Making the Archives Talk

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1 The Scholarly Editor as Biographer

2 Editorial Theory and the Act of Submission

3 Fair Copy, Authorial Intention, and Versioning

4 Alcohol and Drinking in Sister Carrie

5 Double Quotes and Double Meanings in Jennie Gerhardt

6 Editing Private Papers: Three Examples from Dreiser

7 Toxic Words and the Editor

8 Did F. Scott Fitzgerald Have the Right Publisher?

9 The Internal Chronology of Tender Is the Night

10 Annotating Mr. Fitzgerald

11 Keeper of the Flame: Editing the Literary Remains of William Styron

12 The End Is Near

Acknowledgments

Index

“James West adopts and defends a biographer’s approach to textual studies and scholarly editing. For the biographer, there is no source of information, no point of view about the evidence, and no conflicting opinion that is rejected or neglected. The central theme of this book is that textual editing involves constructing narrative explanations for the surviving evidence, giving us purchase on the interpretive consequences of textual variation. As West says, ‘This is fun. It’s what textual editors do.’”

—Peter L. Shillingsburg, Loyola University