In addition to historicizing, recording, and defining the nature of the 20th century's most significant textual and bibliographical achievements, this volume offers a useful introductory guide to bibliography and textual criticism and their scholarly evolution. Supplemented with expansive author, subject, and title indexes, the book provides annotated entries for more than 750 monographs and articles published during the 20th century. These are grouped in topical chapters devoted to general bibliography and textual studies, analytical bibliography, descriptive bibliography, textual criticism, historical bibliography, and enumerative bibliography.
In tracing the history of 20th-century bibliographical and textual criticism, this book surveys numerous issues and topics. These include the New Bibliography, computer and information technologies, the history and art of book collecting, the history of the book, the controversial publication of such texts as the Oxford Shakespeare and the Hans Walter Gabler edition of Ulysses, and the influence of literary theory and criticism on the contemporary direction of bibliographical and textual studies. Thus the work demonstrates the wide-ranging activities of bibliographers and textual critics, their fundamental aims, and their continuing efforts on behalf of our understanding of the physical, literary, historical, and technological aspects of authorship, the editorial process, and book production.
About the Author: WILLIAM BAKER is Professor, Department of English, and Professor, University Libraries, at Northern Illinois University. He is the Editor of George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies, as well as the author or editor of such volumes as Harold Pinter (1973), George Eliot and Judaism (1975), The Libraries of George Eliot and G.H. Lewes (1981), The Early History of the London Library (1992), F.R. Leavis and Q.D. Leavis: An Annotated Bibliography (1989), The Letters of George Henry Lewes (1995, 1999), Literary Theories: A Case Study in Critical Performance (1996), and The Letters of Wilkie Collins (1999).
KENNETH WOMACK is Assistant Professor of English at Penn State Altoona. In addition to co-authoring Recent Work in Critical Theory, 1989-1995: An Annotated Bibliography (Greenwood, 1996) and co-editing the Dictionary of Literary Biography's 3-volume British Book Collectors and Bibliographers series (1997-1999), he has published numerous articles on 20th-century British and American literature and film, as well as on bibliography and textual criticism. He is Editor of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory, Correspondent for the World Shakespeare Bibliography, and Associate Editor of George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies.
