Turn of the Screw

[Lobstergirl]

So a friend of mine read and rated Turn of the Screw and it went through my feed. I have read two different editions of Turn of the Screw. Yet in my feed, it did not show as read; there was the giant UGB screaming "Want to Read." The editions I had read had been separated out from the others (mistakenly I believe). So had these editions:

http://www.goodreads.com/work/edition...

I know that we often keep separate works which contain significant additional material. However, I think this rule should only apply when the significant additional material is by the same author. So if something contained Turn of the Screw plus two other stories, we would separate that from just Turn of the Screw.

But the editions above and the Norton Critical Editions contain the original James text, plus essays and criticism about the James text. I think, in fact I feel very strongly, that these need to stay combined with all other editions of Turn of the Screw.

I haven't gone and looked at every Norton Critical Edition of every classic, but it will be very wrong if these have all been separated out. The Norton Moby Dicks need to be grouped with every other Moby Dick, and the Norton Pride and Prejudices need to be grouped with every other Pride and Prejudice. If there has already been a discussion about this, I missed it.

In support of this position, I'll add that while some editions of the classics only contain the text of the classic, many more editions contain an introduction or prologue or something that goes by another name, which is a critical essay about the work. And we never separate those out.

[Victoria]

I rather agree with this. If the main material of the book is the original text by the same author with merely "additional" material to compliment it, then it stands that the work itself is not different, but has been added on to. I'm willing to be persuaded, but I can definitely see your point here!

[vicki_girl]

I support keeping them separate. For the record I own the following edition:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12...

This is one of the Norton Critical Editions (NCE). I had separated it, and put a note, but someone seems to have ignored it.

I decided to separate it because the additional material was a significant portion of the book. I don't have it in front of me right now, but from memory the story "Turn of the Screw" was only ~20% of the text of the book. The other ~80% was essays, analysis etc. To me, if I read this (it's still TBR), I would be reading something very different than just the original story. I would not combine this any more than I would combine "The Turn of the Screw" with "The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories".

ETA: Just to clarify, I think there is a difference between a (relatively) short prologue/introduction of 10-20 pages, and the NCE where the majority of the book is the analysis of the work.

[Lobstergirl]

I recombined the Norton "Turns of the Screw." I left the Bedford/St. Martin's "Turns of the Screw" separated (linked to in post #1) so people could see how they were separate, and the librarian notes. But I think those should be combined too, and I don't think the primary author should be Peter G. Beidler, but Henry James.

The NCE's have been in the database forever and I've never seen any of them separated until now. So it seems to me this should have come up for discussion as a librarian issue, rather than you deciding what the policy would be, vicki-girl. This is a major edition of works of literature. I often seek out the NCE to read when I'm reading a particular classic. And I don't want it to appear, in my feed, on my shelves, in a listopia, when I'm in editions view, etc., like I haven't read Madame Bovary or The Trial or Crime and Punishment or whatever it is because someone decided all those editions should be separated from every other edition of those works.

GR policy is to lump abridgements in with the original work. An abridgement might contain 50% less text than the original. So for one thing, just to be consistent we should keep the NCE's with the originals.

Another thing: perhaps for The Turn of the Screw, the extra essays were the majority of the book. But this is because TOS is a novella. For a full length novel, the novel itself is going to be the bulk of the book, and the extra essays are going to be <50%.

[Lobstergirl]

vicki_girl wrote: "I think there is a difference between a (relatively) short prologue/introduction of 10-20 pages, and the NCE where the majority of the book is the analysis of the work."

I happened across a Bantam edition of, I think it was a Flaubert novel, in the bookstore the other day. I was surprised to see that a whole bunch of essays and commentary had been tacked on to the end of the novel. It wasn't just a 10-20 page intro. They were clearly trying to do the same thing Norton does, but it wasn't quite as extensive. This must be a new thing with Bantam editions. And we shouldn't start separating out Bantam, either.

[Lobstergirl]

I feel like if I read an abridgement, I would be reading something very different from the original story. And to be clear, some of these abridgements are things where they take a work meant for adults, and grind it down to something for 5th or 6th graders, with a vastly reduced vocabulary.