In spring 1838, Franz Liszt made his first appearances before the Viennese public with a selection of his transcriptions of Schubert’s Lieder for pianoforte. The performances unleashed veritable storms of applause from audiences and critics alike; some of the rapturous reviews even claimed that the music of Schubert, who had died ten years earlier, only became intelligible through Liszt’s playing. Liszt’s transcriptions were meant to transfer Schubert’s piano writing effectively to the new generation of concert grands. Their formidable virtuosity, which was frequently criticised in later years, was only superficially an end in itself, however. Instead, Liszt viewed virtuosity as a vehicle for obtaining the maximum expression appropriate to the original and for capturing the emotive quality of Schubert’s music. His precepts as an editor of Schubert’s piano music were of a different nature. Unlike contemporary editions, the Schubert volumes that Liszt prepared for the Stuttgart publishing house Cotta around 1870 are exemplary in quality and indicate every editorial intervention, while also being devoid of the arbitrary additions common to the subjectively tinged performance tradition of his generation. This chapter provides a thorough study of Liszt’s approach to Schubert’s music, while also considering the reception of his adaptations and editions.

The Conclusion offers final reflections on authorship, use and patronage of Ordo Romanus texts and manuscripts.

Pater’s individual volumes of essays were republished and reprinted many times in the years following his death. The books passed from hand to hand, and entered the second-hand market, often featuring brief inscriptions which indicate that they were proffered as gifts, in addition to more revealing marks of ownership comprising underlinings and marginal annotations. This postscript considers a small sample of such books, helpful in illustrating the diversity and orientation of Pater’s posthumous readership. Ranging from an early copy of Appreciations bought as a schoolboy by an eminent English scholar to a pocket edition of the same work presented to a prospective Oxford student, these books testify to the continuing appeal of Pater’s writings. An underlying theme to be followed is the vexed question of Pater’s perceived relevance to the study of English literature while the subject itself was acquiring its institutional framework in British universities. Some indications of Pater’s American readership, and his appeal to the more flexible curricula of the ‘new universities’ of the 1960s, are also relevant to the context under consideration here.

This penultimate chapter introduces two complete editions of the Lives. The first was published in 2006 by Oxford University Press and the second in 2010 by Yale. The value of these editions is the attention they bring to the textual details of Johnson’s critical writing; they promote accuracy in dealing with his terminology. Evaluating Johnson’s criteria depends on such detail. The editions invite us to look more closely at the implicit meanings within the overall structure. They are of course very different and suggest different editorial cultures. The Oxford is very ample in its commentary; the Yale annotation is leaner and conforms in editorial style to the Works to which it belongs. Different users will find merits in both approaches, and a final preference is difficult to determine given the different ways in which Johnson’s critical and biographical writings are read or used. But both editions, in their ambition and magnitude, suggest the persistent presence of Johnson’s critical writing and are crucial to its reception.

Editions’ begins with the Attribution Controversy: in 1790 George Chalmers attributed 81 titles to Defoe; by 1960 John Robert Moore counted 570. This led to a trio of works by P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens overhauling the bibliography: The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (1988), Defoe De-attributions: A Critique of J. R. Moore’s ‘Checklist’ (1996), and A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe (1998). Various scholars reinstated titles; various other scholars wondered whether Defoe even wrote Moll Flanders and Roxana. But editors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were confident enough in identifying the Defovian to produce multi-volume Works, while in this century Pickering & Chatto have published to date forty-four volumes. The chapter concludes with a look at some of the more arresting versions of Robinson Crusoe – such as the one in ’Pitman’s shorthand "(corresponding style)"’.

This chapter pulls together the previous chapters’ conclusions about the early medieval laity. It then asks why new, Carolingian-style formula collections stopped being made in the course of the tenth century. After surveying possible answers offered by the scholarship, it suggests – while acknowledging that we will likely never know for certain – another, namely that they continued to be produced as long as scribes wanted to write their documents and letters like others were writing theirs, for a clientele whose interests could span very long distances. As the Carolingian world disintegrated in the later ninth and tenth centuries, this became less important. The chapter closes with the history of the manuscript Paris, BNF, ms. lat. 2123, as it disappears from view, surfaces in the early modern period, arrives at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and ends up in the hands of Karl Zeumer as he edited the formulas for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. It discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the MGH edition, the impact that Zeumer’s editorial methods had on the formula texts and their images of the laity, and the resulting dangers of treating this edition, rather than the surviving manuscripts, as a primary source.

Chapter 1 does the work of conventional introduction to De Excidio by surveying everything we know about the text, from date, authorship, and provenance to manuscript witnesses, sources, and reception history, including a critical discussion that clarifies the relationship between De Excidio and its main source, Flavius Josephus’ Jewish War (written in Greek around 75 CE). Chapter 1 also lays out a framework for the rest of the study by explaining Roman exemplarity as a rhetorical discourse especially familiar within scripted character speeches by historians in the Greco-Roman world.

Molière was an experienced actor and dramatist before he became a published author. He warned readers on more than one occasion that much of his art was simply lost in print. If that is self-evidently true, it is also the case that it was not all loss for Molière’s original readers: they could read his dedicatory epistles to society’s potentates whom he was trying to impress; they could read his occasional prefaces, in which he addressed his readers directly and with a lightness of touch that anticipates the dramatic text itself; and they could sometimes see illustrations that crystallised key aspects of his comic imagination. Moreover, readers would have been familiar with newly established conventions in the printing of dramatic literature that would have helped them to reconstitute in their mind’s eye aspects of performance: scene divisions evoking entrances and exits, and stage directions both explicit and (more importantly) implicit. The punctuation of the printed text is an unreliable guide to actual performances, but helps readers to hear the particular performance inscribed into the printed version of the text. Meanwhile, different editions, in the seventeenth century and since, with ever-evolving apparatus, offer readers increasingly varied approaches to the plays.

Slote’s chapter addresses the issue of the multitude of new editions of Joyce’s works using an intersection of translation studies and editorial theory, understanding various translations as new textual entities. Slote draws on Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, “The Task of the Translator,” in which the mission of the translator is presented as a mimetic one in that it requires both creation and imitation. Translation, according to Benjamin, aims not at fidelity but at strangeness, not at singularity but as the mapping of a maximum of possibilities. Likewise, editing is a mimetic activity in that – as with translation – it involves transposition from one textual instantiation into a different and new textual instantiation in order to further propagate the text in a new manner, to a new audience. The chapter then looks at various translations of Joyce’s works as new textual entities that also happen to be in different languages. The burgeoning library of Joyce editions will be thus examined not as a continuum of more-or-less precise versions but as an exploration and multiplication of possibilities.

Chapter 1 explores one of the most enduring popular works for children, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Charles Dodgson wrote it at a time when the very conception of childhood as a distinctive and cherished stage of human development was being explored and, through the popularity of Dodgson’s penmanship, being promulgated. Dodgson’s interest in children is also apparent from his (now controversial) photographs of children and from his obsessively detailed exchanges with his publisher, Frederick Macmillan, over the presentation of Alice and other works for children. Dodgson sought to curate the way young readers entered into and experienced the fantasy realm. He appeared to draw the line at ventures he judged could dilute the fantasy, such as mass-manufactured goods produced outside of Victorian artistic creative industries. Dodgson wrote at a time when authors could and did control the terms of engagement with their fantasy through the exercise of copyright. Management, agency and legal relations would supersede this authorial power and authority in the following century.

The second part of the book, entitled “Time”, concerns matters that relate to specific temporal issues, linked either with the subsequent legacy of the Tour or with events that occurred close in time to its composition. Chapter 5 attempts to show how students of history have enlisted the book for a variety of purposes, especially within the last hundred years. They include eminent writers in almost every branch of the discipline, markedly different.in outlook and interests. Social, political, economic, cultural, urban and transport historians are among those who have made the most frequent raids. The work has proved invaluable to generations of writers, its text adduced by historians of the family, old age, women, religion, shopping, weather, landscape, cartography, leisure, travel and tourism, infectious disease, antiquarianism, archeology, gambling, the Navy, Civil War battlefields, dialect, folk customs, industrial archeology – the list could be greatly prolonged. The evidence collected here confirms the Tour as a truly central work for our understanding of Britain at a crucial stage of its transition into modernity.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), which has appeared in more than four hundred editions, is one of the most enduring and widely available African American texts. More than three dozen editions of the book have appeared in print since 1990. The variety of editions includes an ever-expanding body of paratexts such as chronologies, notes, bibliographies, and study guides, which reveal the extent to which publishers, editors, and scholars continually redesign Douglass’s book for new generations of readers. Investigations of Narrative editions and paratexts enhance views of one of our most well-known writers and books.

Beginning in the early 1970s, scholars have been recovering an Asian American literary archive. The first anthologies of Asian American literature defined the field in divergent ways. Some focused on US-born writers and a politics of cultural nationalism. Others embraced a wider range of writers and a variety of political positions. The second wave of anthologies and scholarly discussions reacted against more limited views of Asian American literature and extended the field to encompass more women writers, genres such as poetry and drama, works written before the 1960s, and authors from beyond those of East Asian descent. Depending on the particular project, recovery has meant unearthing forgotten writings, revaluing discounted or discredited texts, or rethinking the sociopolitical context of works. Recovery continues today in print and digital editions released by both independent and mainstream publishers. Questions remain about which authors and works deserve recovery, and the stakes are high since inclusion in a canon can serve as a proxy for inclusion in a culture.

Chapter 30 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines the reception of Sappho’s poetry in Latin America, examining figures such as José Martí, Julio Herrera y Reissig, Esteban de Luca, Lucas José de Alvarenga, TomÁs Antônio Gonzaga, Carlos Guido y Spano, Álvares de Azevedo, Antônio Frederico de Castro Alves, Mario Faustino, SalomÓn de la Selva, Haroldo de Campos, Décio Pignatari, Mercedes Matamoros, Juana de Ibarbourou, Alfonsina Storni, Alejandra Pizarnik, Rosario Castellanos, Mercedes CortÁzar, and Ana Cristina César.

Already at a young age, Strauss made initial contacts with well-known publishing houses. Eugen Spitzweg of the Munich publishing house Jos. Aibl became a paternal friend for the aspiring composer. At the beginning, when Strauss was barely known to a wide audience, Spitzweg expressed his friendship by including Strauss’s compositions in his catalog. But soon Strauss’s reputation grew – and with it his self-confidence in negotiations with his business partners. Unlike some other important composers in music history, Strauss developed into a capable businessman and secured high fees for his music. This chapter highlights the publishing context of Strauss’s work. It characterizes his relationships with his long-time main publishers, names the publishers with whom Strauss collaborated only briefly, and presents an overview of the great variety of sheet music editions (from historical publications to modern critical editions) in which Strauss’s music is available.

Strauss’s written correspondence consists of many thousands of documents. The publicly-known portion is extensive indeed, even without approximating the total inventory: edited today are some 8,000 letters, postcards, and telegrams to and from the composer, the bulk of which have not been translated. Hitherto untapped, however, is more than that amount of material in various archives and libraries. Particularly noteworthy here is the family-owned Richard-Strauss-Archiv in Garmisch, which houses the largest share of Straussiana worldwide, including the largest collection of letters to the composer. An official, even if not fully complete catalog of Strauss’s correspondence, both published and unpublished, is still an urgent research desideratum. This chapter contextualizes the extant materials by focusing on issues such as access, chronology, editorial standards, and dissemination, while calling for all materials to be made accessible via modern edition principles.

This essay examines how in editions, on the stage, and in biographies, Jonson was revised and reinterpreted for the eighteenth century, generally as a foil to Shakespeare. The first illustrated Jonson was published in 1716, with the plays for the most part represented as if on a modern stage, though few had been performed since the early seventeenth century. Portraits of Jonson too went through much revision, even at one point substituting a slim, youthful, lively poet for the heavyset middle-aged scholar of the previous century. Critical treatments of the playwright were ambivalent, even maintaining that the role he conceived for himself, and that best expressed his character, was that of Morose in Epicene. David Garrick made the roles of Kitely in Every Man in His Humour and Drugger in The Alchemist particularly his own, with the latter even spawning a series of tobacconist sequels. But these productions rebalanced the plays around star performances and increased their sensationalism and emotional temperature. In print, portraits, and performance Jonson was not afforded the same care and respect that were lavished on Shakespeare and was increasingly overshadowed by him.

Elena Rebollo-Cortés examines how the material features of Sylvia Plath’s final two books have played a key role in establishing a critical framework for the interpretation of her texts and in defining her posthumous identity as a writer. In the context of the publishing history and the literary afterlife of Plath’s works, Rebollo-Cortés shows us how the figure of Plath has been presented to readers through the visual and textual packaging of key editions of Ariel and The Bell Jar. These key works have had a wide readership and large presence in the literary market. Their editions have therefore played a major role in the creation and perpetuation of Plath’s identification with a tragic figure. This concentration on books as historical and material objects presupposes that editions are (sometimes overlooked) vehicles of meaning, revealing, for example, that editions of Ariel disclose how Plath has been portrayed as a Faber poet, a woman poet, or a myth, while editions of The Bell Jar have privileged biographical readings of the novel.

This essay assesses the challenge of digital culture to the representation and reproduction of Chaucer’s work, arguing that scholarly projects associated with the emergence of ‘digital humanities’ have in the main replicated the humanist goals of traditional literary scholarship. With the rapidly changing nature of digital textualities, the essay concludes by suggesting that a proper reckoning between Chaucer’s works and digital culture has yet to take place.