The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen

by John L. Bryant

Theorists, scholars, and critics usually consider literary works to be fixed objects, assuming that any variations in the text of a work should be stabilized, reduced, eliminated. John Bryant urges that these variations create valuable records of the interactions between the artist and society. Preprint revisions, revised editions, adaptations for film, and expurgations for children are among the many forms of flux that shape literary works and position them relative to their audiences. Fully understanding the life of a literary work in its cultural situation requires recognizing the fluidity of text, and the present work makes the first coherent theoretical, critical, and editorial approach to the study of revision.
The author develops his theory and its critical application drawing upon the example of Melville's Typee, using its various versions to present protocols for fluid text analysis. He shows how the mountain of scholarly material comprising the fluid text can be presented by a partnership of book and computer screen, in ways that offer new opportunities, insights,and pleasures for scholars and readers.
The Fluid A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen is written in a clear and accessible style and will appeal to scholars and students in editorial theory, literary criticism and analysis, and anyone concerned with the information architecture of complex literary works in digital media.
John Bryant is Professor of English, Hofstra University. His most recent book is an edition of Melville's Tales, Poems, and Other Writings .

208 pages, Paperback

First published October 29, 2002

Reviews

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Fluid Text rests on a simple principle: no published work is an island unto itself.

While this may make sense to any literary theorist, Bryant's focus isn't just the social, political, economic, personal influences on the text, but that the islands form an archipelago of text.

Aside from all the outside influence, a literary scholar also need to be aware that the text itself changes over time and the work you have inyou hand at an given time is not necessarily the primary text.

The main example in Bryant's work is the three editions of Typee from Melville that were released within years of each other but Melville and his editors. The UK edition had different phrasing than the original US edition, which was cut for a second edition to make it more tolerable to the social norms of the time, but accepted by Melville as he felt those parts of the work detracted from the main plot.

I'm thinking about assigning the coda and last chanter to some of my classes. It's where Bryant tries to envision a way to showcase changes to a text over time so that students and scholars get a more thorough view of the text rather than the personal one they develop based on a familiarity with a single edition (Bryant points out the problem of this method in his example of paperback texts using censored versions of Book of the Month club text vs. paperbacks that returned to the original printing.)

There's a lot to think about in the book. Not always answers, but openings to things that publishers, scholars and teachers need to think about when teaching or editing.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Bryant offers new solutions to age-old problems of textual editing, introducing a new apparatus to aid the reader in tracing the evolution of a text. Within the realm of digitized works, I think his ideas and the possibilities are particularly interesting.

[Jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting concept. Boring, boring book.