This small but powerful book initiated a major shift in literary theory and method when it was first published in 1983. Starting from a critical inquiry into certain specialized issues in the practice of editing, McGann gradually unfolds an argument for a general revaluation of the grounds of literary study as a whole.

This work initiated a major shift in literary theory and method when it was first published in 1983. Starting from a critical inquiry into certain specialised issues in the practice of editing, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism gradually unfolds an argument for a general revaluation of the grounds of literary study as a whole. McGann's point of departure is the controversy he opens with the once-dominant line of traditional textual and editorial scholarships as it evolved through the fundamental work of W.W. Greg, Fredson Bowers and G. Thomas Transelle. In departing from the canonical approach to the technical question of copy-text, McGann argues that theory of text must ground itself in a recovery of the entire productive and reproductive history of the text. His book proposes combining literary criticism and bibliographical scholarship with social, institutional and collaborative models of creation and production.

Aristotle's theory of eternal continuous motion and his argument from everlasting change and motion to the existence of an unmoved primary cause of motion, provided in book VIII of his Physics, is one of the most influential and persistent doctrines of ancient Greek philosophy. Nevertheless, the exact wording of Aristotle's discourse is doubtful and contentious at many places. The present critical edition of Ishaq ibn Hunayn's Arabic translation (9th c.) is supposed to replace the faulty edition by A. Badawi and aims at contributing to the clarification of these textual difficulties by means of a detailed collation of the Arabic text with the most important Greek manuscripts, supported by comprehensive Greek and Arabic glossaries.

Drawing extensively on archival research, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound critically explores the textual history of Pound's late verse, namely Section: Rock-Drill (1955) and Thrones (1959). Examining unpublished letters, draft manuscripts and other prepublication material, this book addresses the composition, revision and dissemination of these difficult texts in order to shed new light on their significance to Pound's wider project, his methods and techniques, and the structures of authority-literary and political-that govern the meaning of his poetry. Illustrated by reproductions of archival documents, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound is an innovative new study of one of the most important poets of the 20th century.

Over the past decade literary critic and editor Jerome McGann has developed a theory of textuality based in writing and production rather than in reading and interpretation. These new essays extend his investigations of the instability of the physical text. McGann shows how every text enters the world under socio-historical conditions that set the stage for a ceaseless process of textual development and mutation. Arguing that textuality is a matter of inscription and articulation, he explores texts as material and social phenomena, as particular kinds of acts. McGann links his study to contextual and institutional studies of literary works as they are generated over time by authors, editors, typographers, book designers, marketing planners, and other publishing agents. This enables him to examine issues of textual stability and instability in the arenas of textual production and reproduction. Drawing on literary examples from the past two centuries--including works by Byron, Blake, Morris, Yeats, Joyce, and especially Pound--McGann applies his theory to key problems facing anyone who studies texts and textuality.

These essays challenge the positivist, patriarchal assumptions of earlier approaches to textual criticism.

"Philip Whalen (1923-2002) is a key figure in both the Beat and San Francisco Renaissance movements of the New American Poetry. Whalen authored twenty collections of verse, more than twenty broadsides, two novels, a huge assemblage of autobiographical literary journals, nine or ten experimental prose works, and dozens of critical essays, lectures, commentaries, introductions, prefaces, and interviews. But he came to regard his literary journals as his most important prose legacy. A professed Buddhist for most of his adult life, Whalen was ordained a Zen Buddhist monk in 1972 in what is arguably still the most influential Zen Buddhist training temple complex in North America. In some ways Whalen begs a comparison with Thomas Merton, the twentieth century's most significant Christian monk-poet. But where Merton contained himself within the conservative guidelines of Trappist-Christian orthodoxy, Whalen was a closeted homosexual (or bisexual) who inscribed an insider's account of his monastic community with an acid tongue and a keen sense of humor. His pen spared no one in the religious hierarchy he trained under. Whalen's literary work represents a significant turn in American letters, as he and his closest colleagues immersed themselves in East Asian literature and religion, reinvigorating strikingly new linguistic and aesthetic paths for North American writers and artists. However, until now Whalen's forty-plus years of journals-sixty small eight-by-six-inch notebooks-have been largely inaccessible, archived in the rare book and manuscript library at the University of California, Berkeley, undigitized and unavailable online. Thus, the publication of a critical scholarly edition of Whalen's journals and notebooks constitutes an important literary event and an invaluable resource for scholars, teachers, poets, and lay readers who follow twentieth-century North American poetry. In his complex and idiosyncratic poetics, Whalen adopts a unique mind-and-language-centered approach to the creation of a poem. Some of his finest works are "live action" scenes where he fuses moments of bald mental perception with the linguistic intricacies of his inner consciousness (i.e., the words, phrases, and observations that his mind forms, or that other people spill into his mind in the same block of time). The significance of Whalen's journals is manifold, Brian Unger argues, and goes beyond their mere availability. Unger argues that of all the San Francisco Renaissance and Beat poets of the postwar period, Whalen's roots in modernism are among the strongest. He was a voracious reader, as his journals show, and a keen student of earlier literatures. Furthermore, the journals conclusively overturn many misleading arguments about Whalen's personal life as related in the 2015 Whalen biography Crowded by Beauty by David Schneider. The publication of the journals would provide for the first time, and in Whalen's own words, an objective and self-substantiated account of his life with biographical information that has never before been generally available. The Whalen journals make clear as never before the primary psychological forces driving his personal life, his interior life as a poet and a religious monk, and they shed important light on the intriguing complexity of his philosophical and phenomenological poetics"--