, in theory copyright was said to protect

the property rights of individual creators in their original creations, even as in practice it favored

low originality thresholds and corporate creators. Bracha notes that “No copyright regime whose

border wars of copyrightability involve telephone directories or guides of cable television

companies and whose default rules often vest initial copyright ownership in faceless business

corporations could be plausibly described as extending protection only to [in Woodmansee's

phrase] 'a unique, original product of the intellection of a unique individual'” (195). The 1991

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Feist decision actually marks a reversal of this trend, bringing the originality requirement of

eighteenth century by demanding at least a modicum of creativity beyond “sweat of the brow.”

In the United States, the idea of the author as a unique individual creator is found in the

state copyright statutes of the 1780s. In 1783, Joel Barlow argued that “There is certainly no kind

of property, in the nature of things, so much his own, as the works which a person originates

from his own creative imagination” (qtd in Bracha 198). By the time copyright was included in

the U.S. constitution with the goal of “promot[ing] the Progress of Science and the useful Arts,

by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective

Writings and Discoveries,” “authorship was understood as the process by which an individual

spirit served as the ultimate source of new original ideas” (Bracha 199). However, copyright was

still legally defined as the right to reproduce exact copies of a text—much more a publisher's

right than an author's. The distance between the theoretical argument in favor of copyright as the

protection of original works of imagination and the practical application of it as a market-

oriented protection of the right to produce a commodity informed debates about authorial

originality throughout the nineteenth century. The outcome of these debates then shaped the

representative of Emerson's intentions and copyright the work done on it by its editors.

Two strands of cases shaped the legal status of originality in the nineteenth century. The

first of these, represented by Justice Joseph Story, espoused an anti-Romantic view of authorship

as a process of quoting and borrowing. In the 1845 case Emerson v. Davies, Story wrote an

almost postmodern evaluation of the nature of language: “Every book in literature, science and

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art, borrows, and must necessarily borrow, and use much which was well known and used

before. No man creates a new language for himself, at least if he be a wise man, in writing a

book... The thoughts of every man are, more or less, a combination of what other men have

thought and expressed” (qtd in Bracha 202). Accordingly, Story posited a view of copyright that

necessitated no originality requirement. In contrast, Justice Samuel Nelson judged that

originality was a prerequisite for copyright in the 1850 case Jollie v. Jaques on the premise that

the song under review in the case “must, doubtless, be substantially a new and original work; and

not a copy of a piece already produced, with additions and variations, which a writer of music

with experience and skill might readily make” (qtd in Bracha 204). Ultimately, Story's view of

this case, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes refused to apply an originality requirement on the

subject under review, an advertisement poster for a circus. However, in doing so Holmes drew

on the very language of originality that supports the theoretical argument of original authorship.

Any intellectual work, according to Holmes, is “the personal reaction of an individual upon

nature... [that] always contains something unique” (qtd in Bracha 200). By this logic, originality

is the foundation of authorship and thus of copyright, but it is not the Court's role to decide what

constitutes originality. In this way, the Romantic notion of authorship as the original production

of imaginative works prevails, even as originality disappears from the legal consideration of

This distinction between aesthetic and legal definitions of originality was tested in the

1922 case of Jeweler's Circular Publishing mentioned above, which established the “sweat of

the brow” doctrine at which the decision in Feist took aim. Justice O'Connor, in her decision in

Feist, criticizes the flaws of “sweat of the brow,” “the most glaring being that it extended

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original contributions—to the facts themselves” (qtd in Greetham, “Telephone” 69, n. 1). Under

the copyright regime in which the CEAA operated, however, “sweat of the brow” prevailed,

making copyright claims such as those in Emerson's Works legally binding. The copyright for

both Emerson's Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks and Collected Works are held by the

President and Fellows of Harvard College. However, the claims behind these copyrights differ.

Harvard's claim to copyright in the Journals rests on their ownership of the physical manuscript

journals themselves. As the first entity to bring them from manuscript into print, Harvard's claim

to ownership is dependent on their unique access to these handwritten books. Further, as

Greetham makes clear, the decision to edit them according to a genetic procedure, with editorial

input included on the pages of the text, makes the original contribution of the editors obvious and

the text difficult to pirate.

On the other hand, the copyright for the Collected Works is dependent on the revision of

already-published, public domain works. Whereas the copyright entry in the Copyright Office's

Catalog for the Journals requires no clarification, there is a note appended to the entry for the

Works stating that the only new material is in the “editorial matter” and “revisions.” Because the

editorial matter is appended in separate sections that aren't licensed to private publishers, it is the

status of these “revisions” within the clear text—whether they are made in accordance with

objective factual evidence or according to the personal judgment of the individual editor—that is

crucial for copyright after Feist. Despite Hackett's concerns, however, the Hinman collator

legally established authorship for its users before Feist. The fact that Hackett would question the

machine's status as an author, though, attests to the gap between the theoretical construction of

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the author reified through CEAA editions and the CEAA's own practices in copyrighting the

products of their self-described objective process.

In addition to questioning the basis by which mechanical collation bestows proprietary

authorship upon CEAA editors, Hackett also accuses the CEAA of using copyright to “[restrict]

the free use of a national treasure that is our common property.” Hackett and Wilson's

contestation of CEAA copyright in favor of free use in the public domain enacts a tension

between individual property and public interest that is intrinsic to American intellectual property

legislation. In charting the differences between Rose's formulation of the legal basis of

authorship in the British context and that of the American context, Meredith McGill notes that

the 1834 case Wheaton v. Peters “self-consciously re-stages the British debate over literary

property, reformulates its terms, and rejects both common-law copyright and the Lockean

argument that undergirds it.” In doing so, the case “establishes going-into-print as the moment

when individual rights give way to the demands of the social and defines the private ownership

of a printed text as the temporary alienation of public property” (45-46). The original 1790

individual's property rights. Wheaton v. Peters established this principle by asserting that “an

author's common-law property in his text ceased on publication; that strict compliance with all

statutory requirements was necessary for establishing title in a work; and that there could be no

common law of the United States” (65). Wheaton v. Peters was the high-water mark of a

republican conception of authorship that privileged the circulation of ideas over the property

rights of individuals, however. Throughout the rest of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the

rights of authors were asserted via a series of new copyright acts that extended the initial term of

protection from the original fourteen years to today's term of the author's life plus seventy years.

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As a result of these acts, the conception of the work in American legal and cultural discourse has

shifted from that of an instrument of the public good to a piece of personal property that

represents the labor of the individual. Arguments for copyright extension focus on the need to

protect this property not only for reasons of personal financial gain, but to safeguard the person

of the author himself against misuse or misrepresentation by others.

The CEAA, by purporting to present their editions as monuments to their authors that are

purged of corruption and safeguarded by copyright, participates in a discourse of literary

property that increasingly sees the text as a sacred space to be made inviolable to the

encroachment of outside agents. Paul K. Saint-Amour calls this discourse “hauntological,”

arguing that copyrights' “links to commemoration and consecration, its intimate ties to the death

of the author, and its vaunted conquest of death through its power to confer one or another kind

of afterlife on creations and creators” gives it “no less a cultural function than to determine and

police the border between the living and the dead” (124). This hauntological function of

span of copyright has overtaken that of its most immediate beneficiary—the work’s creator— it

has become the site for debates not only about the optimal balance between individual incentives

and public goods but about cultural memory, the sanctity of the dead, and the longevity of their

intentions and legacies” (126). CEAA authors, all of whom were in the public domain, were

vulnerable to political misappropriation, bowdlerization, and other forms of misuse. As the

government-funded institution tasked with producing definitive editions of the most important

American authors, it was incumbent on the CEAA to stabilize their texts, to present them as the

original products of literary genius, and to protect them as such. The relevant copyright act for

the CEAA was the Copyright Act of 1909, which guaranteed a term of protection of fifty-six

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years—not technically a posthumous copyright act, though in many cases it practically acted as

one. Further, the CEAA operated during the debates about copyright that led to the Copyright

Act of 1976, which extended protection to fifty years beyond the author's death. During this

time, discourse surrounding copyright law became increasingly suspicious of the public domain,

insisting instead on the inviolable legacy of creative individuals against the “legalized

vandalism” (124) of those who would re-print or re-fashion those works unfortunate enough to

have their copyrights lapse.

The CEAA's controversial implementation of copyright was thus a re-iteration of the

nineteenth-century debate about the public domain, in a regime that saw corporations with a

vested interest in their intellectual property co-opting the language of author's rights to protect

their copyrights. University presses defended the sanctity of authors' legacies as critics like

Mumford and Wilson invoked the republican model of publicly-owned texts that structured

counterpart in the afterlife of the author. The editor sacrifices himself in order to keep the author

alive: he constructs the author, paradoxically, by denying his role in doing so. Thus, even as

Barthes called for the death of the author and Foucault relegated him to a function of discourse,

CEAA editions resuscitate the author by re-writing his texts in his stead, presenting the 'text of

the work' that the author intended but that was sullied by the intervention of editors, compositors,

and publishers. By creating a new, copyrightable text but deferring authority to an imagined

author, the editor becomes a medium by which the ideal image of the coherent Romantic author

is revived from the “grave of memory” represented by the public domain. A copyright regime

that persisted in the rhetoric of authorial originality even as it reduced the originality requirement

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to the mere “sweat of the brow” underwrote this project by simultaneously valorizing creative

genius and protecting the results of the apparently objective Greg-Bowers method.

As David Greetham writes, “scholarly editors in the post-Feist period desiring to hold onto

their intellectual property should resist the allurements of external structure, laws of nature,

science and 'facts,' in favour of criticism and speculation” (“Telephone” 66). In the case of

Emerson's Works, it would be Ferguson's expertise as a critic and his application of a creative

“maximalist” editorial procedure that ensures copyright protection after Feist's institution of an

originality requirement. In the copyright regime in which Ferguson operated, however, deferring

to an external system of organization like Greg-Bowers posed no threat to Harvard's copyright,

and in fact doing so allowed an integral, coherent Emerson to emerge uncontested as the original

author of the text. The myth of Romantic authorship—a solitary individual creating original,

singular, coherent works—is maintained, while copyright is guaranteed based not on Ferguson's

construction of Emerson, but on the strength of Greg-Bowers's claim to establish facts from the

historical record.

CEAA director Matthew Bruccoli lamented in his overview of the program that “the

reprinting publishers were expected to perform scrupulous multiple proofings of reset texts to

ensure their trustworthiness, but it was impossible to enforce this expectation” (242). Perhaps the

most problematic legacy of the CEAA lies in what is elided in his complaint—the reprinting

publishers are charged with re-introducing corruptions, while changes made by CEAA editors

are assumed to be trustworthy. The author is revived; the marketplace is once again to blame for

the corruption of their texts; meanwhile, the editor disappears.

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CHAPTER THREE: EDITING MINORITY AND WOMEN’S WRITING: THE CANON

WARS AND THE COMMITTEE ON SCHOLARLY EDITIONS

The National Endowment for the Humanities' funding of the Center for Editions of

American Authors expired on August 31, 1976. Beginning September 1, the organization was

reconstituted as the Committee on Scholarly Editions (CSE), which continues today. The CSE

operates differently from the CEAA in two main respects. Rather than focusing exclusively on

American texts from the nineteenth century, the CSE approves of any text, from any country of

origin and any era, and in any language, as long as it meets the requirements for methodological

rigor that the organizers have established. Secondly, the CSE lacks the control over funding that

gave the CEAA so much of its power. After 1976, any edition that sought governmental support

had to apply directly to the NEH. These changes made the CSE simultaneously more and less

influential than the CEAA—by extending its influence to texts from any nation and time period,

the CSE fulfilled Fredson Bowers' desire to see Greg-Bowers become a truly universal method,

but at the same time the CSE's role was reduced to that of an advisory body. The staff of the CSE

would consult on editorial problems and review the work-in-progress of those who requested its

services but would no longer enjoy the dominant position over the editing of nineteenth-century

American literature that had inspired the controversies covered in the last chapter.

Still, the CSE could not avoid its own controversies. These centered largely around the

continued predominance of white men among those authors whose editions earned CSE's

emblem (formerly seal) of approval. Scholarly editing, by its nature a conservative discipline due

to the slow pace of publishing collected editions, struggled to adapt to critical revaluations of the

canon throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. The NEH and the CSE clashed with the progressive

contingent of the canon wars because of their predilection for already-canonical authors with

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large surviving archives of manuscript and printed material. Despite its presentation as an

objective, universal method, Greg-Bowers is best suited to authors with large bodies of work.

Collation, comparison, and emendation according to authorial intention are simply not possible

in the case of recovery projects like Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl or

Harriet Wilson's Our Nig—works that saw limited publication and distribution and whose

authorship was contested.

While the CSE no longer officially adhered to Greg-Bowers, the method still formed the

basis of its approval system and, in turn, the NEH's funding decisions. In the CSE's introductory

statement published in PMLA in 1976, the organization

conceded that “editorial procedures must be adapted to

the material to be edited. These necessary modifications

may differ between an edition of a nineteenth-century

American novel and of an American statesman's papers,

between a twentieth-century novel and a medieval

romance, or a scientist's treatises and a Renaissance play.” However, to gain approval from the

CSE, editions had to “[identify] those texts that carry textual authority, demonstrating why the

copy-text chosen is an appropriate choice, and defending the rationale for any emendation of that

copy- text” (584). The CSE advised future editors that

It is frequently true that an author's completed manuscript—or, when the manuscript does

not survive, the earliest printed edition based on it—reflects the author's intentions more

fully than later editions or transcripts, in which printers' or copyists' corruptions are likely

to have multiplied; in such cases, an editor producing a critical text would choose the

early form as copy-text and would emend it to correct erroneous readings and to

incorporate later variants that can be convincingly identified as genuine authorial

revisions. “Introductory Statement” 584

Image 7: The emblem of approval of the

Committee on Scholarly Editions.

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Though Greg-Bowers is not mentioned in the CSE's prescriptions by name, its process of

selecting and emending a copy-text according to authorial intention is still espoused, and its

language of “textual authority” and “corruptions” is still in full force.

For the two editions I focus on in this chapter, Yale University Press’s Frederick

Douglass Papers Edition and the University of Nebraska Press’s Willa Cather Scholarly Edition,

the combined pressures to find funding and to adopt the editorial requirements demanded by that

funding have resulted in the application of Greg-Bowers long after its hegemony in the 1960s

and 70s. Though other editorial models may better fit these authors, Rachel Blau DuPlessis notes

that “Versioning, instability, suggestive plethora, or hypertext models may not be available

choices when material has to be produced in a given form or not at all... And there are, at least in

book form, striking material limits to the investment a publisher (or any parallel institution)

would want to make in nonstandard textual conditions” (93). Even in a moment when facsimile

editions, multiple versions, or digital spaces are the preferred media for new scholarly editions,

“this set of material, economic considerations can push an editor into a modernist attitude [i.e. a

preference for closed, intentionalist clear-text] toward the task of editing as a judgment about the

workplace, the workshop, and the marginal gains” (94). A scholarly edition represents long-term

marginal gains in the form of increased reputation for its author and increased circulation for

their works—important considerations for editors of marginalized authors. Editors working

within the regime of Greg-Bowers chose to invest in these marginal gains for their authors, while

others struggled to find funding. The result is that prestigious, high-profile editions like the Yale

Frederick Douglass and Nebraska Willa Cather also happened to be those that advanced the

conception of authorship that is at the core of Greg-Bowers. This means that these gains were

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also marginal in a negative sense. These authors, already at the margins, could only gain via a

method that distorts the histories of the texts that it produces.

Yale University Press's Frederick Douglass Papers Edition began as a historical, rather

than literary, project. Founded by the historian John Blassingame in 1973 and publishing

beginning in 1979, the Papers Edition was funded through the National Historical Publications

and Records Commission as part of its attempt to include women and people of color in its

roster. As William Ferraro, an editor for the George Washington Papers, attests, early NHPRC

editions were dedicated to the founding fathers in a patriotic Cold War push to valorize the

nation’s beginnings. After pushback from the public, more diverse figures were included

beginning in the late 1970s.

The first series in the Douglass Papers, his Speeches, Debates, and

Interviews (1979-1992), uses a documentary editing style rather than Greg-Bowers. Quoting

Greetham, William Andrews remarks that these early editions of Douglass, “conceived and

overseen by historians, incorporate a view of documentary editing that treats the text ‘primarily

as a vehicle for meaning rather than form,’” which “places a premium on ‘ensuring the reader’s

convenience’ in negotiating the text rather than on ensuring that whatever problematic the text

may present as text is fully accounted for” (49, italics in original). Writing in 1997, Andrews

notes that “To my knowledge, the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly

Editions, which I have been a member of for the past three years, has never received an inquiry

about the advisability of undertaking a major editorial project on behalf of an African American

Ferraro in conversation with the author.

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or, for that matter, any other writer of color,” leading him to wonder why African Americans

don’t “also qualify for complete textual editions in formats comparable to those that are sealing a

hallowed place in American literary history for a Harold Frederic or a Charles Brockdon

Brown?” (50). This was about to change, however, for in 1999 the series of Douglass’s

Autobiographical Writings began, this time having adopted the Greg-Bowers method and

therefore earning the CSE emblem of approval.

The editors of the Autobiographical Writings use the language of liberty and freedom to

justify their choice of Greg-Bowers. They argue that Douglass’s voice was restrained—made

unfree—by the impositions of his publishers, in particular in the 1892 DeWolfe, Fisk version of

his third autobiography, Life and Times. By applying Greg-Bowers to the linguistic code of this

text, the editors claim to restore the freedom of expression that Douglass worked to gain

throughout his life. However, the publication history of the book tells another story. Douglass

sent to DeWolfe, Fisk a now-lost marked-up copy of the 1882 version of this text that they used

to set their edition. He then went through extensive negotiations concerning the paper,

typography, binding, and illustrations of their edition after seeing the early copies, never

mentioning the text itself. This suggests that he at least implicitly approved of the text and was

only dissatisfied with the bibliographic codes of the book.

By applying Greg-Bowers, the Yale editors ignore these bibliographic codes, changing

the linguistic codes again in the name of an expressive freedom while ignoring the social

freedom that Douglass was exercising during his negotiations. Douglass’s social freedoms

increased over time from his first autobiography in 1845 to this last in 1892, and these changes

are registered in the paratexts of each one. Greg-Bowers editors, by conflating multiple of these

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texts into one new edition with new paratexts written outside of Douglass’s control, posit and

remark on an “essential” Douglass that persists through time. These paratexts are mirrored in the

paratexts of the black slave body, including brands and scars—those markings designed to

control the physical body and attest to its own persistence through time. A social-text theory that

maintains the discrete nature of each version of Douglass’s autobiographies, on the other hand,

posits a different ontology of being, a “fluid” Douglass that is changeable and perhaps

contradictory. These versions capture Douglass at different stages in his life, from escaped slave

to abolitionist to statesman, and cannot be conflated without a loss in the representation of the

social freedoms exercised by Douglass in each case.

The University of Nebraska’s Willa Cather Scholarly Edition is the first and only CSE-

approved edition of a female American writer. Beginning in 1992, Nebraska’s Cather edition

was, like the Yale Douglass, funded after Greg-Bowers had fallen out of favor with many textual

theorists. Still, Greg-Bowers found support in the CSE, which led to NEH funding for the Cather

edition while many other women-focused editorial projects moved to commercial publishers like

Pickering and Chatto or Penguin. In the latter sections of this chapter, I discuss the state of

feminist scholarly editing in the 1990s and the problems of funding that many editions faced. I

then analyze the ways in which Greg-Bowers’s assumptions about authorship color the

biographical aspects of the Nebraska edition’s apparatus, asserting a model of individual

authorship where an alternative view of the evidence uncovers a collaborative writing process

shared by Cather with her longtime working and romantic partner Edith Lewis.

The nature of Cather’s career and reputation, as a traditional novelist with a large material

archive, made her a likely subject for Greg-Bowers. As the Cather Scholarly Edition progressed

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through the 2000s, it in fact incorporated many elements of social-text theory, but Cather’s

intentions remained the focus. Though the first edition of Cather’s important novel The

Professor’s House serves as copy-text for the 2002 Nebraska volume, thereby including Lewis’s

key contributions as literary editor, her role is ultimately overlooked or mischaracterized as

secretarial in the essays and lists of emendations. This elision extends to Cather and Lewis’s

personal relationship, which scholars like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and Melissa

Homestead have argued was romantic. After an overview of the academic dispute over Cather’s

lesbian identity, I show how the Scholarly Edition Professor’s House enters into the conservative

side of this debate because of the evidentiary standards of James Woodress and Frederick Link,

the authors of that volume’s Historical and Textual Essays. Despite their objective stance, an

ongoing discussion about the role of evidence in literary studies throughout the 1990s shows that

such evidence as they cite is always created via the methodology that employs it, and is therefore

an object of interpretation. By this logic, methodology determines the status of evidence, rather

than vice versa. Before turning to these two editions, however, it is necessary to discuss the role

of the CSE in the canon wars during the late 1980s and 1990s, before the Nebraska Cather and

Yale Douglass found approval from the Committee by adopting Greg-Bowers.

The CSE in the Canon Wars

The persistence of Greg-Bowers's influence on the CSE, combined with the NEH's

preference for highly visible canonized authors, created barriers to entry for women and minority

writers that delayed projects like the Yale Douglass and Nebraska Cather into the 90s. In a 1991

panel discussion on “The Politics of Editing” held at the annual Society for Textual Scholarship

conference, scholars and editors looked back on the first fifteen years of the CSE and its position

within the ongoing debate over the political implications of the literary canon. W. Speed Hill, a

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chairman for the CSE and a panelist for the NEH, took a conservative stance. “What does it take

to get edited?” he asked. “Answer: Well, you have to be canonical. But how do you get

canonical? Well, you have to be printed, reprinted, anthologized, and yes, edited (preferably

badly) before. But how to do all these good things? … Does it help if as an author you are (or

were) white, male, and heterosexual? Well, yes it does, but these are not the real issues” (96,

italics in original). The real issues, Hill argues, are created and sustained by the NEH review

process itself. He explains that proposed editions of neglected women writers were rejected

because their authors

were (as yet) uncanonical, or because the applicants were insufficiently skilled in the

preparation of complex, institutionally-based grant applications, or because the applicants

were frankly not interested in the niceties of copy-text, historical collations, emendations,

substantives and accidentals, and all the other minutiae dear to the Greg-Bowers-

Tanselle-trained textual critic. An inescapable consequence of the structure of the review

process at the NEH is its focus on method: methodology we all have in common, even if

we edit different texts. Therefore, an application to edit a “lesser” writer that displayed

faultless methodological expertise or even novelty will be more favorably viewed (in my

experience) than an application to edit a “greater” writer in a proposal that was

methodologically flawed or otherwise deemed wanting. All the more cause to lament the

fate of writers demonstrably uncanonical whose would-be editors simply wanted to make

available texts that have been allowed to go out of print—allowed, that is, by publishers

who were themselves white, male, presumably heterosexual or in the closet, and certainly

dead. 96-97

There do exist what Hill calls “revolutionary editions,” such as the Kane-Donaldson Piers

Plowman or Bowers's Dekker, but these “are revolutionary in their methodology, not in their

choice of text to be edited” (98). An editor of a non-canonical author, then, must abide by the

“minutiae” of the Greg-Bowers method, while those editors with “revolutionary” methodologies

can rely on the reputations of their authors in order to receive a subsidy.

What Hill does not account for is that the Greg-Bowers methodology, though shared “in

common” among scholarly editors, is not equally applicable to all authors. He seems unaware of

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the double bind that he sets up: choose a canonical author for your revolutionary editions, he

suggests, but follow Greg-Bowers to the tee for your revolutionary authors. He offers cold

comfort to prospective editors who refuse this logic. Faced with the reality “that the scholarly

editor must necessarily accept the history of his or her text as a donnée, to be analyzed, charted,

rationalized, explained, and so encoded within the text as editorially established,” such a scholar

“can simply decline the honor” of being an editor. “You will not accept history; you will be

outraged by it, and that will be your strength. You will not edit tracts, you will write them” (98,

italics in original). For Hill, scholarly editing has no active political potential; rather, it serves to

reflect and embody changes that have occurred elsewhere. Scholarly editions of minority or

women authors meant to sit alongside CEAA-approved editions of Hawthorne, Emerson, and

Melville are to be deferred indefinitely, until the author in question has achieved canonical status

outside of the editorial establishment. Greg-Bowers provides the language to circumvent this

institutionally-imposed impasse, though, if the editor is interested in its niceties.

Joel Myerson took the opposite view in his contribution to the panel. Myerson recognizes

that “virtually everything we do as editors is in some way political.”

Take, for example, the ways in which we select the people to whom we devote our

editions. The earliest editors took as their subjects white males because the choice was

obvious: had not white males made the most visible early contributions to the history,

literature, and culture of our country? … Politically, though, these choices did little more

than to reinforce the cultural assumptions that predominated during the period when these

men lived—times when non-whites and females were denied access to the mainstream of

American life. 111

The influx of money brought on by the CEAA was a welcome advance in the professionalization

of scholarly editing—Myerson speaks of editors suddenly able to afford new cars and boats—but

it brought with it the limitations imposed by large funding institutions. After the rise of the

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CEAA and NEH, “No longer was the importance of an edition the prime consideration for

undertaking it; rather, some people needed a positive answer to the question 'Is it fundable?'

before even beginning a project” (114). The answer to this question, as both Hill and Myerson

are aware, was too often dependent on the reputation of the author and the readiness with which

their work could be subjected to an intentionalist methodology.

That methodology, in turn, had its own political consequences. Myerson points to the

political effects of Greg-Bowers as compared to those approaches that gained popularity in the

1980s:

The Greg-Bowers theory proposes, in the least complex situation, the potential

reconstruction of a particular form of a text at a particular point in time. The text is in a

sense the property of the author, and we, as editors, protect the author and the author's

work from being sullied. We are, therefore, the guardians of tradition, a role not very

popular today and considered by some to be elitist. In a parallel example, Jerome J.

McGann suggests an almost Marxist, collective ownership of the text among the author

and other participants in its creation: the “workers” of the text have indeed united. Peter

Shillingsburg has proposed an egalitarian opening up of textual editions, so that all

versions of the work are accessible to everyone. No longer are editors posing as guardians

of texts, but, rather, as disseminators of them. All these textual policies have political

ramifications, ranging from hierarchical assumptions about the relations between author,

editor, and reader, to ones in which barriers are destroyed. 115

Greg-Bowers's deference to the authority of the author ignored the work of writing partners,

editors, publishers, and compositors, all of whom McGannian social-text theory sought to

recognize. Further, it assumed that editors were necessary to purify corrupted texts for the

passive readers of “definitive” editions. As this top-down model of authority came under attack,

the funding policies of the NEH and the editorial methodology of the CSE appeared increasingly

out of touch with the theoretical and political changes introduced by social-text theory and the

revision of the canon. The unselfconscious editors who presumed to rescue a marginalized voice

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through Greg-Bowers in fact repeated the record of textual interference that they sought to

expunge. Rather than presenting a version of the text newly freed from the impositions of the

original editors and publishers, these scholarly editors presented a version shaped by their own

prerogatives. Still, as in the case of the Yale Frederick Douglass, CSE editors used the rhetoric of

liberty and freedom of expression to obscure their role as “guardians of the text.”

Greg-Bowers in the Papers Edition of Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

All three CSE-approved volumes of Douglass's autobiographical writings contest the

presentation of himself as author, as his autobiographical strategies confront the biographical

impulses of his intentionalist editors. However, his third autobiography, Life and Times, provides

the clearest evidence of what is at stake in the editing and re-publication of his life story.

Published in 2012, this latest volume of the Papers project marks the completion of the

autobiographical series. The publication history of Life and Times is the most complicated of

Douglass's autobiographies, giving its editors occasion to exhibit the potential of Greg-Bowers to

sort out and clarify complex textual situations. And, as the last substantial piece of life-writing

that Douglass completed before his death, it represents the latest stage in his own evolving views

about how best to put his life into print. In fact, Life and Times consists largely of passages that

he collected and revised from My Bondage and My Freedom interspersed and expanded with

other pieces, making Douglass in effect both the editor and the author of this amalgamated text.

After an overview of the publication history of Life and Times, I will discuss the representation

of this history by the Yale volume's editors and how their editing takes textual control away from

Douglass even as they insist that Greg-Bowers restores his freedom to him.

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The publication history of Douglass's third autobiography is a story of frustration and

compromise. The book was originally written—or rather, assembled—in 1881 under contract to

Thomas Belknap and Sylvester Betts of the Park Publishing Company in Hartford, Connecticut.

Though it has since been lost, it is clear that the copy submitted by Douglass consisted of twenty-

five newly revised chapters from My Bondage and My Freedom to which he added excerpts from

the Narrative of the Life, his letters, newspaper articles, speeches, and new holograph material.

The entirety of the First Part and Chapters II, III, VI, and VII of the Second Part of Life and

Times is taken directly from My Bondage, though with corrections and emendations (LAT 485,

502). After this material was set into type, which accounted for 482 pages, Betts reached out to

Douglass for more manuscript in order to lessen the number of blank pages left in the book's last

gathering. Douglass obliged, sending his eulogy of President Garfield with three pages of newly-

written concluding material and his April 1876 speech commemorating the Freedman's

Monument in Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, the former piece was too short to fill the

gathering and the latter was too long for it, forcing Betts to add an additional gathering that itself

required more material to be filled. Douglass then sent his speech from August of 1880 on West

Indian Emancipation, which brought the book's total pages to 518, with only the last leaf left

blank. These additions made the ending of the 1881 edition an illogical jumble. Douglass's

original eighteen chapters, which proceeded chronologically, now ended with a nineteenth

chapter that anachronistically integrated Garfield's death into the narrative with a second

conclusion tacked on. Then, the Freedman’s Monument and West Indian Emancipation speeches

were added as an appendix with no effort to explain their presence (LAT 486-488).

There were ultimately five printings of the 1881 edition, with changes made in the second

and third. At Betts's request, Douglass expanded the West Indian Emancipation speech to fill out

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the blank leaf, and there were also changes to the table of contents and pagination (LAT 490). All

five printings featured illustrations that Douglass called “coarse and shocking” (qtd in LAT 489),

though he was able to successfully petition that at least a few copies from the first two printings

be published without them. In 1882, a second edition was printed that featured hundreds of

textual alterations from the 1881, many of them demonstrably authorial. The main changes that

Douglass hoped for in the edition, however, regarded its quality. He felt so strongly that the first

edition suffered from poor typography, binding, and design that he gave up his battle over the

illustrations in order to assuage Park Publishing's concerns about the cost of a new edition (491).

Finally, this 1881 text was published in an English edition by John Lobb, editor of Christian Age

magazine in London, who Anglicized the text by altering its spelling to British usage, deleting

references to figures with whom the British public would be unfamiliar, and expunging a passage

critical of the Englishman Hugh Forbes, who prevented one of John Brown’s plans for a slave

insurrection (493).

The most drastic changes to Life and Times wouldn't happen until a decade later,

however. Douglass ended the 1881 text by stating that it would be the last of his

autobiographical endeavors: “What may remain of life to me… will probably be told by others

when I have passed from the busy stage of life” (LAT 372). Despite this, Douglass wrote thirteen

new chapters for an 1892 edition after the Boston firm of DeWolfe, Fisk and Company

purchased the plates from Park Publishing. In addition to the new chapters, Douglass sent

DeWolfe, Fisk a copy of the 1882 second edition “with a great many changes made in it,” as a

representative later wrote to Douglass's widow, Helen Pitts (qtd in Condon 15). Oddly, DeWolf,

Fisk incorporated more than 1,000 such changes in the First and Second Parts, which required

them to re-set many of the plates, but then simply added the newly-written Third Part to the end,

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leaving the Garfield eulogy, the conclusion, and the appendix of two speeches sitting awkwardly

between the Second and Third Parts. The result is a combination of texts including twenty-five

chapters of My Bondage and My Freedom that had been revised by Douglass twice over; the

excerpts from Narrative of the Life and the several letters, newspaper articles, and speeches that

had been added to those chapters; holograph material written for the Second Part; the materials

that Betts requested to fill out the first edition; and a newly-written Third Part. The number of

people who had a hand in creating this collection of fragments is impossible to know, but it

includes Douglass himself, the original editors of Narrative and My Bondage, Sylvester Betts,

Helen Pitts (who likely commented on and typed up the Third Part), the editors at DeWolfe,

Fisk, and all of the compositors, designers, and workers responsible for each edition.

Faced with this immensely complex book-object, the editors of the Yale Papers set about

isolating Douglass's intentions from those of the other agents in its publication. The editors did

so through the rhetoric of voice and hand, metonymizing Douglass’s physical body to emphasize

how their edition restores his freedom of expression. Robin Condon, the managing editor of the

Papers project, writes that the editorial goal was to “strip away the layers of corruption resulting

from the hands and the agendas of publishers, editors, and compositors to recover Douglass’s

unadulterated voice and, insofar as possible, the hand of the individual author, a man whose

other works as well as this one demonstrate the paramount importance Douglass placed on his

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ability and freedom to write his own life and define his own identity.”

She elaborates that “the

aim of the process was to recover the unadorned fundamental quality of Douglass’s powerful

voice … to preserve Douglass’s earliest intentions … [and] to present … the essential character

of Douglass’s oratorical narration, his own account of his experiences, and what he perceived to

be their significance in American social, political, and cultural history, as free as possible of the

modifications made by editors, compositors, and others” (14). For example, she objects to “what

[the editors] believe to be many nonauthorial revisions; in other words, collation, or word-for-

word, punctuation mark-for-punctuation mark comparison of the texts reveals considerable

evidence of house styling in the 1892 DeWolfe, Fiske publication that was absent in the earlier

Park Publishing editions and impressions” (13). This mission statement reflects the authorial

orientation of the project, one to which Condon assigns an ethical dimension when she writes

that the editors chose “the traditional, but vastly more time-consuming [Greg-Bowers] editorial

methodology” in order to “honor his hard-earned literary skill and personal liberty” (16).

In practice, Greg-Bowers operates at the level of the sentence, the word, the punctuation

mark. The recovery of Douglass’s metaphorical “voice,” therefore, consists in the creation of that

text that best captures the particularities of the authorial “hand” of the manuscript. The Yale

editors point to the DeWolfe, Fisk edition’s “formal punctuation scheme, very different from the

The volume’s editor, John R. McKivigan, uses similar language in describing the goal of the edition: “The

Frederick Douglass Papers edition of the autobiography strips the text of the many layers of stylistic veneer applied

by its New England editors in 1881, 1882, and 1892, who believed that they could, and indeed, should, enhance and

correct Douglass’s prose. However, as with any editorial alterations that affected or substantively changed the

meaning of the sentences and paragraphs crafted by Douglass, the loss of that veneer is in fact a gain for those

seeking to reconstruct Douglass as he was in his time and as he wrote of his life” (italics in original, “Introduction:

Rediscovering the Life and Times” 7).

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casual and idiosyncratic pointing in the pre-1892 American publications,” as evidence of

editorial intrusion that must be purged from the text. “Douglass’s earlier sentence structure was

reconfigured, by means of transposition of phrases and clauses, possibly in order to render the

tone more elegant. Word choice was altered, sentences ending in prepositions were corrected,

and split infinitives were eliminated. It is hardly an exaggeration to claim that the revision of the

plates for the DeWolfe, Fiske publication was extensive,” Condon remarks (15). She quickly

dismisses the idea that Douglass himself would have made these changes by noting that “it

seems unlikely that the 1881 writer had transformed substantially his punctuation, syntax, and

word choice by 1892, when he had attained 74 years of age.” Rather, “the most likely scenario of

revision is that Douglass’s corrections were combined with rigorous house styling by his Boston

editors” (15-16). It seems as likely that, knowing this to be his last and presumably most

representative autobiographical text, Douglass took care in revising it according to contemporary

grammatical and syntactical conventions. Still, the best evidence for who was responsible for

each change in the 1892 DeWolfe, Fisk edition is the lost copy of the 1882 second edition “with

a great many changes made in it,” as the letter to Pitts states. Which of these changes were

Douglass’s and which were his editors, then, remains an open question.

The 1892 edition would seemingly be the correct copy-text to retain Douglass’s “great

many changes.” The Yale editors initially agree:

Despite the uncertainty about whose revising or stylizing hand did what, the DeWolfe,

Fiske version may be assumed to be the most authoritative version of all, not only

because it is the sole contemporaneous one that contains the “Third Part,” but because it

is the last published during Douglass’s lifetime. But because we cannot say with

certainty, the only means of assuming that the DeWolfe, Fiske is the most authoritative

text published during Douglass’s lifetime is to conceive of authorship within the “social

text” orientation popular in the scholarly editing community since the 1970s. The “social

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text” approach to scholarly editing involves viewing Douglass as not the sole or

individual author of Life and Times. Instead, Douglass is a mere participant in a process

of collaborative authorship… However, the 1892 version, emerging as a product of the

nexus of the intentions of many persons involved in the publication process, can hardly

claim to be a work “finished by the hand by which it was begun.” Condon 16

After laying out the case for the 1892 edition as copy-text, Condon changes course and insists on

Greg-Bowers as the only way to avoid the problem of collaborative authorship, resting the

decision on Douglass’s stated intention that his work be “finished by the hand by which it was

begun.” As a result, the Yale editors chose multiple copy-texts, combining the Third Part from

the DeWolfe, Fisk edition with a surviving revised typescript of that section, and then reverting

to the first American edition of 1881 for the First and Second Parts.

Of course, there are additional extenuating circumstances that led the editors to conflate

the 1881 and 1892 editions. As they note, Henry Louis Gates already edited what amounts to a

social-text edition when he republished the 1892 Life and Times in the 1994 Library of America

edition of Douglass’s autobiographies, which gave them an incentive not to merely repeat his

choice. In that sense, the Yale editors do a great service in providing another type of edition for

those readers who wish to choose between the two orientations. Additionally, the other volumes

in the series of Autobiographical Writings and in the Papers Edition as a whole were edited

according to Greg-Bowers, making it the standard method—already tested and funded—before

the editors even began the project. What I’d like to point out, though, is the range of

intentionalities left unaccounted for in the Greg-Bowers method in this case, and the

consequences for imagining Douglass as an author interested in his “personal liberty” in the

publishing world. This is not to invalidate the work done by the Yale editors but to explain the

divergent ideas of authorial identity that result from their intentionalist editing on the one hand

and a sociological orientation on the other.

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Greg-Bowers’s narrow focus on textual intentionality does not account for the

extratextual considerations that were of utmost importance to Douglass during the publication of

the 1892 Life and Times, and Condon’s conflation of this limited, text-based intentionality with

Douglass’s physical body in the form of his “voice” or his “hand” helps to obscure the rather

complex sense in which the 1892 text represents the full range of his judgments and decisions

about how to represent himself as an author at the end of his life. The DeWolfe, Fiske edition,

flawed and frustrated though it may be, is the product of careful considerations and negotiations

on Douglass’s part—a product of the social process of publication in which Douglass was fully

involved. Douglass took seriously his freedom to represent his life in print, but he also took

seriously his freedom to represent himself in print, which entailed the ability to enter into a

contract with a publisher and negotiate the terms by which his corpus would be created, defined,

and circulated among his audience. Put simply, we can see Douglass’s voice and hand in more

than just the textual issues with which Greg-Bowers is concerned.

Peter Shillingsburg usefully distinguishes between different types of authorial intention,

and his categories can help illuminate what is at issue in Douglass’s negotiations with DeWolfe,

Fisk. In the most abstract sense, “there can be an intention to be brilliant or successful, to write a

novel or poem, or to convey an idea, emotion, or attitude. A single unwavering intention, if such

were conceivable, at any of these levels might produce several alternative texts of more or less

satisfaction to the author” (32). We can say that Douglass’s intention on this level was simply to

write an autobiography, though this was not an independent intention, as he was encouraged by

his friends and family. At a level below this, one can speak of an author’s intention to “construct

scenes and plot them in chapters or sections,” though this intention too is “apt to fluctuate, and

his construction of a scene may pass through many stages” (32). This level refers to Douglass’s

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complex re-appropriation of My Bondage and My Freedom and his composition of the new

sections. Both of these levels of intention are unhelpful, as they represent different versions of an

“intention to mean” that is ultimately irrecoverable.

At one more level of granularity, however, we have “an intention to record on paper, or in

some other medium, a specific sequence of words and punctuation according to an acceptable or

feasible grammar.” Shillingsburg explains that “The author’s intention to convey an idea is

important to editors because they know authors often produce alternative texts in their pursuit of

a single intention of that kind. But one must be careful to distinguish this level of intention from

an intention to record a specific sequence of words. More than any other level of intention, the

intention to put down a particular sequence of words and punctuation is recoverable” (33). This

intention, the “intention to do,” relates to the materiality of the manuscript and is thus susceptible

to an analysis of physical evidence. Alterations on a manuscript page can be referred to (and

argued over) without recourse to an imagined authorial intention to mean, though the reader’s

interpretations of the physical evidence can vary. Unfortunately, the most relevant document—

Douglass’s marked-up copy of the 1882 text—is not available for such interpretation.

A third category of intention, and one that is sometimes at odds with the intention to do

as it is represented in manuscripts, is best understood as “expectation,” or what the author

As Shillingsburg notes, intentionalists and social-text theorists agree that this type of intentionality is

ultimately not wholly recoverable, though for those in the Greg-Bowers school the pursuit of it remains a valid, if

unachievable, goal. Skeptics cite the subjective, historical, and fluctuating nature of the intention to mean as reasons

to discount the validity of any such pursuit. For the Greg-Bowers position, see Tanselle, “The Editorial Problem of

Final Authorial Intention,” Studies in Bibliography 29 (1976). For the skeptical position, which I follow here, see

Morse Peckham, “Reflections on the Foundations of Modern Textual Editing,” Proof 1 (1971).

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expected others, including editors and publishers, to do to see the book through the publication

process. Authorial expectations include the physical formatting of the book, but also the house

styling of the text’s grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and other stylistic elements. There is

evidence that authors like Mark Twain actively resisted house styling, but Shillingsburg points

out that “instances in which authors relied on the publisher or simply did not fight the production

crew’s control over accidentals are, it seems, more numerous” (54). This issue is the foundation

of the social-text orientation that textual critics including Donald Pizer, Philip Gaskell, Jack

Stillinger, and most notably Jerome McGann created in response to Greg-Bowers. Social-text

theorists consider the manuscript to be merely a guide for both the author and the publisher to

follow during the creation of a collaborative published work, and it is thus the first edition born

of this collaboration that usually has authority. It is also useful to note here a distinction between

what I call a “soft” social-text theory, in which the publisher is seen as fulfilling the author’s

intentions (an author is neglectful of proper punctuation in the manuscript because he knows the

publisher will supply it later) and a “hard” social-text theory, in which the author’s intentions are

not to be considered at all (an author protests against the treatment of accidentals in their text but

the social nature of publication overrides or negates this concern, even when explicitly voiced).

In this case, a soft social-text approach recognizes that DeWolf, Fisk carried out Douglass’s

intentions either by adopting his changes from the lost 1882 copy or by applying a house styling

that Douglass was satisfied with. A hard social-text approach would recognize this textual

history, but would not consider Douglass’s satisfaction with the 1892 edition to be relevant to

that text’s authority.

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The choice to edit according to Douglass’s intention is justified by the Yale editors

according to a logic that wavers between these different categories of intention. Condon writes,

regarding Douglass’s composition of the Third Part published in the 1892 version, that

The reason he proffers for adding to his life’s story a decade later, to recount the events

occurring between the years of 1881 and 1891, is, he states, that his friends and his

publishers felt that the “unity and completeness of the work require[d] that it shall be

finished by the hand by which it was begun.” (It is likely that he heartily agreed with his

friends and publishers.) He proceeds to speak about the more general intention behind his

self-narrative as a whole, writing: “Like most men who give the world their

autobiographies I wish my story to be told as favorably towards myself as it can be with a

due regard to truth.” Surely, these two statements from the author himself appear to

dictate editorial practice on a scholarly edition of this final autobiography. 13

Douglass’s decision, on the advice of his friends and publishers, to finish his third autobiography

himself to ensure its “unity and completeness” and his desire to represent his story “as favorably

towards [himself] as it can be with a due regard to truth” both function at the highest level of

intentional abstraction—to wish to write a unified autobiography favorable to oneself is of a kind

with wishing to write a well-plotted adventure novel that is as exciting as possible, and the

degree to which the finished product met the expectations of its author is similarly unknowable.

As Shillingsburg notes, while the Greg-Bowers method assumes that one can move toward

recovering authorial intention of this kind, it fails to “explain how we can know we are moving

toward something if we cannot know the thing we are moving toward” (32). The Yale editors

take Douglass at his word when he describes his desire for a complete and unified account of his

life, but in the absence of a knowable trajectory toward a version of Douglass’s third

autobiography that would fulfill this intention, they rely on Greg-Bowers as the editorial method

that best maps onto this conception of a coherent life.

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The best index of the extra-textual intentions that Douglass had for Life and Times are the

letters that he wrote to DeWolfe, Fisk negotiating how his book would be published. Unhappy

with the text and appearance of the first edition of 1881, Douglass wrote to Sylvester Betts of

Park Publishing on 30 October 1881 that he had “marred and spoiled my work entirely” (qtd in

LAT 489). He was indignant about the illustrations included in this edition, stating that he was

“no more reconciled than ever to the publication of my life with illustrations, and I ask and insist,

as I have a right to do, that an edition of the book shall be published without illustrations, for

Northern circulation.” He also reminded Betts that the book should be printed on “good white

paper” along with a steel engraving of himself. On 28 of January 1882 Douglass again wrote to

Betts to complain of typographical errors in this first edition (LAT 489). Park Publishing had

initially offered to reduce his royalties in order to pay for improvements in the materials of the

second edition. However, Douglass offered to forego his complaints regarding the illustrations

and typographical errors in favor of the larger goal of making the second edition “what it should

be as to quality and finish” (qtd in LAT 491). The negotiation worked; not only did Park publish

a better quality edition, but it completely re-set the type of the first edition in order to

accommodate changes Douglass requested to the text. Evidence that Douglass was satisfied with

this second edition includes the fact that he made no further changes to it for its second, third,

and fourth printings, and that he used this edition as his own copy-text when establishing the text

of the 1892 DeWolfe, Fisk edition. The fact that Douglass did not make a similar complaint

regarding the 1892 version again suggests that he was satisfied with that text.

This series of negotiations, regarding not only textual emendations but illustrations and

production quality, provides an example of the types of intentionality that Greg-Bowers cannot

account for. In terms of a “soft” social-text approach, it is likely that Douglass implicitly

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approved of the changes to the 1881 text that the Park editors made along with his own for the

1882 second edition. It is again likely that he approved of the changes made along with his own

by the DeWolfe, Fisk editors for the 1892 edition. According to a “hard” social-text approach, of

course, his approval does not matter, as the 1892 edition represents, finally, the product of a long

series of judgments, decisions, negotiations, and compromises that began in some sense with the

composition of Douglass’s first autobiography in 1845. An intentionalist approach sees floating

behind the physical text an ideal text toward which these decades of composition and decision-

making somehow tend, while a social-text approach sees each edition as an event that culminates

in an artifact that stands on its own as the outcome of a collaborative process. Each approach, as

I have suggested, implies a conception of authorial identity, and along with it an ethics of editing

that, in Frederick Douglass’s case, directly affects how we view him as a free black author who

cherished his right to navigate the literary marketplace as he saw fit.

Paratext and the Construction of the Author

In order to chart Douglass’s trajectory as an active agent in his own publishing history, it

is necessary to gauge his growing involvement in the production aspects of each of his

autobiographies. The paratexts of each of these texts provide evidence of the increased freedom

and authority that Douglass enjoyed as he transitioned from fugitive slave to abolitionist to

statesman, adapting his textual presence to fit each of these roles. The paratext, which is in

Gerard Genette’s famous formulation the “zone of transaction” that “enable[s] a text to become a

book and to be offered as such to its readers, and more generally, to the public,” includes those

textual elements generally considered subsidiary or auxiliary to the main text, including title

pages, dedication pages, introductions, prefaces, footnotes, and marketing material (1). Though

Genette himself sought to downplay the interpretative potential of these marginal textual spaces,

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recent scholarship has insisted on their importance for African American book history. As Beth

McCoy writes, “Texts and paratexts emerging from the African American freedom struggle…

suggest that the paratext is territory neither subordinate nor undisputed. Rather, tangled

throughout books (and other printed texts) as well as around the images that are the stock in trade

of an increasingly visual culture, the paratext is territory important, fraught, and contested. More

specifically, its marginal spaces and places have functioned centrally as a zone transacting ever-

changing modes of white domination and of resistance to that domination” (156). By “revaluing

the venerable language of the book as object,” she suggests, we can “forg[e] a crucial coalition

between bibliographic scholars and those studying the intersections of race, power, and culture”

(157). In the case of Frederick Douglass, the book-as-object holds especial importance as the

index of his political freedom and his influence as an author. As he moved further away from

William Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society, he gained more control over both his

textualized body and his anthropomorphized text.

As Robert Stepto points out, “in its primal state or first phase, the slave narrative is an

eclectic narrative form” (58, italics in original) because of the authenticating documents

published as paratexts of the slave's writing. The introductions, prefaces, and appendixes that

accompanied each slave narrative into print re-enacted at the textual level the control of the black

voice that the narrative described. As early as the 1845 Narrative of the Life, though, Douglass

sought to counter this control by incorporating other texts into his narrative and by responding

directly to the white-authored prefaces and introductions appended to his text, in this case

Garrison's “Preface” and Wendell Phillips's “Letter.” Garrison’s “Preface” was meant to assure a

white audience that the following narrative was based on actual experience, guaranteeing “a

baseline delivery of fact designed to bolster Garrison's philosophic appeal” and reducing

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Douglass’s life to “one strand of evidence in a larger abolitionist project” (Blumenthal 178).

Garrison assures his readers that “I am confident that [the narrative] is essentially true in all its

statements; that nothing has been set down in malice, nothing exaggerated, nothing drawn from

the imagination; that it comes short of the reality, rather than overstates a single fact in regard to

SLAVERY AS IT IS. The experience of FREDERICK DOUGLASS, as a slave, was not a

peculiar one; his lot was not especially a hard one; his case may be regarded as a very fair

specimen of the treatment of slaves in Maryland” (Narrative 6). McCoy remarks on the limiting

nature of this description, as “fugitive authors—and Douglass most notably among them—wrote

not merely to be believed as tellers of fact or even as fact themselves. The paratext crafted by

white prefacers and editors, however, reduces fugitive author to fugitive reporter… In this way,

serving neither the text nor its author, the paratext serves something else: an indirect white

supremacy, different from the brutality against which white abolitionists fought but one that

interferes with the fugitive writer's authorial primacy nonetheless” (157). By reducing

Douglass’s experience to mere fact describing “SLAVERY AS IT IS” and turning it into only “a

very fair specimen” of slavery in Maryland, Garrison simultaneously insists on the verifiable

nature of the Narrative and turns its particularities into a representative type to be considered as

symptomatic of the system of slavery as a whole.

Douglass chafed against Garrison’s description—and prescription—of his

autobiographical project. From the distance of ten years, in My Bondage and My Freedom, he

described his experience on the lecture circuit with the American Anti-Slavery Society:

During the first three or four months, my speeches were almost exclusively made up of

narrations of my own personal experience as a slave. ‘Let us have the facts,’ said the

people. So also said Friend George Foster, who always wished to pin me down to my

simple narrative. ‘Give us the facts,’ said Collins, ‘we will take care of the philosophy.’

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Just here arose some embarrassment. It was impossible for me to repeat the same old

story month after month, and to keep up my interest in it. It was new to the people, it is

true, but it was an old story to me; and to go through with it night after night, was a task

altogether too mechanical for my nature. “Tell your story, Frederick,” would whisper my

then revered friend, William Lloyd Garrison, as I stepped upon the platform. I could not

always obey, for I was now reading and thinking. New views of the subject were

presented to my mind. It did not entirely satisfy me to narrate wrongs; I felt like

denouncing them. 207-208, italics in original

Douglass wearies of the very “facts” that Garrison would later be at pains to emphasize. Reduced

to a “mechanical” nature by the admonishments of the Garrisonians, he feels a loss of liberty in

his freedom of expression. Only those experiences brutally played out in slavery were considered

fit material by his companions; the more scholarly—and authorial—experiences of “reading and

thinking” were irrelevant to their larger project. Much of the last chapters of My Bondage are

devoted to Douglass’s break with the Garrisonians, centered largely on their opposition to his

writing career. After expressing his wish to begin a newspaper, they advised him that he was

“better fitted to speak than to write” (226). After producing the manuscript of the Narrative,

Wendell Phillips stated that “if in [Douglass’s] place, he would throw it into the fire” (209).

Though motivated by concern for Douglass’s safety, this pronouncement—that of a white man

advising the destruction of black writing—is a fit metaphor for the larger structural inequalities

that would eventually pit Douglass against his former friends in the interest of his authorial

career.

Even as early as the Narrative, though, we can see Douglass deploying rhetorical

strategies that challenge the authority of his white textual guarantors. One such instance is his

description of his attempted escape in 1835, where Douglass reproduces the pass that he wrote

for himself:

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This is to certify that I, the undersigned, have given the bearer, my servant, full liberty to

go to Baltimore, and spend the Easter holidays. Written with mine own hand, &c, 1835.

William Hamilton,

Near St. Michael's, in Talbot county, Maryland [62]

Stepto points to this pass as an “internalized” paratext, but comments only on Douglass’s

impressive ability to recreate it from memory. There is no evidence, however, that Douglass is

recreating it verbatim. Either way, he is in full control of the educated white standard dialect,

proving himself capable of manipulating language to his own ends. The hypothetical slave

catcher would be duped by the unlikelihood of a slave who could write in this style, but the

reader of the Narrative, already assured of its veracity by Garrison's “Preface” and Phillips's

“Letter,” would understand the implicit comparison between Douglass's prose and that of his

white underwriters. Douglass destroyed the original pass in a fire before he and his companions

were caught, making this reproduction from his memory a complex historical and racial

palimpsest. “Mine own hand” refers simultaneously to Douglass's hand in 1835 and 1845,

mimicking the white hand of William Hamilton in the former year and referring obliquely to the

white hands of Garrison and Phillips in the latter. He is able to “pass” in both cases through his

own literary mastery, calling into question the control that white-authored texts have over black

bodies and black expression. This short text authenticates Douglass's ability to write freely in

1845 just as it was meant to authenticate his ability to move freely in 1835. If its authenticity is

dependent on the guarantees of Garrison and Phillips, it also speaks back to them by calling into

question the standards of eloquence on which they rest their authority as educated white men.

Douglass does not only speak back to Garrison and Phillips from his main text; he also

takes up space alongside them in the margins to comment on his text in much the same way they

do, and even to vouch for the accuracy of a white-authored text. He includes an “Appendix” at

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the end of the Narrative, in which he comments on the religious views he put forth in the main

text and copies a parodic poem written by a Northern Methodist preacher. As Rachel Blumenthal

argues, in this paratext “Douglass forcefully counters white editorial and managerial politics…

Where Garrison would have us commune sympathetically with the embodied presence of the

well-proportioned, black, ex-slave, Douglass writes to us in his appendix not as the embodiment

of sympathy, but as a literary and cultural critic re-appropriating his own narrative as a text that

can be commented upon authoritatively by its author” (181). To conclude his appendix, Douglass

copies a poem by a white Northern preacher and assures us, in an echo of Garrison, that “I

soberly affirm [it] is ‘true to the life,’ and without caricature or the slightest exaggeration” (83).

Regarding this poem, Robert Stepto remarks that “what we must appreciate here is the effect of

the white Northerner’s poem conjoined with Douglass’s authentication of the poem. The tables

are clearly reversed,” and thus the Narrative provides “what is unquestionably our best portrait

in Afro-American letters of the requisite act of assuming authorial control” (77). Crucially, this

authorial control is taken in the margins, in paratexts including appendixes and commentaries.

These textual spaces, as Douglass was well aware, helped to define the main text for its readers

and therefore provided an important venue in which he could clarify and comment upon his

project. The irony, or tragedy, of the Yale Papers Edition is that its own paratexts replace these

carefully selected texts-on-the-margins, these indicators of Douglass’s fledgling authority, by

turning Douglass’s paratexts into primary texts to again be commented on by a powerful white

publishing institution.

After his break with Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery League, whose necessary

but overweening presence in the Narrative still unsettled him, Douglass ensured that he would

have complete control over the paratexts in his next autobiography, My Bondage and My

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Freedom (1855). Notably, he dedicated this book to Gerrit Smith, a Congressman whose view of

the Constitution as an anti-slavery document and belief in the efficacy of political reform to

abolish slavery were in direct opposition to Garrison. Then, after a preface that consists largely

of a letter written by Douglass himself, he enlisted the black abolitionist and medical doctor

James McCune Smith to write an introduction. Smith makes the contrast between his own

introduction and Garrison’s explicit by narrating Douglass’s split with the Garrisonians upon the

launch of Douglass’s newspaper The North Star, writing that “The Garrison party, to which he

still adhered, did not want a colored newspaper—there was an odor of caste about it; the Liberty

party could hardly be expected to give warm support to a man who smote their principles as with

a hammer; and the wide gulf which separated the free colored people from the Garrisonians, also

separated them from their brother, Frederick Douglass” (13, italics in original). In contrast to

Garrison’s introduction, Smith’s focuses on Douglass’s character, memory, discipline, and

abilities as a writer and editor. Whereas Garrison cast Douglass’s story as typical of the slavery

experience, Smith wrote that it was exemplary of the American experience: “And the secret of

his power, what is it? He is a Representative American man—a type of his countrymen” (14).

Most importantly, this introduction evidences a network of black intellectuals that can contest

and rebut the political and bodily claims that Garrisonianism made on Douglass. No longer does

his voice have to be authenticated by the white elite; Smith’s description of Douglass as an

abolitionist and writer says nothing of the facticity of his narrative, but only its effectiveness.

The appendix to My Bondage, similarly, provides extracts from a selection of Douglass’s

speeches, proving his eloquence directly rather than relying on Garrison’s account as a

verification of, and advertisement for, his appearances on the American Anti-Slavery Society

lecture circuit. Finally, the famous letter to Thomas Auld, in which he seethes and rails at his

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former master, completes Douglass’s transition into an author who is fully in control of his text

in all its particularities and responsible for any of its consequences.

Douglass’s third autobiography, written a quarter century later, after the Civil War and

after he had become an international celebrity and statesman, takes the logic of paratext to its

limit. In Life and Times, paratext subsumes text, as previously written but revised material blends

into new holograph material that itself contains extensive quotations from newspaper articles,

letters, and speeches. The complicated interrelationships between the texts that make up Life and

Times are a product of the artifact as it was produced by Douglass in collaboration with Park

Publishing; DeWolfe, Fisk; and all of his associates from 1855 onward. As Beth McCoy writes,

“Thus are Douglass's two subsequent autobiographies [after the Narrative] doubly fugitive,

telling the tale of a slave who fled both the brute white supremacy of slavery and the equally

effective (if more genteel) paratextual domination exercised by Garrison and Phillips” (160).

This is personal liberty of a far different kind than that touted by the editors of the Yale Papers

Edition. McCoy then asks, “After all, what are the paratext's bibliographies, edition notations,

indexes, page numbers, and copyright signs if not spaces of repetition progressively shaped to

accumulate and increase knowledge, property, and power?” In the case of scholarly editions,

even as the relevant institutions (Yale, MLA, NEH) and their editors increase their own

knowledge, property, and power, their (extensive) paratexts work to contain and control the

historical black voice of authors like Douglass, who took such care in marshalling his authority

to create his books as he saw fit, and in approving or disapproving of the results. To add a

question to McCoy’s, then: is there a way that a historically white, institutionalized editorial

method like Greg-Bowers, coming as it does from Shakespeare studies and then applied to a long

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list of canonized white male authors, can be used to controvert the “paratextual domination”

Douglass faced in his own time?

Without pretending at a comprehensive answer, I’d like to conclude with remarks

regarding the way that Greg-Bowers’s inherent biographical project, as outlined in the last

chapter, applies to African American literature and especially the works of former slaves. The

persistence of the textualized black body through time, as it bears the marks of slavery even into

freedom, encourages a conception of the author as an idealized figure that exists outside of

specific and concrete historical moments, just like the “Emerson” that approves of a conflation of

his 1836 and 1849 texts of Nature. What McCoy calls the “paratextual condition”—one in which

“those hailed as subjects go about their daily lives within a prefatory, citational haze of paratext

to their selves: Social Security numbers, driver's licenses, green cards, and voter registration

forms”—was one of imminent violence for antebellum African Americans due to the close

correspondence between text and their physical selves. McCoy cites a scene from Edward P.

Jones’s 2003 novel The Known World, in which “the freedman Augustus Townsend steers his

wagon homeward. Stopped by whites everywhere he goes, Townsend has got used to carrying

his free papers close to his body. The papers, whose words Townsend has memorized but cannot

read, function as his paratext: they are preface and footnotes documenting his accession to

property in himself” (158). Such scenes, in which texts are used to control black persons such

that they become a sort of paratext to the person themselves, abound in Douglass’s three

autobiographies.

Douglass describes the system of capturing fugitive slaves in fully textualized terms:

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Advertisements are from time to time inserted, stating that slaves have escaped with iron

collars about their necks, with bands of iron about their feet, marked with the lash,

branded with red-hot irons, the initials of their master’s name burned into their flesh; and

the masters advertise the fact of their being thus branded with their own signature,

thereby proving to the world, that, however damning it may appear to non-slavers, such

practices are not regarded discreditable among the slaveholders themselves. Speeches 26

The advertisements here work in much the same way as Augustus Townsend’s free papers or

Douglass’s own (self-written) pass, as white-authored guarantors of a black body’s right, or lack

thereof, to exist in any one place. Further, the slave’s body itself is “marked,” “branded,” and

“burned,” written into with their master’s initials or signature. Regarding his own body-as-text,

Douglass states that “Mr. Garrison followed me” on the lecture platform, literally “taking me as

his text.” John Collins would remark that Douglass was a “graduate from the peculiar

institution,” he writes, “with my diploma written on my back!” (My Bondage 206). These textual

scars persist through time, supporting a reading that would conflate the works produced by

Douglass or other escaped slaves as the products of a coherent author-figure. This is the

traditional reading of the famous passage in which Douglass remarks on his childhood sleeping

in the cold: “My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing

might be laid in the gashes” (76). This syncretic phrasing links Douglass’s past as a slave with

his present as an author, literally measuring the sign of his suffering with the pen used to

describe it. This correspondence between the physical self and the written self naturally suggests

a consistency of self—and of intention—across time, and this suggestion is taken up by the

editors of the Yale Life and Times.

Robin Condon asks “whether Douglass’s identity, as he lived his famous 'several lives in

one' was fluid or essential.”

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Was the Douglass of Life and Times the same as the Douglass who, under the aegis of

William Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society, recounted his experience as a

slave in the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself? Was

he the same Douglass who broke with the Garrisonians, declaring himself a political

abolitionist who read the Constitution as an antislavery document in his 1855 My

Bondage and My Freedom? 12

She ultimately takes an essentialist position by noting that “Although Douglass did indeed

inhabit many roles during his life—enslaved worker, fugitive, abolitionist, husband and father,

orator, writer, editor, and statesman, among others—he affirmed that the hand that documented

his early years of slavery … was the same hand responsible for revealing the details of his

harrowing journey to freedom, discussing his editorial efforts, recounting his relationship with

John Brown” (13) and writing about other events in Life and Times. Though it was indeed the

same physical hand that wrote each of the three autobiographies—a hand “furnished by nature

with something like a solid leather coating” as he had “bravely marked out for [him]self a life of

rough labor” (My Bondage 206)—the authorial hand, and the social circumstances surrounding

it, were markedly different in each case.

Thus, while an intentionalist approach necessitates an essential Douglass, in Condon’s

terms, a social text approach would insist upon a fluid Douglass, one whose changing intentions

and desires depended upon his changing social contexts and relationships. Eric Sundquist writes

that the choice between the Douglass of the Narrative and the Douglass of My Freedom suggests

a “problematic historiographical choice to be made between the Douglass closest to, and thus

presumably best able to articulate, the experience of slavery and the Douglass who purposely

constructed for himself a linguistically more sophisticated ‘American’ identity, with figures such

as the framers of the Constitution or Benjamin Franklin as his models” (4). Blumenthal remarks

that Sundquist's mutually exclusive options “[suggest] that no compromise can be reached, that a

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choice has to be made between the early and the late Douglass,” and that “As autobiographical

texts that claim a certain degree of facticity, discrepancies between various editions regarding his

account of slave life can, at times, prove jarring for the reader” (183). In this context, Life and

Times presents a tempting opportunity for Greg-Bowers adherents to straighten out the historical

record and present a text of Douglass’s entire life with a continuity and coherence guaranteed by

the same hand that fought Covey in 1834 and that finished the third autobiography in 1892.

While this conflation of textual consistence with physical persistence is suggested by the

repetitious correspondence between text and body throughout Douglass’s autobiographies, when

we consider paratexts as indexes of one’s control over one’s body and one’s text—over a

corpus—we are reminded of the radically different conditions under which Douglass wrote in

1845, 1855, 1881, and 1892. In that sense, Sundquist’s historiographical choice is not

problematic, but simply an indication of the (para)textual condition and a recommendation for

maintaining the discrete nature of these versions. Douglass’s various levels of control over his

career are embodied in each of these texts as he gained, step by step, his true personal liberty and

freedom to become, finally, an author.

Willa Cather and Feminist Textual Editing

The “glacially slow pace” of editing to which David Greetham attributes the gap between

editorial theory and editorial practice is particularly relevant to feminist textual criticism

(Theories 3). At the 1986 conference of the Association for Documentary Editing, Greetham

asked the panelists of the “Sex, Text, and Context” session how a “genuine feminist ethic” would

be materially instantiated in a scholarly edition—in short, how feminist theory might alter

editorial practice. He was met with a “mute incomprehension” (“Manifestation” 78). He

attributed this to the ADE’s conception of feminism in editing as “a question of an affirmative-

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action response to the subjects and personnel of editing” (79). Greetham was after something

different from the question of the demographics of editors and their subjects; he was questioning

the ways in which the theoretical assumptions on which different editorial methods were built

might invisibly uphold heteropatriarchal domination in the resulting texts. But in the early 1990s,

demographic change within the CSE-sponsored Greg-Bowers regime represented the most

promising incursion of feminist theory into the male-dominated world of scholarly editing.

And even this relatively modest demographic change barely registered; as of this writing,

Willa Cather is the only female American writer with a collected edition approved by the CSE.

This section will explore the consequences of the CSE’s adherence to Greg-Bowers for the

editing and apparatus of The Professor’s House, Cather’s 1925 novel about the history professor

and author Godfrey St. Peter, his increasingly unhappy marriage, and his nostalgia for the

companionship of his star pupil Tom Outland. After the 1980s, this novel formed the crux of

queer readings that were based on biographical evidence of Cather’s homosexuality. Critics such

as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and Melissa Homestead have formed a tradition in

Cather criticism that returns again and again to The Professor’s House as the most provocative

instance of Cather’s lesbian writing. A more conservative tradition that questions the evidentiary

standards of such interpretations is exemplified in the work of Joan Acocella and Cather

biographer James Woodress, who also wrote the Historical Essay for the Cather Scholarly

Edition volume of The Professor’s House.

I argue that the objective stance of this conservative critique and its insistence on the

primacy of physical evidence over interpretation are in fact attempts to conceal its own

interpretative biases, and that Greg-Bowers’s assumptions about individualistic authorship

undergird this position. Despite the Cather Scholarly Edition’s gradual incorporation of elements

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of McGannian social-text theory, it still relies on foundational notions of authorship from Greg-

Bowers. The result is that the collaboration between Cather and her lesbian partner and editor

Edith Lewis is neglected in the Historical Essay and in the process of editing the Scholarly

Edition version of The Professor’s House. Before discussing the compositional history of the

novel, I will give a sketch of the academic environment in which the Cather Scholarly Edition

was founded, first by giving an overview of the state of feminist textual criticism in the 1980s

and 90s and detailing how the Cather edition enters into this context by combining Greg-Bowers

with a “soft” social-text approach. I then summarize the debate concerning Cather’s sexuality

during the same era and discuss the scholarly arguments about evidentiary standards that were

reaching their highest pitch in the late 90s, when the editing and publication of Cather’s novel

were getting underway. The Nebraska edition of The Professor’s House, published in 2002,

enters in this contentious debate by way of its seeming neutrality, which aligns it with a status

quo that would erase Edith Lewis’s relationship with Cather and her contribution to her novel.

The late eighties and early nineties, the era in which the Cather Scholarly Edition got its

start, saw an explosion of new editions of women writers edited by women scholars. The annual

Conference on Editorial Problems of 1995 was the first such conference to focus exclusively on

women writers, and its program attests to the formative role that female editors had in producing

editions of women writers during the canon wars. Speakers included Naomi Black (editor of

Virginia Woolf), Joan Coldwell (Anne Wilkinson), Germaine Greer (Katherine Philips), and

Isobel Grundy (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu). Still, the degree to which gender should influence

editorial practice remained an open question to some. Margaret Anne Doody, editor of Frances

Burney and Jane Austen, asked in her closing remarks at the conference whether Greer was right

to complain that “Feminist scholars who clamour for women’s work to be included in the canon

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assume that there are texts attributed to women that actually represent what women wrote and

the way they wrote it” (qtd in Doody 134). She responded by saying that “It is not the case that

we have simply splendid, solid, and indestructible texts of all male writers, and weak or

inadequate and hopelessly lost texts of the women…. The truth is that writing is a slippery

business, and that the preservation of most ‘texts,’ as of most textiles, is due largely to sheer

luck” (134-135, italics in original), and then asked “to what extent it is right to cut a discussion

of Editing Women off from a discussion of Editing Men. Should we really treat the matter as

altogether separate? Isn’t that attributing a kind of false invincibility to male authors and

editors?” (136-137). Eventually Doody did concede that “Because the women writers have been

left out so much, or jammed into shapes that didn’t fit them, there is room to talk about them

separately,” (138) but her hesitancy to support and validate a feminist editorial theory at a

conference dedicated to the problems of editing women writers registers the obstacles faced by

those who believed one was necessary.

Meanwhile, other feminist editors were drawing attention to material and economic

conditions that did make the editing of female writers qualitatively different from that of male

writers. In an article on “Editing Women” published in 1995, Marilyn Butler noted that feminist

critics “don't complain enough that most publishers, even the leading university presses, won't

put up money or even encouragement for any but the most familiar woman's title—even though

every large-scale conference proves the growth of interest in the field.” She argues that “We

must have true scholarly editions of a significant body of women's writing, not only to grasp the

internal dynamics of an individual career, but to understand its group dynamics, its inter-

relations with society and history” (274). Looking back on the 1980s and the canon wars that

were just beginning to subside, she then ties the economics of academic publishing to the broader

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lack of recognition of women writers: “In the very decade when academics were seriously

challenging the rationality or fairness of canon-formation, a new brutalism even more

characteristic of that decade was speeding up time's steady rate of attrition, and putting up a more

effective resistance to de-canonization than the arguments of Allan Bloom and Christopher Ricks

combined” (276-77). Here we see a shift in priorities away from recovery projects that sought to

get into print as many forgotten or obscure women writers as possible and toward an editorial

rigor that would respect the historical differences between those writers, as was expected of

scholarly editions of men. However, in an academic publishing environment in which scholarly

editions of women writers were unlikely to be funded, Butler encourages her colleagues to turn

to publishers like Pickering & Chatto, who specialize in collected editions of women writers, and

to mass-market paperback publishers like Penguin, who were at the time beginning to include

more academic introductions and endnotes and who could distribute the editor’s work to a much

broader audience.

Alexander Pettit, editor of Eliza Haywood, was also attracted to Pickering & Chatto for

his project, but for a more theoretical reason. He argues that “it may be that commerce is doing

what theory has not been able to do: providing a workable framework for the editing of ‘terrible

texts’” (299). “Terrible texts,” in Pettit’s terminology, are those “compendia of error [that] were

in many cases printed in one small run of one edition” (294) and that were often produced by

women. Pettit argues that women writers like Haywood necessitate a feminist editorial theory

that would address the particularities of their mode of textual production. Though Haywood was

an early modern writer, she metonymically stands in for women writers in later eras. Contra

Doody, he insists that “The works of traditionally canonical writers from the later Renaissance

on—primarily male and belletristic, respected in their own day and revered since—have tended

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to reach us in good shape, stunted by minimal errors in their maturation from manuscript to

modern critical edition. Even in their own time, these were more likely than lower-brow works to

appear in multiple editions and thus to qualify for postpublication correction” (294). A writer

like Haywood did not revise her texts after publication, and her manuscripts would have been

destroyed in the printing process. She was interested in producing as much writing as possible,

while her printers (and therefore her compositors) were interested in printing as much as

possible. This environment “encouraged production, not precision” (295). Many of Haywood’s

works saw publication in only one edition; variants in those with multiple editions are often

indifferent because the priority of the editions cannot be determined. Thus, she is a prime

example of the way that “The theoretical apparatus of critical editing has long advertised a high

canonical bias, most pertinently by favoring theories of emendation that assume the presence of

multiple states from which the editor can select his or her copy text and against which he or she

can collate it” (296). We can extrapolate Haywood’s textual situation to those women’s writings

of the nineteenth and twentieth century that, unlike Cather’s, lack an associated archive because

of market conditions.

Greg-Bowers, with its requirement for multiple texts of a work that would allow an editor

to collate, compare, select a copy-text, and emend, surely excludes such ephemeral women’s

writing.

Given these limitations, Cather is a prime candidate for the Greg-Bowers treatment, as

Pettit argues that social-text theory is similarly incapable of addressing these ephemeral works, because

“Behind McGann's preference for first editions lies the likelihood of an extant manuscript. In fact, his theories about

the salubrious communalism of published states are testable only when manuscripts are at hand” (296). I would

argue that social-text theory’s tendency to reproduce the first edition as the state that is most exemplary of the

communal nature of publication would be appropriate for recognizing the multiple intentions embodied in

Haywood’s books. McGann’s critique of Greg-Bowers is weakest when he re-introduces authorial intention and

reverts to manuscript readings.

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her major works each existed in three distinct states: initial magazine serialization, first novel

edition, and the later collected Autograph Edition. Additionally, more and more typescripts of

her novels and short stories have recently come to light. Cather’s involvement with each step of

the publication process, from editing to design to font selection, also makes it easy to place her

intentions at the center of the editing process.

Despite the Cather Scholarly Edition’s

dedication to Greg-Bowers, Cather’s concern with the materiality of her books led its editors to

also incorporate elements of a soft social-text theory. In a 2000 overview of the Cather Scholarly

Edition project, Susan Rosowski, Charles Mignon, Frederick Link and Kari Ronning write that

As Cather’s editors, we have chosen to honor Cather’s expansive sense of an author’s

authority over her work. Our commitment to intentionality thus construed animates our

presentation of historical introductions, explanatory notes, textual essays and apparatus,

and, less conventionally, page format, paper stock, illustrations, and typeface… Cather’s

experience as an editor, her clarity of vision as a writer, and her meticulous attention to

detail as a reviser demand that her editors respect her intentions and present her as clearly

as possible. 31

Cather is put front and center in each decision made, up to and including the design and materials

of the book itself. Here we can see how Greg-Bowers is combined with a soft social-text

approach, as these latter concerns fall under the rubric of what McGann would call

“bibliographic codes,” those non-linguistic elements of the physical book that themselves

communicate information to the reader. Though they don’t refer to McGann or to social-text

theory explicitly, the editors do attest that “Cather challenges her editors to expand the definition

of ‘corrupt’ and ‘authoritative’ to include the text’s whole format and material existence… Given

For more on how Cather “took an increasing role in the making of her books as physical objects,

becoming involved with questions of bindings, book-jackets, and even paper and typography,” see Kari A. Ronning,

“Speaking Volumes: Embodying Cather’s Works.”

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Cather’s explicitly stated intentions for her works, an authoritative edition of them must go

beyond the sequence of words and punctuation to include other and more overtly physical

matters” (34). This echoes McGann’s statement in The Textual Condition that “both linguistic

and bibliographical texts are symbolic and signifying mechanisms. Each generates meaning, and

while the bibliographical text commonly functions in a subordinate relation to the linguistic text,

‘meaning’ in literary work results from the exchanges these two great semiotic mechanisms work

with each other” (67). Further, the editors of the Cather Scholarly Edition note that Cather

herself “identified her reader as someone outside the Academy,” and therefore they would adopt

“policies concerning content, format, design, and style that would make the edition broadly

accessible as well as methodologically rigorous” (31, italics in original). This again recalls

McGann’s encouragement, in the Critique, for editors to design their editions with a specific

audience or type of reader in mind, though the rationale remains firmly intentionalist.

The influence of McGann’s theories on the production of the Cather Scholarly Edition

was made more explicit by Ann Moseley, author of the Historical Essay and Explanatory Notes

for The Song of the Lark. In a 2009 article summarizing her process for writing these pieces,

Moseley begins by writing that “The editors of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition have

appropriately chosen to follow the Greg/Bowers editorial method in presenting ‘an eclectic

critical text’ … that ‘presents Cather's intention at the time of original composition’ and

publication.” She then immediately changes tack to note that “The Explanatory Notes and

Historical Essay go beyond this traditional methodology, however, in showing not only how

Cather ‘attended carefully to both the process and the product’ of the novel but also to the deep

social implications of her composition and revision process” (131, italics mine). She goes on to

quote McGann three times, including his argument that “the textual history of a work is ‘first a

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social history’” (131); his warning about divorcing texts “from the social relationships which

gave them their lives (including their ‘textual lives’) in the first place, and which sustain them

through their future life in society” (139); and his observation that “the production of books, in

the later modern periods especially, sometimes involves a close working relationship between

the author and various editorial and publishing professionals associated with the institutions

which serve to transmit literary works to the public” (147). The editors’ increasing concern with

the social situatedness of Cather’s texts can be seen, then, in their attention to the roles of non-

authorial figures like professional editors, publishers, typographers, and book designers. The

myth of the solitary author inherited from Greg-Bowers, however, persists despite this new

attention paid to other agents in the publication process. Because their conception of authorship

remains an individualistic, Romantic one, collaboration is not part of the language with which

the editors can describe Cather’s compositional process. This blind spot has particularly urgent

political consequences in Cather’s case, as her longest collaborative writing partnership was also

her longest lesbian romantic relationship, with the writer and editor Edith Lewis.

Cather as a Lesbian Writer

It is necessary to contextualize the Cather Scholarly Edition volume of The Professor’s

House within the critical discourse surrounding her sexuality because this novel formed the

centerpiece of so many queer readings of Cather’s fiction and, not unrelatedly, because this

context illustrates the impossibility of a neutral or apolitical position from which texts can be

edited and apparatuses written. Lillian Faderman, in her 1981 book Surpassing the Love of Men:

Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present, used the

relationship between Cather and Sarah Orne Jewett to describe the generational divide regarding

perceptions of romantic female relationships on either side of the 1890s. Sharon O’Brien then

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used Faderman’s analysis to argue for Cather’s homosexuality in her 1987 biography of Cather’s

early years, Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. O’Brien writes that

Cather’s arrival at a lesbian identity by the 1890s, then, resulted from several

psychological and social processes. Her adolescent male impersonation signified her

attraction to a rebellious posture and may have predisposed her to respond to the

emerging identification between lesbianism and sexual ‘inversion’; her membership in

unconventional Lincoln subgroups gave her social communities that rejected or

questioned dominant Victorian values; her reading in fin-de-siècle, Greek, and French

literatures introduced her to the ‘oriental’ world of hedonism and unconventional

passions and gave her differing images of the lesbian. 136

Confronted with a dearth of evidence from Cather’s published works, O’Brien argues that “In

deciding whether to define Willa Cather as a lesbian writer and then in determining her

individual experience of lesbianism, we cannot use her silence—her failure to weave the

emotional threads central to her life directly into her fiction—as a clear basis for deduction. The

fact that Cather ‘could not, or did not, acknowledge her homosexuality’ either in the public

sphere or in her writing does not mean that she did not acknowledge it to herself” (128). Instead,

she cites letters from Cather to her college friend Louise Pound as well as cultural and

biographical facts as elucidated above: Cather’s decision to dress in men’s clothing and go by

“William,” her participation in theater groups, and her reading of Sappho and Gautier.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler then produced landmark queer readings of The

Professor’s House in 1989 and 1993, respectively. The novel, which tells the story of Godfrey

St. Peter’s increasing frustration by his domestic life with his wife and two daughters, is divided

into three sections. The first and last are third-person narratives that focus on St. Peter, usually

alone in his attic room, writing, but sometimes interacting with (and being alienated by) his

family. The middle is a first-person narrative of St. Peter’s most promising student, Tom

Outland, as he discovers an ancient cliff dwelling with his friend and mentor Roddy Blake in the

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American Southwest. Though told from Tom’s perspective, it is understood that this section is a

flashback of sorts, to an evening in which Tom told this story to St. Peter before his untimely

death in World War I. Thus, St. Peter’s nostalgic recollection of this evening is implicitly in the

background. In the third section, perhaps inspired by his recollection, St. Peter decides to edit the

journal that Tom kept in the Southwest. In the novel’s denouement, St. Peter almost asphyxiates

himself with gas after he falls asleep with a leaky stove in his attic room, until he is saved by his

seamstress opening the window. The form of the novel supports a queer reading in which the

“homosocial romance” of Tom and Roddy on their journey of discovery in the middle section is

interiorized, bookended by the “heterosexual bond” of St. Peter and his wife in the first and third

sections. Conversely, Tom and Roddy represent exteriorized freedom in the great outdoors (or

Outlands) of the Southwest, while St. Peter almost suffocates in the interior domestic space of

his closet-like attic room until it is exposed to the outside via the open window (Sedgwick 174).

Sedgwick writes that the novel’s “eponymous domesticity (the house itself, that is to say,

not the Professor) is biographically thought to allude to the enabling provision for Cather’s own

writing of a room of her own, first by Isabelle McClung and then perhaps by her more

domesticated and serviceable companion/lover of decades, Edith Lewis.” Importantly, she

understands the silence regarding lesbianism in The Professor’s House not as silence at all, but

rather as “cross-translations” enacted through Godfrey St. Peter’s relationships with Tom

Outland and his wife Lillian: “Though the love that sustains these necessary facilitations has

been a lesbian one, however, its two crystallizations in the novel are both cross-translations: one

across gender, into the gorgeous homosocial romance of two men on a mesa in New Mexico; the

other across sexuality as well as gender, into the conventional but enabling marriage of a

historian of the Spanish in the New World” (174).

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Butler answers Sedgwick by questioning her conclusion that “What become visible in

this double refraction are in the first place, of course, the shadows of the brutal suppressions by

which a lesbian love did not in Willa Cather’s time and culture freely become visible as itself”

(175). For Butler, “The postulation of an original ‘truth’ of lesbian sexuality which awaits its

adequate historical representation presumes an ahistorical sexuality constituted and intact prior to

the discourses by which it is represented. This speculation rests on a missed opportunity to read

lesbian sexuality as a specific practice of dissimulation produced through the very historical

vocabularies that seek to effect its erasure” (145, italics in original). If Sedgwick sees the cross-

translations of Cather’s lesbianism as the evidence of the “brutal suppressions” of early

twentieth-century sexual discourse, Butler sees them as constitutive of lesbian sexuality itself at

that time. Both readings take Cather’s homosexuality for granted, however, and together they

inspired queer readings of Cather’s fiction, and especially of The Professor’s House, to

proliferate throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

Parallel to this tradition is another, more conservative interpretation of Cather’s life and

works stemming from James Woodress’s biography, Willa Cather: A Literary Life, published the

same year as O’Brien’s. Elaine Sargent Apthorp, in her comparative review of the two

biographies, writes that because of his “reluctance to speculate where he feels the evidence is

Melissa Homestead writes that “Indeed, Sedgwick’s essay made a chapter on Cather nearly an obligatory

gesture in a monograph presenting queer readings of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century fiction.” See her

“Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, and the Historiography of Lesbian Sexuality,” Cather Studies, vol. 10, endnote 3

for a list of these readings.

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obscure,” he refuses to consider the possibility of Cather’s homosexuality, and “disparages

feminist critics for speculating that Cather was a lesbian in the absence of hard evidence,” yet at

the same time “proceeds to argue that she was deliberately celibate” (2-3). She notes that this

conclusion is “an interpretation which is as speculative as those he judges, and on the same

grounds,” and that because “pure ‘objectivity’ is not actually possible… the assumption that one

has achieved such a posture of dispassionate scholarship can be dangerous, since it enables the

academic to pronounce and prescribe under the guise of pure description” (3). Woodress’s

reticence in remarking on Cather’s sexuality is justified through claims of evidentiary standards,

but this objective stance is itself biased and can foreclose on productive avenues of research.

Fifteen years later, Woodress would write the Historical Essay and Explanatory Notes for the

Cather Scholarly Edition volume of The Professor’s House, deploying there the same

problematic method.

The exemplar of this strain of Cather criticism is Joan Acocella’s 2000 book Willa Cather

and the Politics of Criticism, which is an expanded version of her 1995 New Yorker article

“Willa Cather and the Academy.” Here, Acocella rails against feminist critics who, in her view,

manipulated Cather’s texts and biography to fit their political purposes. “Whatever Cather’s

sexual status, feminist critics seeking to rehabilitate her needed it to be one way. They had to

show her in conflict; therefore she had to be a thwarted homosexual,” Acocella writes. “But the

writers who first described her as a lesbian did not try, in any methodical way, to prove that she

was. They just said she was” (49). After an attack on O’Brien’s biography, she concludes:

The feminists now had what they needed, the hidden conflict. Since it was

homosexuality, it had to be very heavily defended. Hence the surface of Cather’s fiction

could no longer be taken literally; it had to be read through. And once the critics looked

at it again, they suddenly found that it was easy to read through. What before had seemed

a surface of polished marble was now judged to be full of “gaps” and “fissures.” Didn’t

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Cather sometimes skip whole decades in her narrative? Didn’t she sometimes interpolate

long subtales into her main tale? What caused these strange disjunctures? What was

hiding in these gaps? Clearly, it was either lesbianism or, more generally, some conflict

about women. 51

Because the feminists needed a conflict, they made Cather a homosexual; since the conflict was

homosexuality, “it had to be very heavily defended.” This meant that critics could no longer read

her works literally (though it’s hard to imagine what such a piece of criticism would look like

beyond rote summary). And after this realization, it turned out that Cather’s works lent

themselves to such interpretation quite amenably. It was easy to read “through” her works,

through the “gaps” and “fissures,” in order to attempt to answer the actually quite intriguing list

of questions Acocella provides. The ease with which Cather’s work can be interpreted through a

feminist or queer reading is thus, oddly, evidence that such readings are untenable.

Aside from the slipperiness of Acocella’s logic here, it should be noted that interpretation

itself is under attack; works should be “taken literally” like “a surface of polished marble.”

Statements regarding Cather’s sexuality must be “proved” in a “methodical way.” As Susan

Kress asks in her rebuttal to Acocella, “Why do we require such a heaping up of evidence to

prove homosexuality? Presumably because—even though now legal—it is still not universally

acceptable to be gay. And so it becomes little short of outrageous to ‘accuse’ someone of

homosexuality (as if of some dreadful crime) unless we have absolute, incontrovertible proof -

proof plain and not so pure.” But, she points out, “such confirmation is hard to come by precisely

because the history of homosexuality has been a secret one, revealed, if at all, through codes and

masks… And so, yes, critics look for gaps and fissures, seeing not the smooth cliff face but its

cracks and crevices” (97). The fact is that Cather’s life and works are up to interpretation, and

O’Brien, Sedgwick, Butler, Woodress and Acocella have all provided theirs. A metacritical

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awareness not only of Woodress and Acocella’s evidentiary standards, but the rhetorical

purposes for which those standards are deployed, is necessary to dissever their neutral stance

from the heteropatriarchal status quo that it supports.

Edith Lewis’s Hand and the Problem of Evidence

Perhaps owing to Cather’s strict control over the production of her books, perhaps

because of the common image of her writing alone in attic spaces, or perhaps on account of the

calm, measured tenor of her prose, she has long been considered exemplary of the isolated

Romantic author. However, with the recent discovery of typescripts of several of her novels and

short stories, a revaluation of this trope is underway by feminist critics. These typescripts are

heavily marked in Edith Lewis’s hand, leading critics like Melissa Homestead to argue that far

from being a secretary for Cather, Lewis was her literary editor, making substantial changes to

Cather’s texts without approval from Cather herself, and that as such Cather’s fiction should be

considered more obviously collaborative. Homestead also argues that Cather’s relationship with

her longtime companion and working partner Edith Lewis was not only a lesbian one, but openly

so; thus, she goes further than Sedgwick or Butler, whose readings rely on the status of Cather

and Lewis’s lesbian relationship as being socially transgressive and hidden. She links their

romantic relationship to the compositional histories of Cather’s novels and short stories in a way

that calls into question both the conservative literary-critical reading of Acocella and the related

biographical and textual work of Woodress.

Homestead describes The Professor’s House as a “lesbian project” because it is

“grounded in Cather and Lewis's shared Southwestern travel, Lewis played a key role in [its]

production, and [it] reproduce[s] and thematize[s] Cather and Lewis's collaboration in portrayals

of affectionate bonds between men … Cather's portrayal in The Professor's House of Godfrey St.

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Peter editing Tom Outland's journal of his experiences in the cliff-dweller ruins of the Blue Mesa

pays tribute to Lewis as Cather's editor.” She insists that this is not “a story of lesbian

collaborators in the closet. Rather than treating their life together as a shameful secret, Cather

and Lewis lived together openly for thirty-nine years, their partnership recognized and respected

by family and friends” (410). This interpretation is built upon an archive of documents including

letters to and from Cather and Lewis’s families, gifts given to each other and to their families, a

notebook kept by Lewis but used by Cather during their shared excursion to the Southwest in

1915, and the typescripts of several of Cather’s works that are marked in Lewis’s hand. What

emerges is a picture of Cather and Lewis traveling together and working together on The

Professor’s House in each of its stages, from initial notes taken by both Cather and Lewis in

Lewis’s travel diary, research into the region and its history, reading the initial drafts aloud to

one another to mark up the manuscript, and then editing the early typescript before it was sent to

Cather’s secretary. Each of these documents and its corresponding insight into Cather and

Lewis’s working relationship is important to understanding the circumstances of the composition

of The Professor’s House, but I will focus on the typescript here to illustrate the discrepancies

between Homestead’s reading and that of the Scholarly Edition editors when confronted with the

same document.

Only one typescript for The Professor’s House is known to be extant. It is from an early

draft of the novel, made before the typescript that was sent to the publisher, as changes made to it

feature in the published first edition. Much of the restrained style traditionally attributed to

Cather can be seen as Lewis’s contribution to the novel, as “she pruned wordiness, condensed

and eliminated characters' internal thoughts, and sharpened and realigned key images, with many

of her changes surviving through subsequent revisions to appear in the novel as published”

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(Homestead 428). Even though Lewis was a professional literary editor by trade, the markings on

the typescript are predominantly in Lewis’s hand, and Cather had a secretary, Sarah Bloom, to do

her copying, still “The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition (WCSE) has insistently interpreted

Lewis's hand on the typescripts as evidence of secretarial labor” (421). In Woodress’s Historical

Essay, he only mentions Lewis twice, once as a source for the claim (which he rebuts) that

Cather did not work on the novel in Paris during her stay there with Isabelle McClung in 1923

(292), and once to summarize an anecdote about Cather and Lewis getting lost with an unskilled

guide in Mesa Verde National Park (307-309). In his Textual Essay, Frederick Link writes that

they “accept revisions in Lewis’s hand as having Cather’s approval” because Lewis “would not

have made significant changes on her own, and Cather would in any case have reviewed the

proposed changes as she prepared the next draft” (398-99). This is further evidence of a soft

social-text theory influencing editorial decisions in a largely Greg-Bowers-based editorial

schema. Cather’s intentions are still at the center of this model, such that Lewis’s handwritten

changes that made it into the published text are assumed to be Cather’s even without evidence

suggesting that Cather approved them.

The Scholarly Edition Professor’s House exists in an intermediate zone between pure

Greg-Bowers intentionalism and a hard social-text theory. Because the editors, as a rule, use the

first edition as copy-text, all of Lewis’s changes are kept. The apparatus also details this editing

in its list of variants. However, Homestead points out that “these lists of variants also render

[Lewis’s] editing invisible because they do not distinguish between changes made in Lewis's and

Cather's hands. Instead, the WCSE locates ‘Cather's authority’ in Lewis's hand, and Lewis

vanishes into Cather” (421). It is easy to imagine a more devout follower of Greg-Bowers

reverting to typescript variants at the sight of Lewis’s changes because there is no evidence of

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authorial oversight. In that sense, the inclusion of Lewis’s changes is a step toward a soft social

text-theory. A hard social-text theory, though, would recognize Lewis’s work as editor and

collaborator by marking her changes as hers in the list of variants and by discussing her role in

the compositional process in the Historical and Textual Essays.

In her speech at the “Editing Women” Conference, Margaret Anne Doody echoed James

West’s characterization of the scholarly editor as biographer in the context of feminist editing.

She stated that “Hearing the speakers at this symposium, I am reminded over and over again that

an editor is a kind of highly specialized biographer. Perhaps the editor is really a kind of primary

biographer” (129). In her comparison of O’Brien and Woodress’s biographies, Apthorp notes the

role that the biographer’s self-identity plays in the creation of their subject: “One who

experiences gender as a fundamental element of human experience will focus on those elements

of Cather’s work and life which illuminate this issue, will ‘read’ the signs, in the text of that life

and work, of a woman grappling with her womanhood.” True, too, of sexuality, and a number of

other identities and experiences. The critic, biographer, or editor can aspire to an awareness and a

tempering of these biases, but as Apthorp says, “What is dubious is the critic’s assumption that

an objective assessment is possible, and that one can object to a given methodology without

expressing, as one does so, yet another political/philosophical perspective, subject to the very

limitations one disparages” (9). One can see, then, how Woodress’s approach to Cather’s

biography determined his approach to the evidence for the apparatus of the Scholarly Edition—

perhaps they are indistinguishable. His approach, which refuses to interpret Cather’s biography

or works through a queer or feminist reading because of a lack of evidence, but simultaneously

relies on assumptions of individual authorial intention despite evidence to the contrary,

highlights the political limitations inherent even in (or especially in) seemingly neutral scholarly

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apparatuses. The editor-as-biographer cannot help but read their own life into their subjects’ text,

making one wonder how this edition of The Professor’s House would look if it were edited or

annotated by O’Brien, Sedgwick, or Homestead.

There is a complex web of associations between Cather, Lewis, Godfrey, and Tom, and

the participation of a scholarly editor adds one more layer of complexity. If Godfrey is an author

figure, then “Lewis edited Cather both in and on the page: she edited Cather's representation of

herself in Godfrey, and she edited Cather's typed words.” However, as Godfrey edits Tom’s Blue

Mesa journal, he is also a figure for Lewis herself in her role as editor, such that “Lewis, marking

the page, edited a representation of herself in Godfrey-as-editor.” Further, because Tom’s journal

is based on Lewis’s travel diary from their 1915 Southwestern trip, “she edited him editing a

document that mirrored her own Southwestern travel diary.” This creates a “multi-faceted mise

en abyme of writing and editing, infinitely reflecting back to them their complex interchange of

roles in the production of the novel” (Homestead 434). Imagine a scholarly editor looking into

this mise en abyme and seeing their own role reflected back at them; is it any surprise that how

they saw themselves would then be reflected again into the text they produce? A Greg-Bowers

editor, and especially a straight male trained in a conservative critical tradition, would only take

into consideration that textual evidence that his methodology and viewpoint could account for.

The problem of evidentiary standards that is at issue in the Nebraska edition of The

Professor’s House was a recurring topic in academic debates throughout the 1990s, as the Willa

Cather Scholarly Edition was founded and as this volume was being edited. In 1998, Matt

Brown remarked how “anxieties about evidence have only intensified with the advent of the new

cultural history… Such worried debate expresses, in part, the legacy of a familiar disciplinary

turf war between historians and literary critics, between objectivism and interpretation” (308). In

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his contribution to this ongoing debate in a special issue of PMLA dedicated to the topic in 1996,

D.C. Greetham discusses the reflexive nature of evidence as marshalled in textual studies. “The

conjecture (the hypothetical forensics) depends on the prior construction of empirical data. But

the act of finding in order to create is selective and interpretive, the first stage of a hermeneutics

that eventually produces meaning that seems construable directly and unambiguously from the

data” (“Textual Forensics” 34). In other words, evidence is never objective, but always created

by means of a method that determines its relevance. It seems that the answer to Greetham’s

semi-rhetorical question, “Is it possible to determine evidentiary status without having a desired

version of the work in mind?” is negative, leading him to conclude that “the hermeneutic

creation of evidence before the (editing) event is a widespread phenomenon” (34).

Gary Taylor invites us to imagine a document that would transform our understanding of

Shakespeare’s compositional practice: a letter that reads, “Dear Anne, I’ll be home next week, as

soon as I finish revising that old play of mine, King Lear. Your loving Willy. London. 1 April

1610.” What would make this a transparent piece of evidence? Taylor notes that “artists, after all,

do, often enough, lie about their work. For all we know, ‘revising King Lear’ might have been

Shakespeare’s alibi, to cover an adulterous weekend” (qtd in Greetham 46). Additional evidence

would be needed to confirm the truth of this letter, and that evidence would need its own external

evidence to attest to it, and on and on. Ultimately, its status as evidence is determined by the

hypothesis that it is enlisted to support, and not vice versa. This example, though a bit whimsical,

is of a kind with cases we’ve seen here. Emerson writes in his diary that he is unhappy with the

1836 “Nature” and struggles to revise it in 1849; this is used as evidence that these versions must

be conflated. Douglass’s publishers send his widow a letter explaining that they’ve used his

marked-up copy to make changes to their edition; this is used as evidence that these changes

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should be reversed. Edith Lewis’s hand is found on Cather’s typescript; this is used as evidence

that Cather reviewed and approved of her edits. In each case, the Greg-Bowers method

determines the status of the evidence under review, and in each case, a singular text and an

independent author is the result. More disturbingly in Cather’s case, evidence that does not fit the

editors’ standards is neglected, affecting not only the reception of her work but the construction

of her identity.

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CHAPTER FOUR: “AT THE TIME WHEN I WROTE THE FOLLOWING PAGES WERE

WRITTEN”: FROM DEFINITIVE EDITION TO FLUID TEXT

In 1996, Charles Ross made a series of predictions about the effects that digital editing

would have on the discipline of editorial theory. First, he said, it would kill Greg-Bowers.

Echoing Barthes, he wrote that “the birth of the reader-as-editor must be at the cost of the death

of the critical edition.” And then, in case his target wasn’t clear enough, he specified “I refer to

the ‘critical edition’ as promulgated by W.W. Greg and promoted by Fredson Bowers and G.

Thomas Tanselle, and as institutionalized in Anglo-American editing by the Center for Editions

of American Authors and its successor, the Committee for Scholarly Editions.” Because these

editions have “not kept pace with either literary theory or the needs of readers who want texts

that reflect the processes of composition and that facilitate interpretive interactions” (225), they

would soon go by the wayside. Instead, we would have digital editions that allow the reader to

create new texts, including “A version with all transmissive factors, including collaboration and

possible or likely ‘corruptions’ from the whole range of prepublication and postpublication

materials (manuscripts through published editions),” which could then be “emended by deleting

certain transmissive factors (for example, changes made by collaborators or editors or

amanuenses or compositors),” among other possibilities (228). Such editions wouldn’t kill the

author, however—in fact, quite the opposite. “In any case, electronic editing won’t do away with

the author,” Ross prophesied, “on the contrary, it may even revive that oft-deconstructed

concept, since it acknowledges openly the need for editors and readers to tell stories about their

authors” (229).

Some of Ross’s predictions were more correct than others. As we saw in the last chapter,

the critical edition did not die, though it may be struggling. Interactive editions that allow the

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reader to select and emend specific types of variants do not yet exist, but there are those that

feature “the whole range” of relevant materials, from manuscript to published edition, and

encourage the reader’s participation and interpretation. And finally, it may be, at least for the

type of edition discussed here, that electronic editing will perform a sort of resurrection of the

author, or at least a renewed interest in authorial intention—this time, however, as interpreted by

the reader instead of the editor.

Since the early ‘90s, much of the discussion surrounding editorial theory has shifted

toward digital literary projects, leading the CSE to broaden its guidelines and adapt its

requirements for approval to accommodate the new mode of publication that the Internet

introduced. More recently, the NEH created the Office of Digital Humanities to oversee grants

designated especially for technology-centered humanities research. Despite these considerable

changes, though, the digital era in scholarly editing has largely replicated many of the

controversies discussed so far in this dissertation. For example, within digital editing the

contentious rivalry between Greg-Bowers and social-text theory continues apace. While digital

editions based on the former initially set the stage, digital archives based on the latter soon

followed and became dominant. Additionally, because of institutional constraints and funding

requirements, the new digital canon is (in danger of becoming) as conservative as the print-based

canon of the 1960s. Despite an early, liberational surge in independently-created digital recovery

projects, the evolution of encoding protocols from HTML to SGML to TEI/XML left those

without funding unable to keep up. Funding is based on canonicity, and canonicity is in large

part based on definitive scholarly editions.

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This chapter focuses on SUNY-Geneseo’s Walden: A Fluid Text Edition and compares it

to the CEAA’s Writings of Henry D. Thoreau edition published by Princeton University Press in

order to account for the ways in which theories, methods, and problems of editorial theory have

persisted in the American context, through the continued influence of the CEAA and CSE, to

shape the ways in which digital scholarly editions are produced today. First, I provide an

overview of the issues outlined above, explicating how Greg-Bowers and social-text theory

compete in the digital space and how the evolution of text-encoding protocols has reinforced a

conservative canon. Then, I discuss the most compelling emergent alternative to Greg-Bowers

and social-text theory, the fluid-text editing of John Bryant. SUNY-Geneseo’s fluid-text edition

of Walden is the most complete and versatile example of this method to date and illustrates these

issues of editorial competition and canonization.

Walden: A Fluid Text Edition also illustrates a new problem that is markedly different

from the CEAA era, which is the changing (some would say diminishing) role of editors of

digital editions as compared to print editions. As readers manipulate multiple versions of a work

on a single screen to come to their own conclusions about compositional and publication

histories, editors come to resemble curators who put original materials on display more than

authorities who emend their variants and stabilize their meanings. While fluid-text editing has

initiated a sea change in this direction, the perseverance of Greg-Bowers complicates any simple

narratives about the “death” of eclectic editions, as Ross predicted. I then conclude this chapter

and the dissertation by comparing the recent controversy over the digital humanities in the Los

Angeles Review of Books with that a half century ago in the New York Review of Books, tracing

similarities and differences between the two to remark on ways that we can learn from the CEAA

to better navigate our current moment in digital scholarly editing.

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Digital Editions and Archives

In the early days of digital editing, the majority of projects were editions of important

works that were undertaken with the same assumptions that governed Greg-Bowers. Continuity

with the form of the codex dictated the way that pages (or rather, images of pages) would be

manipulated on-screen. Amy Earhart notes that “For a portion of American textual studies

scholars, primarily those committed to the Greg-Bowers school, digital editions emphasized a

continued integrity of the object of study…. For many early edition projects, the digital interface

mimics the traditional book structure and includes core elements of the book such as the table of

contents, page display, and index.” In this way, “early digital edition work did little more than

replicate the print structure.” There was a contingent of editors who insisted on the same

relationship between editor, text, and reader as in traditional print editions as well. Tanselle, the

great proponent of Greg-Bowers, takes the opposite stance from Ross’s “reader-as-editor” theory

as late as 2006, when he writes in the foreword to the MLA’s collection on Electronic Textual

Editing that readers “need the editor’s assistance in the form of comments on the textual history

of the work, organized records of variants in the relevant documentary texts, and the like. They

also need editorially emended texts in order to see how the mass of evidence has been used in

reading by scholars who have made themselves expert in the textual history of the work.”

Tanselle recognizes, though, the potential for digital editions to showcase “many such emended

texts, attempting to reconstruct authorial intentions at different stages, publishers’ intentions, and

any other sets of intentions that seem relevant” (5). This is a striking concession from a strict

authorial intentionalist like Tanselle in the face of the next wave of digital projects that, by the

time of his writing, had become pervasive: the digital archive.

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Just as McGannian social-text theory followed the reign of Greg-Bowers in the greater

history of American scholarly editing, the rise of digital archives in the late 90s marks the

supersession of the former over the latter (though of course editions are still being made; just in

fewer numbers than archives). The ability to place a text in the context of all those documents

that surrounded it during its initial publication is naturally suited to social-text theory’s

conception of textuality. In fact, McGann himself was waiting on the emergence of the

technology to be able to properly represent the social environment in which he saw texts

circulating. He used his Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A

Hypermedia Archive (published beginning in 2000) to explore this potential, hosting Rossetti’s

poems, prose, pictures, manuscripts, and correspondence in high-quality scans. Earhart writes

that “Certainly McGann saw the RA as a ‘self-reflexive system,’ a ‘laboratory to study books,’

and a reflection of social text theory.” Other projects also began during this time, including the

Walt Whitman Archive (begun as the Walt Whitman Hyptertext Archive in 1995) and the Willa

Cather Archive (begun in 1997). Though these projects naturally tended to be conceived in terms

of poststructuralist figures of the network or rhizome instead of the older theoretical models of

the stable text that CEAA editions were based on, the CEAA still impacted them. In some cases,

this was explicit in the archive itself, as in the Cather Archive, which hosts scans of the pre-1923

novels in their Willa Cather Scholarly Edition versions, as well as the Douglass Papers Archive,

which does the same for the finished Yale volumes. In others, such as the Whitman Archive, the

link was not as obvious to the public, but having already been funded for a CEAA edition helped

to secure further funding for the digital project within the same NEH grant structure that was

initiated in 1965.

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As such large-scale projects were getting underway in the late 90s, literature professors

interested in expanding the canon decided to forego funding and create their own simple editions

of women and minority writers on their personal or university-sponsored webpages. For a while,

these “digital recovery projects” greatly increased the number of available works by otherwise

unknown or inaccessible writers.

However, these sites were built on the easy-to-use HTML

(Hyper Text Markup Language), and as the trend in digital editing moved to the more specialized

TEI/XML (Text Encoding Initiative/Extensible Markup Language) tagging language, they were

quickly abandoned. After the early years of the twenty-first century, these HTML sites were

never updated, rarely used, and sometimes deleted. Those editions that didn’t update began to

look amateurish and non-scholarly, but editions that wanted to institute the newest encoding

protocols needed funding to do so. As was the case with edition grants in the CEAA and CSE

eras, funding was tied to the already-established reputations of authors. Ken Price, an editor of

the Walt Whitman Archive, writes, “Not surprisingly, past decisions often become reinscribed in

the present: projects funded by government agencies to produce print editions in previous

decades solidified their academic standing in ways that leave them in advantageous positions in a

new electronic environment.” He remarks that the WWA directly benefited from the CEAA-

sponsored Collected Writings of Walt Whitman in its grant applications for the WWA, as they

used it as evidence for “Whitman’s firm canonicity” (281). Earhart says quite simply that “NEH

grants, which fund a majority of the digital literary projects, are often judged by impact and

Amy Earhart lists projects from this period that were developed without the help of a digital

humanities center or external funding: The 19th Century American Women Writers Web (19CWWW), Voices

from the Gaps, Early American Women Writers, The Black Poetry Page, The Online Archive of Nineteenth—

Century U.S. Women’s Writings, and American Women Writers 1890 to 1939—Modernism and Mythology.

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impact is most recognized by numbers of hits to the site. We know that canonical writers have a

greater chance of a large following than little known writers. So, it follows that a good number of

the archive and edition projects are focused on canonical writers, such as Rossetti, Melville, or

Whitman.” This in effect replicates the type of problematic canon-creating tendencies we saw in

the CEAA; Earhart warns that “it is possible that we are creating a digital canon that is more

representative of the literary canon of 1950 than that of the literary canon of 2014 [or, for that

matter, 2019].”

Funding is not the only issue that creates and maintains a conservative digital canon.

TEI/XML itself subtly re-inscribes dominant ideas about textuality and is thus more suited to

certain types of texts than others. Martha Nell Smith recalls that in the early years of digital

editing there was a consensus that “The codes [of HTML, SGML, and TEI/XML] always work,

and the principles always apply, whatever one's personal identity or social group (or so many

seemed to believe). It was as if these matters of objective and hard science provided an oasis for

folks who do not want to clutter sharp, disciplined, methodical philosophy with considerations of

the gender-, race- and class-determined facts of life” (4). Digital editing was seen as a redoubt in

the canon wars, much as in the early days of the CEAA, when the Hinman collator and Greg-

Bowers seemed to offer a value-neutral process by which one could apply one’s expertise to a

text.

However, the assumptions about textuality built into TEI/XML are anything but value-

neutral. Briefly, HTML is the language with which the Internet is built; it is a language which

describes how webpages should look to the user. XML is a language that describes the content of

webpages. The following is an example of HTML:

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<html>

<body>

Walden, Henry David Thoreau, 1854

Moby Dick, Herman Melville, 1851

The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850

</body>

</html>

Tags such as for italic and for bold mark that the words enclosed therein will

appear a certain way on the screen. However, the machine itself doesn’t recognize Walden as a

title or Henry David Thoreau as an author. Compare the same information presented in XML:

<books>

<book>

<title>Walden</title>

<author>Henry David Thoreau</author>

</book>

<book>

<author>Herman Melville</author>

</book>

<book>

<title>The Scarlet Letter</title>

<author>Nathaniel Hawthorne</author>

</book>

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</books>

Here, the tag <books> marks this as a list of books; <book> marks each entry as a book in

the list, <title> marks that line as the title of that book, and so on. Such tags make the resulting

documents interactive and searchable on a much more granular level. TEI is a complex set of

such tags designed to describe various types of texts. A poetry manuscript might have tags for

<leaf>, <poem>, <line>, and etc. User communities can create TEI schemas filled with specific

vocabulary for their own purposes, which makes XML far more adaptable than the universal

HTML.

TEI is, however, constrained by the OHCO, or Ordered Hierarchy of Content Objects

model, which describes the structure of all texts according to a Russian-doll-like configuration

wherein sentences belong in paragraphs, which belong in chapters, which belong in books (or

lines belong in poems, which belong on leaves). The trouble is that this nesting structure cannot

be superseded—for example, a poem can’t enclose multiple leaves, because the <leaf> tag would

precede the <poem> tag and therefore the closing tag </poem> would need to precede the

closing tag </leaf> to create the correct structure. In reality, of course, many poems physically

extend across multiple leaves of paper. This means that creators of TEI schemas must think

carefully about the most appropriate sets of tags to implement for their projects to avoid errors.

Large sets of specific tags are possible, but they must be internally coherent. Therefore, to

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describe texts with any level of granularity takes more labor and more money.

The easiest thing

to do with limited time and resources is to use simple tags, which limits what the digital edition

can do for the user. As Amanda Gailey remarks,

The technological requirements, available tag set, and project policies that look for

recurrent features in order to minimize workload are all ideally suited to a project that

collects the work of a single author with relatively consistent habits that can be viewed as

intended or patterned acts, creating an oeuvre of texts that reflect his genius and evidence

self-contained formal elements … [TEI] supports less controversial, less politicized

views of texts, such as examinations of their formal and linguistic structures, over more

contentious kinds of interpretive claims, such as content or thematic elements. 130

The mutually reinforcing categories of canonicity and complexity are reproduced through the

interaction between TEI encoding and funding. Canonized authors with a complex textual

archive, like Walt Whitman, have received funding for impressive digital archives that further

canonize them and further highlight their complexity. Meanwhile, noncanonized authors, if

digitized, are done so in the equivalent to literary anthologies. TEI encoding “typically looks

inward,” from a work to the texts that constitute that work, and then to specific features or

passages of those texts. Looking outward to draw connections between works, on the other hand,

“can be exceptionally awkward and labor-intensive to pull off” (129). This means that these

Amy Earhart explains that “Numerous scholars have pointed to the limitations of the TEI for complex

textual representations, but an examination of the history and evolution of TEI suggests that the problem lies, to

some degree, in the TEI’s initial conception, as the TEI was not originally constructed for use by literary editors.

The 1987 TEI NEH grant shows participation from linguists and literary scholars, but of those involved in the 1987

Working Committee not one of the originators of the TEI was a literary textual scholar…. The specialized needs of

edition building literary scholars, then, were not central to the goals of the original TEI working group.”

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digital anthologies, which feature multiple authors with very different textual and compositional

practices, are more simply produced. The Schomburg Center’s African American Women Writers

of the 19th Century, for example, provides transcriptions of text but no page images or links to

related documents or scholarship. This archive includes works like Phyllis Wheatley’s Poems on

Various Subjects, but the reader encountering this text on the Schomburg site would have no

indication of either its canonicity or its complexity.

Walden: A Fluid Text Edition is uniquely situated at the crossroads of all the issues

described above. First, the creator of fluid-text editing, John Bryant, sees his method as a

combination of intentionalist and social-text principles that have heretofore divided editions from

archives. As one of the first complete fluid-text editions, it gives us an opportunity to complicate

this claim. Second, as a canonized work, with much scholarly attention already paid to its

manuscript and a major CEAA-sponsored edition already completed, Walden was one of the

likeliest books to have such an innovative digital edition dedicated to it. Third, we can use it as a

test case to consider Charles Ross’s predictions about the impact of digital editing on textual

criticism as a whole. Finally, as it is at the forefront of digital editing, the SUNY-Geneseo

Walden exemplifies the problems that critics have with what they consider digital humanities

work that foregoes interpretation in favor of data-driven project-building. In the rest of this

chapter, I will consider each topic in turn, with an overview of fluid-text editing, a history of

Walden from its manuscript to the SUNY-Geneseo project, a reading of a passage that illustrates

Ross’s concept of a “reader-as-editor,” and then a discussion of the broader criticisms of digital

humanities in the Los Angeles Review of Books article that will lead us back to the original

criticisms of the CEAA.

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Fluid-Text Editing

John Bryant’s fluid-text editing theory takes as its focus the differences, or “distance,”

between versions of a work. All works are “fluid” in that they exist in multiple versions, and the

processes of revision (whether authorial or editorial) that created them necessitate a relational,

rather than static, mode of reading. Fluid-text editing is a maximalist method that seeks to

display as much information as possible about all variants between versions. Thus, while it is

possible to create print-based fluid-text editions (Bryant’s Longman edition of Moby Dick is an

example), the amount of information to display usually necessitates a digital edition or a print

edition supplemented by a digital space. Bryant envisions fluid-text editing as an answer to, or

rather a way around, the critical impasse created between the seeming incompatibility of Greg-

Bowers intentionalism and social-text theory. This makes it particularly relevant for our

purposes, as it suggests a possible next step in the ongoing debate between the two methods and

their respective conceptions of authorship. As we will see, however, fluid-text projects like

SUNY-Geneseo’s edition of Walden face unique challenges in the American context, where

CEAA editions have shaped the scholarly discourse for a half century and Greg-Bowers’s

assumptions about the stability of texts have been adopted (knowingly or not) by many scholars.

Bryant defines a literary work as “the combined energies of individual and social forces

which through the processes of authorial, editorial, and cultural revision evolve from one version

to the next and emerge from time to time as documents to be read by readers” (112). Elsewhere,

he describes literature as “a confluence of public events and private intentions” (18). Here he

combines the language of Greg-Bowers—individual, private intentions—with that of social-text

theory—social, public events. While “Neither approach denies the fluidity of texts,” he also

argues that “neither provides a satisfactory strategy of editing that fully showcases revision,

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which is the driving force of textual fluidity” (29). Fluid-text editing is an attempt to address this

problem by deploying the concept of authorial intention in concert with the concept of

publication as an event, thereby creating “a synthesis of conflicting views that may help us better

envision a way to edit, critique, and teach the fluid text” (20). Basically, an author is seen as

intending to write a specific sequence of words, and then other actors with other intentions

change those words in various ways. Rather than taking one or the other of these events as the

determiner of meaning, however, fluid-text editing attempts to display the process that led from

one version (say, a manuscript) to another (a first edition).

This process is based on the concept of intention as used in Greg-Bowers, though I argue

that it is not as crucial to fluid-text editing as the notion of the “event” as borrowed from social-

text theory. Bryant writes that “In making a transcription [of a manuscript], editors will

invariably come face to face with matters of intentionality” (18). He gives an example from

Melville: “I read a crucial, illegible word in the Typee manuscript as ‘promotion’; whereas

Hershel Parker sees it as ‘peroration.’ The word Melville intended is one word only; the scribble

we both ‘see’ is the same; but the readings we give to it vary with our differing rhetorical

agendas.” Bryant recounts this anecdote as evidence of the persistence of authorial intention in

meaning-making, because “in deciphering this and other scribbles, one has no recourse but to

speculate upon intended meanings, to take leaps” (19). However, his example proves just as

easily that meaning-making occurs in the interaction between reader and text, as it is he and

Parker who take leaps and speculate upon meanings, accounting for Melville’s scribble

according to their particular biases or critical imperatives. From this perspective, the language of

intentionality appears to be a rhetorical flourish, not necessary to the project of fluid-text editing

as a whole.

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Bryant’s borrowings from social-text theory are more fundamental. First, fluid-text

theory assumes that versions are discrete textual entities that should not be combined into an

eclectic text. In this way, it shares with social-text theory an insistence on representing the

historical record. Second, it seeks to display and explain, rather than emend and erase, those

changes to the text made by non-authorial agents. Rather, than declaring them “corruptions,” as

in Greg-Bowers, such variants are seen as necessary products of the process of publication. And

finally, fluid-text editors are self-conscious of their own role in reproducing, and thus necessarily

distorting, the literary work. As Bryant writes, “Indeed, editor’s choices inevitably constitute yet

another version of the fluid text they are editing. Thus, critical editing perpetuates textual

fluidity” (26). Even as they attempt to maintain the historical record to the fullest extent possible,

fluid-text editors have built into their process a recognition of the subjectivity of their own

interpretations. This leads to a three-tiered system that describes the relationships between

different versions of a work.

The copy-text in fluid-text editing is usually the fullest, or longest, version of a work.

Atop the text of this version there are the three levels of description: revision sites (cancellations,

insertions, or marginalia on manuscripts, or sites of difference between versions), revision

sequences (the oftentimes conjectural order of changes made on a manuscript), and revision

narratives (the editor's or reader's explanation as to the source, motivation, and meaning of

specific revisions). Together, this information constitutes the revision map. In a print edition, the

revision map is represented via diacritical marks and footnotes, as in a genetic edition. In a

digital edition, revision sites are marked with hyperlinked text and revision sequences and

narratives are displayed in pop-up windows or in a separate pane in the same tab. These three

levels become increasingly subjective and interpretative. Revision sites, though they depend on a

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subjective reading experience, have their basis in the empirical evidence of the markings on a

manuscript or the differences between versions. Revision sequences are often fairly

straightforward accounts of the chronological sequence of a series of marks. For example, a

reader seeing “house^home” in a manuscript could be fairly certain that “house” was written first,

later struck through, and then “home” interlined. Revision narratives are interpretations of the

meanings of revision sequences. In this instance, a reader might notice that the word “home”

accords better with the domestic language in the rest of the paragraph.

Crucially, this leaves the reader with a great deal of freedom of interpretation, while the

editor’s expertise is spent on the correct transcription and representation of source material rather

than the emendation of variants. Bryant argues that “Rather than custodians, textual scholars are

the managers and explainers of the fluid text. They assemble and record the available evidence of

textual fluidity in a literary work” (19). Both definitions of “custodian”—a guardian of the text

or one who makes it presentable to the public—apply to Greg-Bowers editors. Fluid-text editors

instead consider themselves to be digital curators, managing the display of the text and

appending explanatory labels. There is still a resistance among fluid-text editors to consider

themselves collaborators in the sense that they are propagating a new textual product that itself

forms part of the documentary record of the work. But they do present a different hierarchy of

power surrounding the text than CEAA editions offer. The reader of a fluid text is able to wander

about the textual exhibit, peering at the evidence and coming to their own conclusions. This

would seem to suggest a loss in authority for intentionalist editors who, through extensive

emendations, stabilized the text for a relatively passive audience in CEAA editions. However,

fluid-text editions haven’t replaced traditional print volumes yet. As they were conceived of and

executed in an American context still largely dominated by the intentionalist logic and

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canonizing impulses of the CEAA, the few such editions that exist face their own set of

obstacles. These will be explored in the following through Princeton’s Writings of Henry D.

Thoreau edition of Walden and SUNY-Geneseo’s Walden: A Fluid-Text Edition.

Walden, From Manuscript to Fluid Text

Walden’s life from manuscript to fluid text incorporates all of the traditional steps to

canonicity: after being willed by Henry’s sister Sophia Thoreau to his friend H.G.O. Blake, the

manuscript made its way through a series of sales to the Huntington Library in San Marino,

California in 1931. In the interim, the 1906 Manuscript Edition of Thoreau’s work was published

by Houghton Mifflin in 20 volumes, each set of which featured a page from Thoreau’s extant

manuscripts (though none from Walden itself). The first extensive research on the manuscript

was done by J. Lyndon Shanley in the mid-50s. This was followed by a genetic edition

completed as Ronald Clapper’s Ph.D dissertation in the late 60s. The CEAA edition, in The

Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, was edited by Shanley and published in 1971. As we’ll see, this

extensive scholarly history made possible SUNY-Geneseo’s Walden: A Fluid Text Edition in

2014.

The Walden manuscript is an ungainly thing. When Shanley first studied it for his 1957

The Making of Walden, he encountered in the Huntington Library “almost twelve hundred pages

of writing on leaves of different colors and sizes, in different inks and varying handwritings of

Thoreau, with cancellations and ink and pencil interlineations everywhere” (2). Shanley, the first

to make any sort of exhaustive accounting of the manuscript over its eight-year evolution,

identified seven stages in Thoreau’s composition from 1846-1854. Rather than making seven

discrete manuscripts by re-copying his already-written work as he added new material, Thoreau

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instead inserted new leaves into the same stack of papers as worked. As he did so, “he also went

back and canceled, emended, and rearranged previously written material, and thus he created a

new version of Walden with each set of additions” (5). Thoreau did not progress in an orderly

manner, but would insert new chapters, sections of chapters, and even small passages and

sentences throughout the manuscript as he went. It was thus Shanley’s unenviable task to

separate the leaves of the Walden manuscript according to size, color, stationer’s mark, and

handwriting to determine how many stages of revision were represented in it. Having separated

and re-organized the manuscript leaves, he worked out the following chronology of versions: A,

September 1846-September 1847; B-C, Mid 1848-Late Summer 1849; D, Early 1852-September

1852; E, September 1852-53; F, Late 1853-Early 1854; G, February or March 1854. The

document including these versions is labeled HM 924 in the Huntington. An eighth version,

consisting of a clean manuscript copy, was sent to Ticknor and Fields in March 1854 but

subsequently lost. Finally, the page proofs marked by the printer and by Thoreau represents the

ninth and final pre-publication version. This is HM 925 at the Huntington, and was selected as

copy-text by Shanley in the CEAA-sponsored Princeton edition of Walden in 1971.

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Image 8: A page from the Walden manuscript. Note the upper portion, which features a paragraph

struck through and interlined in pencil at a later date. Featured here is the passage from Chapter Three,

“Reading,” which begins “Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”

From https://digitalthoreau.org/fluid-text-toc/.

Ronald Clapper furthered Shanley’s work with his 1967 dissertation at UCLA, “The

Development of Walden: A Genetic Text.” Moving through a copy of the 1906 Houghton

Mifflin edition of the text with a color-coded set of markers, Clapper read each set of manuscript

leaves as sorted by Shanley and marked when every paragraph first appeared. Then, in footnotes,

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he recorded all the substantive variants in every manuscript version of each paragraph through an

examination of cross-outs and interlineations. The result was a genetic text that allowed the

reader to follow which additions and changes were made in which version through a system of

superscipted numbers and symbols for strikethroughs and insertions. Clapper’s work became the

basis of any scholarly work on the manuscript for those who could not travel to the Huntington.

Image 9: An example from Clapper's genetic text of Walden.

It was because of Shanley and Clapper’s earlier work with the manuscript that the

editors at the SUNY-Geneseo edition could feasibly create their project. As the general editor

Paul Schacht explains, “because Clapper’s notation for textual insertions and cancellations

amounted to a code of its own, a first pass at transforming the notations into TEI could be

automated.” Thus, all of the factors discussed above regarding the canonization of digital

editions were in play: a well-known work with a previous CEAA edition could find funding for

an unusually complex application of TEI/XML because of the extensive scholarly work already

done with the extensive extant primary documents. The result is an edition that allows the reader

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to simultaneously see multiple versions of the Walden manuscript in separate panes (see Image

10, p. 205). Whereas the manuscript itself, and even Clapper’s genetic edition, requires the

reader to imagine the seven discrete steps in Walden’s composition, the fluid text presents them

side-by-side, marking Thoreau’s additions and deletions so that the reader can easily track the

work’s evolution from 1846 to 1854.

Reading the Fluid Walden: The Tale of the Particularly Wretched Man

Despite its relative ease of use, Walden: A Fluid Text Edition has yet to become a

prominent source for scholarly work on Thoreau’s book. In this section, I will discuss why this

might be so, and then provide an example of the ways in which it can add to our understanding

of Thoreau’s work. Since its launch on February 3, 2014, the SUNY-Geneseo edition has been

cited by only two articles and one dissertation as a source for the text of Walden.

Of these, one

article cited it along with the Princeton edition, while the other cited it as the only source used

for the Walden text. The dissertation is the only one of the three to rely on the fluid text for a

substantial portion of its arguments, remarking in an early footnote that “This observation, and

many others like it in this dissertation, was made possible by a digital encoding of Ronald

To arrive at these numbers, I broadly followed the methodology of Lisa Spiro and Jane Segal in

“Scholar’s Usage of Digital Archives in American Literature,” The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age,

edited by Amy Earhart and Andrew Jewell, 2011, pp. 101-122. See especially pp. 104-106. I searched the Modern

Language Association International Bibliography, JSTOR, EBSCOhost, and Project Muse for “Walden AND

Thoreau,” limited from February, 2014 to June, 2019. I then searched within the results for relevant terms including

“fluid text,” “Digital Thoreau,” “Paul Schacht,” “Writings of Henry D. Thoreau” “Princeton University Press,” and

“Lyndon Shanley.” Finally, I supplemented the resulting list with the citations listed for the Fluid Text Edition and

the Princeton edition in Google Scholar. Throughout the process, I removed any results titled “Back Matter,” “Front

Matter,” “About the Contributors,” and other irrelevant material. I removed one dissertation about digital genetic

editing on the grounds that it briefly discusses Walden: A Fluid Text Edition in terms of its on-screen presentation of

variants, but does not discuss Walden itself.

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Clapper’s dissertation” (Leslie 13 n7). In comparison, Shanley’s Princeton text has been cited 57

times since 2014. The Princeton text is cited most often in articles and books on Thoreau,

Transcendentalism, and associated figures, but scholars from other fields turn to it as an

authoritative source as well—its 57 citations include a book on American representations of

India and an ecological study of the Appalachian forest.

Several factors play a part in the continued preference for the Princeton edition over

SUNY-Geneseo’s fluid-text edition. Perhaps most hearteningly, the works that cite the fluid-text

edition are all from 2017 or 2018, suggesting that the slow pace of scholarly work is one such

factor and that we will soon see more work based on it. Works from before these years may have

begun before Walden: A Fluid Text Edition was made publicly available. A related factor is that

scholars might not yet know about the project. The durability of the reputation of the Princeton

edition would play a factor here; scholars who were trained with CEAA editions would be less

likely to seek out (and learn to use) new digital versions if they have already researched and

published with the “definitive” print edition. New scholars, in turn, seeing the Princeton edition

cited in others’ work, are more likely to turn to it for their own research. Finally, many scholars

are wary of new digital editions, fearing that citing an online resource carries less weight than

citing the standard text.

These observations align with those found by Lisa Spiro and Jane Segal in their survey of

American literature scholars about the use of digital archives such as the Walt Whitman Archive,

Dickinson Electronic Archives, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture. Walden: A Fluid

Text Edition faces yet more obstacles, as it is more specialized and difficult to use than these,

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which present high-quality images of original source material.

Once a scholar of Walden finds

Geneseo’s edition, they must then learn how to use it. As Tara Andrews and Joris van Zundert

remark concerning the fluid-text Walden, “the aesthetics of the interface to the Digital Thoreau

work in tandem with its subtitle [‘Thoreau Digitized. Deliberately.’] to provide an experience not

merely of the text but also of what it signifies to the editor: deliberation and reserve. This notion

or suggestion, however, is very superficial—the edition hides the text to some extent under the

layers of aesthetic, but once it has been found, the text turns out to be just as ‘densely scholarly’

[as other specialist editions] in that it provides multiple instantiations of the text, scholarly

footnotes, multiple indices, and so on” (7). To even find the fluid-text Walden, however, the

scholar must first be interested in the compositional history and revision as a mode of analysis.

Bryant has remarked that, as a scholarly editor, he is “not surprised by the lack of interest in

textuality among antebellum specialists. The apathy is endemic throughout the profession. They

are no different from scholars and critics in other historicist fields: we take it for granted that the

texts, canonical or noncanonical, that define our discipline arrive on our desks or screens as

fixed, unitary, and ‘reliable’” (“Where is the Text” 145).

While what Bryant suggests is largely true, I would like to complicate his assertion by

tying together a few obstructive factors outlined above and proposing that the apathy he finds in

the profession doesn’t arise from nowhere, but is a product of the textual environment in which

Though the fact that these archives present seemingly unmediated images of original material means

that they are used more often, they are not necessarily likely to be cited more often. One respondent to Spiro and

Segal’s survey remarked, “If you want to talk about the text of a poem in the 1871 edition, why would you cite the

Walt Whitman Archive when you could cite the print, even if you looked at the text online? It carries more scholarly

weight to cite the print. What you’re looking at online is just a facsimile of the text” (108).

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American literary scholarship has been produced since its postwar beginnings. In the same era,

for example, the German and French textual-critical traditions have centered around a form of

genetic editing that looks much more like Bryant’s fluid-text methodology.

German and French

scholarly editions most often take the process of composition as their focus and present variants

along with the reading text. The Anglo-American tradition is unique in its dogged focus on

authorial intention, and the American version of intentionalism, Greg-Bowers, is again unique in

its insistence on a clear text. The apathy of American literary scholars to the textuality of

American literature, then, can be attributed at least in part to the confluence of historical factors

that made the texts that “arrive on our desks” appear in the form that they do: the need for

available clear-text editions for New Critical classrooms after the war, the ascendance of Greg-

Bowers, and the standardization of CEAA editions in scholarship. In this context, it becomes

much more difficult for a complex genetic or fluid text to gain favor.

The fluid-text Walden presents a relatively steep learning curve for scholars used to clear-

text editions, but an easier one than that of genetic editions. After its color-coded symbols are

learned, it provides an environment which gives the reader the interpretive freedom formerly

reserved for the scholarly editor. As an example of this, here is the passage quoted above in the

image from Clapper’s dissertation as it appears in the fluid text:

For an overview of the German tradition, see Contemporary German Editorial Theory, edited by Hans

Walter Gabler, George Bornstein, and Gillian Borland Pierce, University of Michigan Press, 1995. For a similar

collection of essays on the French tradition, see Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes, edited by Jed Deppman,

Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Gorden, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

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Green text represents interlineations in pen on the manuscript, while olive text represents

those in pencil. Strike-throughs represent passages that were crossed through in the manuscript.

Grey highlighting indicates text that was changed in other versions, but remained the same as the

base text in the current version. Looking at Version A (1847) in left-most column, we can

immediately see that Thoreau originally wrote the manuscript for a series of lyceum lectures on

his experiences at Walden Pond. His strike-through of “lecture,” followed by interlineations of

“book,” “work,” and then “book” again evidences his shifting conceptions about the audience

and purpose of his text. Moving to the middle-right Version C, we see that he didn’t write the

famous first lines of his book until his third revision in 1849. Initially, he wrote the rather limp

“At the time the following pages were written” in the passive voice. He then revised it into the

active voice and added the first-person pronoun, which he would later defend in this chapter by

writing that “We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is

Image 10: The first lines of Walden in Versions A-D as displayed in Walden: A Fluid Text Edition.

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speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as

well.”

This brief glance at the first two paragraphs illustrates a markedly different mode of

reading than that dictated by clear-text or even genetic editions. As the reader moves left to right,

first word by word and then pane by pane, they are made to interpret not only the content of the

passage but differences between each version of the passage. Clapper’s genetic text provides the

same information, but requires the reader to actively re-construct it, and they can ignore the

footnoted information if desired. Here, each strike-through and interlineation must be accounted

for as it is encountered. It is in this process that we can most clearly see Ross’s prediction of the

resurrection of the author come true via Bryant’s insistence on framing manuscript changes in

terms of intentionality. We want to say that “Thoreau changed this sentence into the active voice

to emphasize his active role as the first-person protagonist of his book.” It is here, however, that

we have to remember Shillingsburg’s division between the “intention to do” and the “intention to

mean.” The manuscript records that Thoreau changed his first sentence into the active voice;

beyond that, any motive we ascribe as readers belongs to the author-function.

Readers’ interpretations of the fluid-text also extend to large-scale revisions. One

notable example is the following passage from Walden, which I call the “Tale of the Particularly

Wretched Man.” This passage is only found in Version D from 1852, from which it was

immediately deleted:

I remember to have met once a particularly wretched man in our own streets,

asking for a lodging, whom it was almost no pleasure to befriend he so was hopeless. He

had come all the way from New York on foot, seeking work, but he did not know where

he was at any time, only, perchance, that he had travelled thirty miles that day, when

three would have done as well. He thought that he had seriously injured himself by lying

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out, but he was more seriously injured before. He could do work about a stable, but

declared in a disconsolate voice, that there was no work for him, as if the fates had a spite

against him. I saw by his face that he was only a more desperate man than usual, whose

whole life was a crime, who was endeavoring to escape from himself, but for once,

derived no amusement from the method which he had chosen. He thought that nobody

wished to employ him nor would respect him, because he knew that he was unworthy to

be employed, and did not respect himself; and thus he had come two hundred and fifty

miles in a straight line, with desperate steps, offering himself, with a down look,

anticipating failure, to do stable work at such stable yards as this path happened to

intersect, doing his part as he would fain have believed, toward getting work; but the

truth was, he merely wished to convince the fates that he was willing to do his part, when

he was not. And so, judging from his direction, he would go on, if his constitution held

out, to the Gulf of St Lawrence, where he would probably jump in. I knew very well that

he was not the only man who had not succeeded in getting work. Manuscript Version D,

Paragraph 9b

No edition of Walden has yet included this passage, including Shanley’s Princeton edition. In his

work on the versions of Walden found in the manuscript, Shanley does mention it, but includes

only a greatly reduced eight-line portion made up of six sentences and phrases. He writes that

Thoreau “sacrificed a vivid satiric anecdote because it was somewhat irrelevant and broke into

his argument” (52) and because “he did not need more concrete illustrations at this point, and the

folly of a poor itinerant was not particularly relevant for the readers Thoreau could expect” (53-

54).

As this story appeared in perhaps the most famous passage of Walden, that which

begins “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” it is of general interest to readers and

deserves closer scrutiny. While Shanley’s statements are valid interpretations of Thoreau’s

possible intentions in deleting this passage, they do not interpret the passage itself in the context

of the full and evolving work of Walden. Examining its place in the surrounding passages can

tell us more about this Particularly Wretched Man. Just as he wandered through the eastern states

of the U.S., he wanders through Thoreau’s manuscript, once seen, never to be seen again. And it

appears that the manuscript itself is just as full of thoughts about work, stables, and fate as the

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Particularly Wretched Man himself. “Work” appears six times in his brief passage, and 36 more

times in the published version of this chapter, which is appropriate for an extended treatise on

“Economy.”

“Stable” appears three times in this passage and twice in the rest of the chapter.

“Fate” appears twice in the passage and five times elsewhere in the chapter. The only words that

appear with comparable frequency in the “Tale of the Particularly Wretched Man” are, if one

groups them together, those synonyms that describe his wretchedness: hopeless, injured,

disconsolate, desperate, unworthy.

Taken together with the occurrences of these words in the rest of the chapter, this

Wretched Man hoping for the opportunity to work in a stable effectively figures one of the most

important themes of “Economy”: that one should maintain a limited personal economy to reduce

one’s reliance on the broader economy of exchange. Before this passage, owning a stable is

equated with a smothering reliance on property: “How many a poor immortal soul have I met

well nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it

a barn seventy-five feet by four, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of

land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot!” Later, a property owner is denigrated while the

man working in his stable is heralded, as Thoreau asks, “[A]re we certain that what is one man’s

gain is not another’s loss, and that the stable-boy has equal cause with his master to be satisfied?

Granted that some public works would not have been constructed without this aid, and let man

share the glory of such with the ox and horse; does it follow that he could not have accomplished

In the sense of the noun “labor” or the verb “to labor,” or in related words like “workhouse;” the noun

meaning “piece of art” was excluded.

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works yet more worthy of himself in that case?” Elsewhere, Thoreau contends that “the swiftest

traveller is he that goes afoot,” and so it would seem that this itinerant worker in other people’s

stables, who travels by foot and trusts to fate for his lodging and sustenance, would be a

welcome figure in the world of Walden. What we can learn from this context is that the

Particularly Wretched Man is particularly wretched not because of the choices he makes but

because of his self-perception. His mistake lay in assuming that fate is external to him. For

Thoreau, “Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man

thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.” As such, this man who

“thought that nobody wished to employ him nor would respect him, because he knew that he was

unworthy to be employed, and did not respect himself” does not represent an untenable

economic choice, but merely an untenable perspective; his tale implies that a change in attitude

can determine outer material circumstances.

More can be written about the Particularly Wretched Man as a figure who plays a part in

Thoreau’s evolving system of economic theory and about his possible relationship to other texts,

such as Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” For our purposes, it is enough to point out that this

interpretive free-play, in which I rescue the Particularly Wretched Man from his fate imprisoned

behind the bars of Thoreau’s strike-throughs in HM 924, was only made possible by the fluid-

text editor’s decision to display all available evidence in an accessible format in which discrete

versions can be compared. Shanley’s Princeton edition makes no mention of our wretched friend

because he does not form part of Thoreau’s final intention for Walden. Having literally written

the book on The Making of Walden, Shanley was in the best possible position to recover such

passages and make them available in one of the most-used editions of Walden in the second half

of the twentieth century. However, because the CEAA dictated that final authorial intention

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constituted the basis of textual meaning, and because the page proofs of Walden with Thoreau’s

corrections were deemed to represent his intention more than the unwieldy manuscript, this

interesting figure remained largely unknown.

Ironically, Shanley himself becomes a Particularly Wretched Editor, tromping through

the text in a straight line, trusting to the external method of Greg-Bowers even as he encounters

material that should have made him stray from his path. In this way, Shanley’s editorial ethics

betray Thoreau’s ethics, as he forfeits his subjective experience of the text in favor of an

unthinking adherence to a system. His fate, Thoreau might say, was determined as soon as he

thought of himself as a CEAA editor rather as a Thoreau scholar. The SUNY-Geneseo editors,

by presenting the maximum amount of information rather than adjudicating what is or is not

relevant, allow the reader to ramble through the text according to their own Thoreauvian

inclinations.

The New Controversy: From NYRB to LARB

In May of 2016, the English professors and digital humanists Daniel Allington, Sarah

Brouillette, and David Golumbia published an incendiary article in the Los Angeles Review of

Books that was rhetorically and argumentatively reminiscent of Lewis Mumford and Edmund

Wilson’s attack on the CEAA in the New York Review of Books a half-century prior. Whereas

Mumford and Wilson were concerned about the center of scholarly editing and publishing

moving from New York City to universities in the Midwest (“It does seem perhaps unfortunate

that so many of these MLA volumes should be products of the Middle West,” Wilson sneered),

these three critics are worried that the center of scholarly editing is moving westward again, to an

imagined Silicon Valley that is warping the interests of English professors, students, and other

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humanities scholars toward technology and data and away from interpretation. The opening lines

of their piece, “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities,”

summarizes their position nicely:

Advocates position Digital Humanities as a corrective to the “traditional” and

outmoded approaches to literary study that supposedly plague English departments. Like

much of the rhetoric surrounding Silicon Valley today, this discourse sees technological

innovation as an end in itself and equates the development of disruptive business models

with political progress. Yet despite the aggressive promotion of Digital Humanities as a

radical insurgency, its institutional success has for the most part involved the

displacement of politically progressive humanities scholarship and activism in favor of

the manufacture of digital tools and archives. Advocates characterize the development of

such tools as revolutionary and claim that other literary scholars fail to see their political

import due to fear or ignorance of technology. But the unparalleled level of material

support that Digital Humanities has received suggests that its most significant

contribution to academic politics may lie in its (perhaps unintentional) facilitation of the

neoliberal takeover of the university.

At the root of Allington, Brouillette, and Golumbia’s critique is the question of interpretation.

Digital Humanities is business-oriented, with massive grants spurring on teams of professors,

software engineers, coders, and web designers to create larger and more impressive projects

without regard for their interpretive potential. Meanwhile, graduate students and early-career

scholars are being trained with skills that make them recruitable by Google but not fit to critique

the larger neoliberal system for which Google serves as technological metonym. All this is

masked by the rhetoric of progress: technological progress is conflated with social progress,

while a lot of the former and not much of the latter is really happening. The real socially

progressive work of the interpretation of social products and structures, meanwhile, goes

unheralded and underfunded.

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The technological tools that support this transformation seem very new, and for good

reason. Some mark the emergence of the Internet as the greatest shift in information technology

since movable type. The authors’ criticism of “the redefinition of technical expertise as a form

(indeed, the superior form) of humanist knowledge,” however, is not new. Within the field of

scholarly editing, we’ve seen this controversy play out once before. In Mumford’s critique of the

CEAA, he remarks that “Such technological extravagance and human destitution is of course the

fashionable mode of our day;” he criticizes the “preconceptions and the mock-scientific

assumptions governing the pursuit of the humanities today;” he argues that the CEAA

“represents a colossal expenditure of human effort, money, and time, that might have been

addressed to matters of greater consequence;” and he laments “its surrender to the computer and

to those limited problems that computers so deftly and swiftly handle.” Just as the LARB authors

worry about “graduates trained for the current requirements of the commercial workplace,”

Mumford worries about “the next generation of scholars” who will reduce the study of literature

to “an excuse for exercising their professional expertise.” Just as the current authors are unsettled

by the “vast new apparatus of bureaucratic control” that Digital Humanities scholars and

administrators are building, Wilson was put off by the “bureaucrats of the MLA, abetted by their

allies in Washington,” who created a network of institutional control around the CEAA and

NEH. Allington et al take issue with the idea that “building computational tools should qualify as

a replacement for scholarly writing,” while Wilson sarcastically points out that one could not

“expect that the MLA would care to humiliate its Hinman Collating Machine” by appending

interpretive scholarly writing to CEAA editions. Examples of such similarities could be

multiplied.

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The close connection between our current moment in the Digital Humanities and the

history of American scholarly editing is acknowledged by the authors of “Neoliberal Tools (and

Archives),” as their “Political History” focuses on the University of Virginia and the

transformations that took place there from the time of Bowers and Hirsch to McGann to the

IATH. The conclusion that they come to after outlining this history is that both intentionalist

editing in the tradition of Greg-Bowers and Digital Humanities as a whole are opposed to “the

insistence that academic work should be critical, and that there is, after all, no work and no way

to be in the world that is not political” (emphasis in original). They write that “like Hirsch’s

tightly constrained approach to literary criticism, and like Bowers’s similarly constrained

approach to textual scholarship, Digital Humanities has often tended to be anti-interpretive,

especially when interpretation is understood as a political activity.” While Digital Humanities

grew out of the early digital editions of the 1990s, and the funding structure that dictates which

projects get to continue or expand is an inheritance from the CEAA’s initial funding, it is

important to point out that equating scholarly editing to the Digital Humanities in general

excludes important work done in fields outside of literary studies and institutions outside of

UVA. In a response to the article, also published in LARB, Juliana Spahr, Richard So, and

Andrew Piper point out that a there is a “tremendous amount” of DH research that “directly

addresses issues related to race, gender, class, and power.” This work is produced by scholars of

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various backgrounds from various institutions (or even outside of academia), and it comes from

the fields of translation, history, political science, and library studies.

There is still much to learn from this association of the CEAA and current digital projects

from within the fields of scholarly editing and American literary studies, however.

The crucial

issues of interpretive practice, funding and canonization, and public accessibility are shared by

scholars and editors from both eras. I’d like to end by using the example of Walden: A Fluid Text

Edition to summarize some of the lessons that can be learned by extending the history of digital

editions and archives back to the CEAA. The SUNY-Geneseo Walden suggests the interpretive

potential inherent in providing discrete versions that can be compared by the user/reader on one

screen. This is indicative of an overall shift in editorial responsibilities from the emendation of

source texts to their display. However, Tanselle is correct that such editions still call for expert

commentary and historical analysis. This is one way of combining a technological tool (the

edition and the platform on which it is built) with interpretive scholarly work (the accompanying

annotations and essays).

The LARB article inspired a flurry of responses, just as the NYRB one did. A brief list of these can be found at

https://acrl.ala.org/dh/2016/05/05/neoliberal-tools-and-archives-a-political-history-of-digital-humanities/. Other

important responses include Michele Rosen, “Digital Humanities and the Neoliberal Takeover of the University: A

Response,” and Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Am I a Digital Humanist? Confessions of a Neoliberal Tool.”

By including all humanities disciplines under the banner of “Digital Humanities,” the LARB authors partake in the

metaphor of the “Big Tent,” which suggests that DH provides such opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration

that boundaries between fields begin to dissolve. There has been pushback against this metaphor based on the fact

that disciplines have unique methodologies, goals, and interpretive practices, some of which might not be

compatible despite a shared set of analytical paradigms or tools. See Amy Earhart’s “Introduction” in Traces of the

Old, Uses of the New: “Many of the early books on digital humanities have focused on the breadth of the digital

humanities, arguing that digital humanities is an inclusive form that is able to be all to all fields. While such a tactic

serves the political purpose of making digital humanities indispensable, it obscures the impact of practitioners from

various disciplinary backgrounds who have shaped technology to address their scholarly investigations.”

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To build and upkeep editions that do more than provide scans of documents a la Google

Books, substantial funding is needed. This funding, in turn, propagates a system of structural

inequality that privileges already-canonized authors over marginalized ones. Editions like the

fluid-text Walden are only possible because of the extensive work already done by previous

scholars and the continued reputation enjoyed by authors like Thoreau because of earlier projects

like the CEAA Princeton edition. There is heartening evidence of projects based on non-

canonical works being funded, such as Amanda Gailey, D.B. Dowd, and Gerald Early’s Race

and Children's Literature of the Gilded Age. In order to continue support for such projects,

funding organizations like the NEH or the Ford Foundation need to recognize their canon-

building function; that is, rather than simply making canonized material more readily available,

such projects work to canonize lesser-known works by making them available. Of course, as we

now know, the “significance” question is easily answered by reference to a CEAA edition, but

scholars working outside of its selective canon will need to convincingly articulate the case for

their specific primary works’ importance. Greater awareness of the canonizing role of

government-funded projects like the CEAA or ODH-sponsored digital projects may shift the

emphasis of the “significance” question toward establishing a new canon rather than reinforcing

the old.

A question that haunted both the CEAA and current digital projects is that of

accessibility. Despite accusations that its editions were too specialized, the CEAA overcame this

problem and became the de facto producer of scholarly editions in the U.S. by declaring itself the

sole authority on “definitive” editions and by making those editions, sans apparatus, publicly

available at low cost via paperback licensing. Digital editions, despite many of them being free

with an internet connection and hosting much more material than their print counterparts, still

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suffer from neglect from many scholars because of a lack of awareness. In its five years of

existence, the fluid-text Walden has been cited about 5% as often as the Princeton edition in the

same time frame. In this way, it may be that the outsized success of the CEAA has hampered the

usage of current digital editions. Ways to counteract this effect include increased publicity for

digital editions and archives, citation formats posted clearly on them to ensure scholars cite the

editions themselves, and more use of digital projects in undergraduate and graduate classrooms.

Allington, Brouillette, and Golumbia are right to be concerned about the broad forces of

neoliberalization impacting the university and Digital Humanities’ complicity, or active

participation, with them. However, this concern about the effects of technology, data, and

“objective” scholarly work is not new, and by considering the longer history of such

controversies we can better orient ourselves with effective critiques and tenable solutions. This

dissertation has argued that the Center for Editions of American Authors, with its techno-

scientific methodology, massive government funding, and near-monopoly on scholarly editions,

represents the beginning of this long history.

Epilogue

When Jerome McGann spoke at the University of Iowa, he ended his talk with soaring

rhetoric about the importance of printed critical editions, claiming that despite our new digital

tools we have not yet surpassed their ability to present a wealth of textual information in an

accessible way. A colleague tempered the celebratory atmosphere somewhat when he leaned

See Spiro and Segal, 116-119, for these and more recommendations about how to increase use of digital archives.

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over and whispered, “Welcome to the 1950s.” This dissertation has been, in its way, a lengthy

rejoinder to his sarcastic aside. If McGann is correct in calling the critical scholarly edition “one

of the most remarkable machines created by the ingenuity of Man” (New Republic 25), it is

necessary that we turn to its most successful American iteration, the Greg-Bowers eclectic

edition, to uncover the deep ways in which it has shaped our current moment in literary studies.

Even if, like my friend, you don’t share McGann’s breathless wonder at the potential of scholarly

editions, the sheer persistence of CEAA editions on our library shelves and in our scholarly

footnotes warrants a consideration of the subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways that they shape the

discourse of American literary studies.

As this dissertation has shown, we inherit much of our understanding about American

publishing history either directly or indirectly through the CEAA, whose dogged adherence to

Greg-Bowers was a result of the complex academic and political contexts of the Cold War. An

integral part of this inheritance is a conception of authorship that is Romantic and individualistic,

that supports the notion of singular genius while erasing the important work done by a variety of

nonauthorial agents including editors, publishers, compositors, book designers, family members

and friends. The extent to which these stable, discrete, un-footnoted texts have influenced the

scholarship represented in the thousands of journal articles and monographs that use them as

primary sources is ultimately unknowable. Less subtle and more visible effects include the

funding structures that exist on the model of the CEAA, as it was the first venture of its kind to

be subsidized by the NEH. These institutional structures still neglect women and minority

authors in large part due to the project of canon-formation that produced CEAA editions, which

have had the cumulative effect of redirecting funds toward those authors that have already been

extensively edited. By projecting one authorial biography—that of the frustrated artist whose

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work is corrupted by the marketplace—onto each of its authors, the CEAA has flattened out

American literary history and obscured its variety and diversity.

The Center for Editions of American Authors, then, has left a mixed legacy to the current

generation of scholars and editors. While it was crucial for the professionalization and

development of American scholarly editing, the sheer profundity of its early success shaped—or

warped—the field during the intervening decades. Now, we must untangle the positive effects

from the negative in order to create an editing practice that is rigorous, historical, and inclusive.

To do so requires turning toward the past—even back to the 1950s—to learn how our current

moment is indebted to those editors and editions that have shaped our literature in ways that are

too often invisible to the larger field of American literature.

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