Eclecticism and its Discontents
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
Abstract
The widely-praised “open” eclecticism of George Kane’s editions of Piers Plowman has simultaneously elicited discontent for its inattention to textual history, its susceptibility to misuse, and its conflicting conceptions of poetry. These evolving attitudes reveal how the impressive methodological rigor that gives Kane’s system strength problematically clashes with the subjective editorial judgment it proclaims as essential. Eclectic editors’s insistence that a textually straightforward Chaucerian line — Canterbury Tales III 838 — be emended either conjecturally or from a late and isolated textual tradition highlights that problem; the accuracy with which several indisputably brilliant Chaucerian lines are preserved in the witnesses
warns us to be wary of eclectic overreach.
Downloads
Article Details
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (see:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors warrant that their submission is their own original work, and that they have the right to grant the rights contained in this license. Authors also warrant that their submission does not, to the best of your knowledge, infringe upon anyone's copyright. If the submission contains material for which an author does not hold the copyright, authors warrant that they have obtained the unrestricted permission of the copyright owner to grant Indiana University the rights required by this license, and that such third-party owned material is clearly identified and acknowledged within the text or content of their submission.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal.
References
Adams, Robert, et al., eds. 2000. The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Vol. 1: Corpus Christi College, Oxford MS 201 (F). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Barney, Peter. 1993. “Line-Number Index to the Athlone Edition of Piers Plowman”. Yearbook of Langland Studies 7: 97–114.
Boenig, Robert, and Andrew Tay l or, eds. 2012. The Canterbury Tales. 2nd ed. Peter-borough, Ont.: Broadview Press.
Bowers, John M., ed. 1992, The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications.
Donaldson, E. Talbot. 1966. “The Psychology of Editors of Middle English Texts”. Reprtd. Speaking of Chaucer. 102–18. New York: Norton (1970).
———, ed. 1975. Chaucer’s Major Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader. 2nd ed. New York: Ronald Press.
———. 1976. “Some Readings in the Canterbury Tales”. In Medieval Studies in Honor of Lillian Herlands Hornstein. Edited by Jess B. Bessinger, Jr. and Robert R. Raymo, 99–110. New York: New York University Press.
Edwards, A. S. G. 2010. “Manly and Rickert and the Failure of Method”. Studies in the Age of Chaucer 32: 337–44.
Farrell, Thomas J. 2014. “End of semester fun”. CHAUCER@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU. 3 December.
Foucault, Michel. 1984. “What is an Author?” 1969; Joshué Harari, trans., 1979. Reprtd. in Paul Rabinow, ed., 101–18. The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books.
Gower, John. 2006. Confessio Amantis. Russell Peck, ed. 3 vols; vol 1. 2nd ed. Kalama-zoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications.
Hanna, Ralph III. 1997. “(The) Editing (of) the Ellesmere Chaucer”. In The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation. Edited by Martin Stevens and Daniel Wo od-wa r d, 225–43. San Marino, CA & Tokyo: Huntington Library & Yushodo Co., Ltd.
———. 2010. “George Kane and the Invention of Textual Thought: Retrospect and P r o s p e ct ”. Yearbook of Langland Studies 24: 1–20.
———. 2014. “The Versions and Revisions of Piers Plowman”. In The Cambridge Com-panion to Piers Plowman. Edited by Andrew Cole and Andrew Ga ll oway, 33–49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hudson, Anne. 1977. “Middle English”. In Editing Medieval Texts: English French, and Latin Written in England. Edited by A. G. Rigg, 34–57. New York: Garland.
Kane, George. 1966. “Conjectural Emendation”. In Chaucer and Langland: Historical and Textual Approaches (London: Athlone, 1989). 150–61.
———. 1986. “‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Manuscripts: Texts and Critics”. Reprtd. in George Kane, Chaucer and Langland: Historical and Textual Approaches, 206–13. London: Athlone (1989).
———, ed. 1988. Piers Plowman: The A Version. Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman and Do-Well, Revised ed. London: Athlone Press.
———, and E. Talbot Donaldson, eds. 1975. Piers Plowman: The B Version. Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman, Do-Well, Do-Better and Do-Best. London: Athlone Press.
Kelly, Sean, James Simpson, et al. 2013. The Teaching of the Arts and Humanities at Harvard College: Mapping the Future. http://artsandhumanities.fas.harvard.edu/files/humanities/files/mapping_the_future_31_may_2013.pdf.
Mann, Jill, ed. 2005. The Canterbury Tales. London: Penguin.
The Miller’s Tale on CD-ROM. 2004. Peter Robinson, ed. Leicester, UK: Schol-arly Digital Editions.
The Nun’s Priest’s Tale on CD-ROM. 2006. Paul Thomas, ed. Birmingham, UK: Scholarly Digital Editions.
Patterson, Lee. 1987. Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Pearsall, Derek, ed. 1979. Piers Plowman by William Langland: an edition of the C-text. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 1985. “Editing Medieval Texts: Some Developments and Some Problems”. In Jerome J. McGann, ed., Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation. Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press. 92–106.
———, ed. 2008. William Langland, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C -Te x t. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
———. 2010. “Editing the C Text: The Athlone Press Edition of 1997”. Yearbook of Langland Studies 24: 21– 37.
Ramsey, Roy Vance. 2010. A Revised Edition of the Manly-Rickert Text of the Canter-bury Tales. Lewiston, NY; Queenston, Ont.; Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press.
The Riverside Chaucer. 1987. Larry Benson, gen. ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Robinson, Peter, ed. 1996. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue on CD-ROM. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1997. “A Stemmatic Analysis of the Fifteenth-Century Witnesses to The Wife of Bath’s Prologue”. The Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers 2: 69–132.
———. 2004. “The Witness Relations in Link 1 and the Miller’s Tale”. The Miller’s Tale on CD-ROM. Peter Robinson, ed. Leicester, UK: Scholarly Digital Editions.
———. 2013. “The Concept of the Work in the Digital Age”. Ecdotica 10: 13 – 41.
Russell, George and George Kane, eds. 1997. Piers Plowman: The C Version. Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman, Do-Well, Do-Better and Do-Best. London: Athlone Press.
Salter, Elizabeth and Derek Pearsall, eds. 1967. Piers Plowman. Evanston: North-western University Press.
Schmidt, A. V. C., ed. 2011. Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Ve r s i o n s, 2 vols., Revised ed. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications.
Spisak, James, ed. 1983. Caxton’s Malory: A New Edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur Based on the Pierpont Morgan Copy of William Caxton’s Edition of 1485. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Tanselle, G. Thomas. 1989. A Rationale of Textual Criticism. Philadelphia: Univer-sity of Pennsylvania Press.
Vaughan, Míc ̇eál, ed. 2011. Piers Plowman: The A Version. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Wat s o n, Nicholas and Jacqueline Jenkins. 2006. The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love. University Park: Penn-sylvania State University Press.
The Wife of Bath’s Prologue on CD-ROM. 1996. Peter Robinson, ed. Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press.