As he goes through his dead mother's papers Englishman Gregory Lynn, 35, discovers his unflattering school reports, which revive memories of humiliation at the hands of teachers. One called him a donkey, another said he had a girl's name. Lynn decides to even the score with cold-blooded acts of revision. A first novel.

Revision is a crucial part of the writing process. But many authors resist the act. The contributors to this book know this from experience, whether they've taught freshman comp or other writing courses.

This book presents the first full-length study of the stylistically experimental and influential novelist George Moore’s (1852-1933) repeated acts of rewriting. Moore extensively and repeatedly revised and re-issued many of his major works, sometimes years or even decades after they were initially published. This monograph provides new insights into how this process shaped and determined his work, and by extension into the creative significance of literary rewriting more generally. It also offers the first sustained application of linguistic pragmatics, the study of meaning in interaction, to the work of a single author, opening up questions about how analytical paradigms developed in pragmatics can explain how rewriting can affect the interactive relationship between a literary text and its readers. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the areas of pragmatics, stylistics, literary history, English literature and Irish literature.

Philosophers have almost always relegated the topic of revision to the sidelines of their discipline, if they have thought about it at all. This book contends that acts of revision are central and indispensable to the project of philosophizing and that philosophy should be construed essentially as a practice of rereading and rewriting. The book focuses chiefly on Heidegger’s highly influential interpretation of Nietzsche, conducted in lectures during the 1930s and 1940s and published in 1961. The author closely analyzes the rhetorical means by which Heidegger repositions Nietzsche’s thinking within a broad history of metaphysics, even as Heidegger positions his own reinterpretation as that history’s more “proper” reading. The author argues that Heidegger’s revisionist project recasts the philosophical text as paralipsis, a special kind of ironic statement that when “properly” received by the philosophical rereader, expresses what the text did not and could not say. The study of such paraliptical revisionism within the philosophical canon offers a new way of understanding the basic historicity of the philosophical text, a text that is critically indistinguishable from its own future history of interpretations. Philosophy itself is revision, a deeply historicist rereading practice, a continuous reappropriation of its own improper textual past. In addition to being the first book-length published study of Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche, the book also examines the work of Hans-Robert Jauss, Harold Bloom, and other critics of revision. In particular, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s early essays on history, read both with and against Heidegger’s analysis of metaphysics, demonstrate why the historical intervention achieved by revisionist reading is not only a formal and thematic alteration of the past, but also a rhetorical coercion of future interpretive tendencies. No philosophical reader is simply a user or victim of revisionist methods: in rereading philosophical pasts, the reader is the very mechanism by which such interpretive tendencies are first formed into problems or thoughts within the philosophical canon.

The Revision of 1877 satisfied an 1871 act of the Legislature to "revise, simplify, arrange, and consolidate" all the general and permanent public statutes of New Jersey." It is valuable today chiefly as a tool for tracing the history of legislation. As Axel-Lute observes in his introduction, "[t]here are nearly seven hundred current sections in New Jersey Statutes Annotated for which the oldest source cited in the historical note is the Revision of 1877. To trace these sections back to earlier sources, the researcher must use marginal notes and enactment date information in the 1877 work" (iii). In addition to his informative introduction, Axel-Lute has added a detailed table of contents, a feature that wasn't included in the original work.