Editing D.H. Lawrence: New Versions of a Modern Author (Editorial Theory & Literary Criticism) Book

With the recognition in recent years that the apparently stable texts we read in codex books are actually fluid, unstable, or indeterminate, there has been a growing interest in the work of editors. As specialized readers, editors interpret and produce texts in ways that precede and partly determine the strategies with which other readers are said to write texts.Editing D. H. Lawrence: New Versions of a Modern Author takes the Cambridge University Press edition of The Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence, the first complete re-editing of a major modern writer, as a test case in the intersection of textual theory, editorial praxis, and publishing history. The contributors, ten of whom have edited Lawrence for Cambridge or other presses, reflect on important questions raised by the project. How has understanding of Lawrence's creativity and the nature of critical editing been altered by the Cambridge project? Has editing revealed or disguised the processes through which Lawrence's oeuvre reached its multifarious forms? How has this creative process been incorporated into editorial theories, practices, and editions? What have Lawrence's editors assimilated from the community of literary theorists?Copyright on works by many of the great modernists--Lawrence, Conrad, Woolf, Joyce, Fitzgerald--has now lapsed. Students and teachers face a bewildering array of competing editions, many containing significantly different reading texts. Editing D. H. Lawrence will help clarify the important issues surrounding this battle of the books. Charles L. Ross is Associate Professor of English, University of Hartford. Dennis Jackson is Professor of English, University of Delaware.Read More