| In 1965, when editor Robert Halsband published his text of the Turkish Embassy Letters of eighteenth-century traveler and writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, his work was on par with the best critical editions for eighteenth-century literary work produced at the time. But even then, given the completeness of the primary materials available to Halsband---holograph, printer's copy, first edition with a provenance that indicated Montagu's own sanction for publication---his Turkish Embassy Letters text had a problematic set of editorial procedures that let him disregard Montagu's own punctuation and substitute his own.;My dissertation is organized as a complete draft of the edition, in a hybrid of standard dissertation-chapter format (using Microsoft Word) and proof pages (using the typesetting program LaTeX, the compiler TeXShop, and the scholarly-editing package ledmac designed first to handle Renaissance drama). As far as I am aware, this is the first time an English literature dissertation at the University has presented both the words of an edition along with a fully-set textual apparatus. I mention this to mark a moment when the horizon of possibilities for textual work has shifted along with the means of production of scholarly editions. Halsband's textual apparatus was of necessity predetermined before he produced a typescript; he could not even see how the meaning of the text might be impacted by its form until the printer sent proofs, and then, Halsband could not revise much. I could---and did---revise the apparatus as I typed. I have edited words, pages, sections, footnote size and placement, font styles and sizes, and the arrangement of white space; like most academic authors and editors these days, I not only write and correct, but compose and print (or at least, use Portable Document Format) at a desktop computer (iMac). The 1990s revival of book history and bibliographical approaches to literature has now been partially absorbed into literary studies, and makes everyone mindful that what is written is not, materially speaking, separable from how the writing was done: or, to quote Roger Chartier, "to read is always to read something." My work here allows me to build a bridge toward fully-digital work in editing and supports my interest in digital humanities. For this project, I would have to concede to Matt Kirschenbaum that like textual criticism generally, this edition treats "the computer mainly as a platform-independent venue for studying the artifacts of other media": for creating a simulcra of a book instead of reckoning with the unexpected combinations of permanence and ephemeral that comprise the digital media, even though I could not design a book myself, at my desk, without the aid of the computer. But these machines are new; by simply trying to retransmit Montagu's text via a medium for which there is no account in any of her writings, I help determine where along this frontier there might be sites for reproduction, restoration, translation.;Rationale for a new edition. Minus the bibliographical detail belonging to the textual introduction and editorial procedures, the rationale lays out the case of editing the Turkish Embassy Letters according to Montagu's final authorial intentions. Among textualists, intentionalism is now controversial, but my point here is not to take a side in textual debates. Instead, my points are: (1) the primary documents make clear Montagu's final intentions for her work (posthumous print publication), and I want the evidence uncovered here to be considered as part of textual studies arguments on editorial rationales generally; (2) the history of publication and transmission of this important work is characterized by a disrespect for Montagu's intentions that comes from family anxiety about a woman ancestor who was also famous in her own right; this connection between gender and literary production is of interest to all readers of book history interested in how gender impacts literary creation, transmission, and reception; (3) when edited as a separate literary work, Montagu's literary achievements are no longer peripheral, but central to arguing for her canonity to Anglo-American eighteenth-century literary studies, Ottoman studies, women's studies, European history; and (4) the depth of Montagu's command of all topics relevant to the Turkish Embassy Letters can only be brought out in an edition that leaves sufficient room for commentary: ancient and modern history, classical and modern literature, Ottoman life and European politics. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
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