Editing Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Book excerpt: First published in 1978, this collection of papers, first presented at the thirteenth annual Conference on Editorial Problems in 1977, focuses on the editing of nineteenth-century fiction. Four of the papers are devoted to single authors – Dickens, Thackeray, Hardy and Zola – while the fifth takes its principle examples from Hawthorne, Twain and Crane. Looking at a range of works from English, American and French literature, this volume demonstrates the number of different attitudes that exist towards the editorial process as well as the different ambitions for the texts that scholars seek to produce. This book will be of interest to those studying and editing nineteenth-century literature.