Abstract
An acknowledgment of textual instability is built into our understanding of the history of the novel. The significance of the different physical forms in which novels have been printed over time, and the material circumstances that have determined their manner of publication and reception, are now an acknowledged part of scholarly debate. The impact of social theories of bibliography and textual editing espoused by writers such as D. F. McKenzie and Jerome McGann has shifted attention away from a stable, ‘ideal’ text, edited and understood according to authorial intentions, towards a more fluid notion of textuality as the product of history and the material processes of composition, production and recep-tion.1 This development has coincided with — and also supported — the rise in Anglo-American scholarship of the discipline of book history, which seeks to recover and interpret knowledge about the physical forms and commercial and cultural contexts in which texts have circulated.
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Notes and references
See D. F. McKenzie ([1985], 1999) Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press);
J. J. McGann ([1983], 1992) A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia);
McGann (1991) The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
See T. Keymer and P. Sabor (2009) ‘Pamela’ in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press);
P. Shillingsburg (1992) Pegasus in Harness: Victorian Publishing and W. M. Thackeray (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press);
S. Gatrell (1988) Hardy the Creator: A Textual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon);
J. Dubino (ed.) (2011) Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan).
P. Parrinder (2011) ‘General Editor’s Preface’, in Parrinder and A. Ga˛siorek (eds), The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 4: 1880–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. xiv.
R. Wellek and A. Warren (1949) Theory of Literature (London: Jonathan Cape), pp. 49, 62.
C. Craig (1999) The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), p. 193.
C. Jones (2009) Disappearing Men: Gender Disorientation in Scottish Fiction, 1979–1999 (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi), p. 76.
J. Flanders (1997) ‘The Body Encoded: Questions of Gender and the Electronic Text’, in K. Sutherland (ed.), Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 127–43, p. 128.
J. Galloway (1999) The Trick is to Keep Breathing (London: Vintage), p. 12. Further references are in the text. Each of the various editions discussed in this essay follows the same pagination.
I. Murray (ed.) (2006) Scottish Writers Talking (Edinburgh: John Donald), p. 23.
On the implications for critical interpretation of transference from codex to computer screen, see M. Groden (2004) ‘James Joyce’s Ulysses on the Page and the Screen’, in P. Stoicheff and A. Taylor (eds) The Future of the Page (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), pp. 159–75.
K. Sutherland (1997) ‘Introduction’, in Sutherland (ed.), Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 3 (original italics).
C. Hesse (1996) ‘Books in Time’, in The Future of the Book, ed. G. Nunberg (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press), pp. 21–36 (32).
See K. Mitchell (2007) ‘The Unfortunates: Hypertext, Linearity and the Act of Reading’, in P. Tew and G. White (eds), Re-reading B. S. Johnson (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 51–64.
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© 2014 Andrew Nash
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Nash, A. (2014). Textual Instability and the Contemporary Novel: Reading Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing On and Off the Page. In: Parrinder, P., Nash, A., Wilson, N. (eds) New Directions in the History of the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137026989_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137026989_3
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