Tag: textual editing

Adam Gordon. Prophets, Publicists, and Parasites: Antebellum Print Culture and the Rise of the Critic.

Posted on by Emma Hetrick

Each chapter of Prophets, Publicists, and Parasites centers on a particular nineteenth-century American critic: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rufus Griswold, Edgar Allan Poe, Margaret Fuller, and Frederick Douglass. The book’s introduction contextualizes the critics’ historical moment as one in which growing nationalism, advances in printing technologies, and a productive economy enabled the emergence of the literary critic as a fully-fledged profession. These changes also encouraged the proliferation of literary criticism in a variety of print forms. 

Susan L. Greenberg. A Poetics of Editing

Posted on by Ellen Barth

Whereas the author has received considered attention, the editor, it could be said, has not yet fully arrived. Indeed, the profession and practice of editing remain somewhat hazily defined. This elusiveness is due to numerous factors, such as lingering romantic views of authorship and creative inspiration, the subtle ways editing works behind the scenes to ensure and improve communication, and the lack of a comprehensive theory that encompasses all time periods and genres. The goal of Susan L. Greenberg’s A Poetics of Editing is to place editing squarely under the spotlight and uncover this ‘hidden art.’ Built on years of Greenberg’s personal experience overlaid with a scholarly perspective, it proposes a framework for joining together the practice and theory of editing that can cut across media forms and time periods.