What is Authorial Philology?

Pim Verhulst, Dirk Van Hulle, Olga Beloborodova, Carmela Marranchino, Francesco Feriozzi, Margherita Centenari, Sònia Boadas, Marco Presotto, Giulia Raboni, Paola Italia

Description

A stark departure from traditional philology, What is Authorial Philology? is the first comprehensive treatment of authorial philology as a discipline in its own right. It provides readers with an excellent introduction to the theory and practice of editing ‘authorial texts’ alongside an exploration of authorial philology in its cultural and conceptual architecture. The originality and distinction of this work lies in its clear systematization of a discipline whose autonomous status has only recently been recognised (at least in Italy), though its roots may extend back as far as Giorgio Pasquali.

This pioneering volume offers both a methodical set of instructions on how to read critical editions, and a wide range of practical examples, expanding upon the conceptual and methodological apparatus laid out in the first two chapters. By presenting a thorough account of the historical and theoretical framework through which authorial philology developed, Paola Italia and Giulia Raboni successfully reconceptualize the authorial text as an ever-changing organism, subject to alteration and modification.

What is Authorial Philology? will be of great didactic value to students and researchers alike, providing readers with a fuller understanding of the rationale behind different editing practices, and addressing both traditional and newer methods such as the use of the digital medium and its implications. Spanning the whole Italian tradition from Petrarch to Carlo Emilio Gadda, this ground-breaking volume provokes us to consider important questions concerning a text’s dynamism, the extent to which an author is ‘agentive’, and, most crucially, about the very nature of what we read.
 

Sujets

• Textbook
• Philology

Informations

• Publié par: Open Book Publishers
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781800640269
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

WHAT IS AUTHORIAL PHILOLOGY?

What is Authorial Philology?
Paola Italia, Giulia Raboni, et al.





https://www.openbookpublishers.com
© 2021 Paola Italia and Giulia Raboni. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapters’ authors.




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text and to make commercial use of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:
Paola Italia, Giulia Raboni, et al. What is Authorial Philology? Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0224
Copyright and permissions for the reuse of many of the images included in this publication differ from the above. Copyright and permissions information for images is provided separately in the List of Illustrations.
Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher.
In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0224#copyright
Further details about CC BY licenses are available at, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web
Updated digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0224#resources
ISBN Paperback: 9781800640238 
ISBN Hardback: 9781800640245
ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781800640252
ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781800640269
ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9781800640276
ISBN XML: 9781800640283
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0224
Cover Image: Ludovico Ariosto, Frammenti autografi dell’ Orlando furioso , Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, Ferrara c. 26r, Classe I A. Courtesy Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, all rights reserved. Cover Design by Anna Gatti.

Contents
Preface
vii
Introduction to the English Translation
ix
Acknowledgments
xi
Introduction
xiii
Paola Italia and Giulia Raboni
A definition of authorial philology
xiii
The critical edition in authorial philology
xiii
(Authorial) philology and critics (of variants)
xiv
From Petrarch’s Canzoniere to modern texts
xvi
History, methods, examples
xvii
One discipline, different skills
xviii
Digital editions and common representations
xx
1.
History
1
Paola Italia and Giulia Raboni
1.1
Author’s variants from a historical Perspective
1
1.2
Methods throughout history: from Ubaldini to Moroncini
3
1.3
Authorial philology and criticism of variants
6
1.4
Authorial philology and critique génétique
11
1.5
Dante Isella’s authorial philology
13
1.6
Authorial philology in the digital era
18
1.7
Authorial philology in the latest decade
22
2.
Methods
29
Paola Italia
2.1
The text
29
2.2
The apparatus
37
2.3
Variants
47
2.4
Marginalia and alternative variants
57
2.5
Diacritic signs and abbreviations
59
2.6
How to prepare a critical edition
62
3.
Italian Examples
71
Paola Italia and Giulia Raboni
3.1
Petrarch: The Codice degli abbozzi
71
3.2
Pietro Bembo: The Prose della volgar lingua
76
3.3
Tasso: The Rime d’amore
83
3.4
Alessandro Manzoni: Fermo e Lucia and the seconda minuta
89
3.5
Giacomo Leopardi’s Canti
98
3.6.
Carlo Emilio Gadda’s work
107
4.
European Examples
113
4.1
Lope de Vega’s La Dama Boba
113
Marco Presotto and Sònia Boadas
4.2
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Poems
122
Margherita Centenari
4.3
Jane Austen’s The Watsons
133
Francesco Feriozzi
4.4
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu
139
Carmela Marranchino
4.5
Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot
149
Olga Beloborodova, Dirk Van Hulle and Pim Verhulst
References
161
Glossary
181
List of Illustrations
187

Preface
Almost a century after its birth, and after the publication of many editions across the whole gamut of Italian literature, authorial philology has only recently been recognized as an autonomous discipline — as one separate from traditional philology (philology of the copy, which specifically studies variants introduced through transmission); as having its own history and its own methodologies; and as able to provide increasingly refined research tools that can deepen our knowledge of texts through the analysis of their internal history. In this way, authorial philology has led to critical achievements of major note.
This renewed interest is due, on one hand, to the high degree of theoretical evolution achieved by the discipline in the context of Italian literature, in which pioneering critical editions have been produced and have established themselves as effective reference models even with regard to the European scene. This interest is also due, on the other hand, to the ever-growing technical developments in the methodologies by which variants are represented and in the tools for reproducing manuscripts. In recent years, such tools and methodologies, with the introduction of the digitalization of images, have revolutionized the work of philologists, offering far superior fidelity compared to the physical reproductions of the past, and giving the possibility to work interactively on the image, not only by enlarging single papers or details, but also through the synoptic vision of witnesses housed in archives and libraries that are often very far apart. Also notable here are innovations in applying graphic contrast filters that allow the researcher to achieve visual results that are far superior even to those provided by the direct consultation of the manuscript.
This book aims to provide the first synthetic overview of this discipline, charted through its history (see Chapter 1), which has not yet been systematically investigated so far, through the methods (see Chapter 2) used in daily philological work, and above all through concrete examples set out in chronological order (see Chapter 3). We will examine the problem of authorial variants in critical editions of some of the most important works of Italian literature, from the fourteenth to the twentieth century, from Petrarch’s Codice degli abbozzi to the Rime d’amore by Torquato Tasso, from Giacomo Leopardi’s Canti to Alessandro Manzoni’s Fermo e Lucia , and onto Carlo Emilio Gadda’s novels and short stories. In an Italian context, these authors’ names are intricately bound up with the work of the philologists Gianfranco Contini and Dante Isella, who promoted a fruitful interaction between criticism of variants and authorial philology, with Isella developing this interaction into a full-fledged philological discipline with its own system of representation in his philological work and teaching. The development of this discipline is also indebted to the major achievements of the philological school of Pavia. We, the authors of this book, carried out our training in Pavia, where we found a stimulating environment enlivened by the contributions of major scholars such as Cesare Bozzetti, Franco Gavazzeni, Luigi Poma and Cesare Segre. There, with many of our fellow students we gathered the fruits of that active decade between the end of the sixties and early eighties, a period recalled by Isella himself in a lecture held in Pavia in 1999.
On that occasion, Isella expressed the hope that someone ‘would take the initiative to historicize the overall picture and carefully retrace the times and the facts, identifying the directions in which we have been going so far and recognizing the specific character of the Italian school in relation to the theoretical positions and editorial initiatives of other countries such as Germany, France and Spain’ (Isella 2009a: 241). He also recalled how most editions of ‘ in fieri texts’ were constituted ‘by works undertaken in the Pavia area’, works that had allowed the development of ‘ecdotic models and criteria that can be perfectly used without us having to invent each time different, untested solutions’ ( ibid.: 244). This book aims to offer a first contribution to this yet unwritten history, and to also act as a token of gratitude for such a great teacher.
Milan, 2010
Paola Italia an