Scholarly Editing and the Challenges of Attribution

"Scholarly Editing and the Challenges of Attribution"--RBS Summer 2024 Lecture by Stephen Karian at the University of Virginia.
Drawing on his research editing Jonathan Swift’s complete poems for Cambridge University Press and Alexander Pope’s miscellany poems and uncollected verse for Oxford University Press, Stephen Karian will explore the practice of scholarly editing, with particular attention to the challenges of establishing an author’s canon. Scholarly editing draws upon many related bookish endeavors: bookselling, collecting, librarianship, publishing history, bibliography, and textual criticism. Scholarly editors must gather insights from these fields and others to understand and then explain how and why particular pieces of writing came to be, how they changed over time, and how they were distributed among their initial readers. Central to the editor’s task is establishing an author’s canon, clarifying as much as possible what an author did or did not write. In recent decades, much attention in attribution and deattribution efforts has been on “internal evidence,” often defined as matters of style, such as diction, syntax, or meter. This talk argues for shifting the focus to the often-abundant external evidence, specifically documents such as letters or other manuscripts, contextual material, and the physical evidence of printed books. This talk will culminate with a case study using external evidence-especially bibliographical evidence-to argue why a poem currently accepted as Alexander Pope’s should be removed from his canon.
Stephen Karian is Professor and Catherine Paine Middlebush Chair of English at the University of Missouri. He is the author of "Jonathan Swift in Print and Manuscript," and with James Woolley he has edited Swift's complete poems in four volumes for the "Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift" being published by Cambridge University Press. Karian's next project is editing Alexander Pope's "Miscellany Poems and Uncollected Verse for the Oxford Edition of the Writings of Alexander Pope" being published by Oxford University Press. Karian is also the author of more than a dozen articles covering topics such as Swift, Pope, attribution, the book trade, manuscript circulation, scholarly editing, and the English Short-Title Catalogue. He was Rare Book School's E. Ph. Goldschmidt Fellow in 1998.