Textual Scholarship-Definition

To say that I was unaware of the fact that I ever thought that Textual Scholarship was "dry-as-dust" (143) was not even on the radar for me, because this field was not even on the radar for me I am embarrassed to say. I guess being fairly new to the scholarly study of English studies I never knew that texts are not always what the author of origin intended. I guess I am a bit naive to think that along the way people would change words in classical texts because someone thinks there is no way that author could have really meant what they wrote. I was very aware that authors would change parts of their texts because their readers felt that key issues in the text needed to be changed.

There were a few areas that really excited me were the fact that there is an "attempt to disentangle cases of literary collaboration in which a woman author's contribution may have been eclipsed or reshaped by the man's" (152). One of the examples that Marcus uses is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which is always overshadowed by how much did Percy Shelley really help because she wrote the novel at a time when women were finding it difficult to even get published.

The other area that really excited me is the book historian, I could really get into that. I love books and would love to look at the traditional aspects of book history like the descriptive ans analytic bibliography and about its publishing history as well as the history of the copyright. But the ideas of studying the theory part of it as it is set out by Foucault. I can see the importance of all of this in the great example that Marcus gives us of the Mayflower Bible, thought for years to be authentic only to find out that it really was not.

This is a field that was unknown to me until I read this chapter and it is just one more reason to love the field that I am studying.