External links
- G. Thomas Tanselle papers (his personal archive) in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library
George Thomas Tanselle (born January 29, 1934) is an American textual critic, bibliographer, and book collector, especially known for his work on Herman Melville. He was Vice President of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation from 1978 to 2006. [1]
George Thomas Tanselle was born on January 29, 1934, in Lebanon, Indiana. [2] He received a bachelor's degree from Yale University in 1955. [2] Tanselle attended graduate school at Northwestern University where he studied with Harrison Hayford among others. He received his PhD in 1959 from the department of English where his dissertation was titled Faun at the Barricades: The Life and Work of Floyd Dell . [3] From 1960 through 1978 he taught at the University of Wisconsin. [4] After moving to New York City in 1978, he served as vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation until 2006. [4] He was an adjunct professor of English at Columbia University, and co-editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of the writings of Herman Melville. He was president of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia 1993–2006. He is also a member of the board of directors and textual consultant of the Library of America. [1] He was president of the Grolier Club, the pre-eminent American society of bibliophiles, 1986–1990.
Tanselle held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1969–70), American Council of Learned Societies (1973–74), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (1977–78). [4]
Tanselle absorbed the principles of Walter W. Greg and Fredson Bowers, who developed the theory of textual criticism, a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification and removal of transcription errors in texts, both manuscripts and printed books, in order to create a text which most closely reflects the author's intent. He has been called the "most prominent, consistent, and authoritative defender of the Greg-Bowers approach to editing," which is now the "dominant theoretical and practical position in Anglo-American editing." Tanselle has sought to accommodate legitimate critiques of its limitations, such as the insistence on the difference between substantive and accidentals, that is, the difference between the words and their spelling and punctuation. [5] Tanselle, says one scholar, like Greg and Bowers, postulates the notion of an "ideal 'correct' text, measured against which extant texts show various degrees of 'corruption' that the editor seeks to remove." Tanselle follows this tradition more flexibly, but still comes to rest on the "principle of the author's final intention," which the "editor (or critic) seeks first to understand and then to implement..." This position is opposed to the New Criticism, which rejects the author's intent, since the author's intentions are not relevant specifically by themselves, taken solely, for an artistic work, or "piece of art", once it is finished. [6]
He then applied these principles to the study of American literature. [7] He was particularly active as textual editor for the Northwestern-Newberry edition of the works of Herman Melville to make a critical edition, as approved by The Center for Scholarly Editions. [8]
Books
Selected articles
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is an 1851 novel by American writer Herman Melville. The book is the sailor Ishmael's narrative of the maniacal quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for vengeance against Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that bit off his leg on the ship's previous voyage. A contribution to the literature of the American Renaissance, Moby-Dick was published to mixed reviews, was a commercial failure, and was out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891. Its reputation as a Great American Novel was established only in the 20th century, after the 1919 centennial of its author's birth. William Faulkner said he wished he had written the book himself, and D. H. Lawrence called it "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world" and "the greatest book of the sea ever written". Its opening sentence, "Call me Ishmael", is among world literature's most famous.
Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts (mss) or of printed books. Such texts may range in dates from the earliest writing in cuneiform, impressed on clay, for example, to multiple unpublished versions of a 21st-century author's work. Historically, scribes who were paid to copy documents may have been literate, but many were simply copyists, mimicking the shapes of letters without necessarily understanding what they meant. This means that unintentional alterations were common when copying manuscripts by hand. Intentional alterations may have been made as well, for example, the censoring of printed work for political, religious or cultural reasons.
Bibliography, as a discipline, is traditionally the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology. English author and bibliographer John Carter describes bibliography as a word having two senses: one, a list of books for further study or of works consulted by an author ; the other one, applicable for collectors, is "the study of books as physical objects" and "the systematic description of books as objects".
Billy Budd, Sailor , also known as Billy Budd, Foretopman, is a novella by American writer Herman Melville, left unfinished at his death in 1891. Acclaimed by critics as a masterpiece when a hastily transcribed version was finally published in 1924, it quickly took its place as a classic second only to Moby-Dick among Melville's works. Billy Budd is a "handsome sailor" who strikes and inadvertently kills his false accuser, Master-at-arms John Claggart. The ship's Captain, Edward Vere, recognizes Billy's lack of intent, but claims that the law of mutiny requires him to sentence Billy to be hanged.
Benito Cereno is a novella by Herman Melville, a fictionalized account about the revolt on a Spanish slave ship captained by Don Benito Cereno, first published in three installments in Putnam's Monthly in 1855. The tale, slightly revised, was included in his short story collection The Piazza Tales that appeared in May 1856. According to scholar Merton M. Sealts Jr., the story is "an oblique comment on those prevailing attitudes toward blacks and slavery in the United States that would ultimately precipitate civil war between North and South". The famous question of what had cast such a shadow upon Cereno was used by American author Ralph Ellison as an epigraph to his 1952 novel Invisible Man, excluding Cereno's answer, "The negro." Over time, Melville's story has been "increasingly recognized as among his greatest achievements".
The Piazza Tales is a collection of six short stories by American writer Herman Melville, published by Dix & Edwards in the United States in May 1856 and in Britain in June. Except for the newly written title story, "The Piazza," all of the stories had appeared in Putnam's Monthly between 1853 and 1855. The collection includes what have long been regarded as three of Melville's most important achievements in the genre of short fiction, "Bartleby, the Scrivener", "Benito Cereno", and "The Encantadas", his sketches of the Galápagos Islands.
Northwestern University Press is an American publishing house affiliated with Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. It publishes 70 new titles each year in the areas of continental philosophy, poetry, Slavic and German literary criticism, Chicago regional studies, African American intellectual history, theater and performance studies, and fiction. Parneshia Jones is director of the press. It is a member of the Association of University Presses.
Douglas Allen Anderson is an American writer and editor on the subjects of fantasy and medieval literature, specializing in textual analysis of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. He is a winner of the Mythopoeic Award for scholarship.
"The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles", is a novella by American author Herman Melville. First published in Putnam's Magazine in 1854, it consists of eleven philosophical "Sketches" on the Galápagos Islands, then frequently known as the "Enchanted Islands" from the treatcherous winds and currents around them. It was collected in The Piazza Tales in 1856. The Encantadas was a success with the critics and contains some of Melville's "most memorable prose".
Hershel Parker is an American professor of English and literature, noted for his research into the works of Herman Melville. Parker is the H. Fletcher Brown Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware. He is co-editor with Harrison Hayford of the Norton Critical Edition of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, and the General Editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, which, with the publication of volume 13, "Billy Budd, Sailor" and Other Uncompleted Writings, is now (2017) complete in fifteen volumes. Parker is the author of a two-volume biography of Herman Melville published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Parker also edited the first ever one-volume edition of Melville's complete poetry, Herman Melville: Complete Poems, published by the Library of America in 2019.
The bibliography of Herman Melville includes magazine articles, book reviews, other occasional writings, and 15 books. Of these, seven books were published between 1846 and 1853, seven more between 1853 and 1891, and one in 1924. Melville was 26 when his first book was published, and his last book was not released until 33 years after his death. At the time of his death he was on the verge of completing the manuscript for his first novel in three decades, Billy Budd, and had accumulated several large folders of unpublished verse.
Fredson Thayer Bowers (1905–1991) was an American bibliographer and scholar of textual editing.
"Hawthorne and His Mosses" (1850) is an essay and critical review by Herman Melville of the short story collection Mosses from an Old Manse written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1846. Published pseudonymously by "a Virginian spending July in Vermont", it appeared in The Literary World magazine in two issues: August 17 and August 24, 1850. It has been called the "most famous literary manifesto of the American nineteenth century."
Textual scholarship is an umbrella term for disciplines that deal with describing, transcribing, editing or annotating texts and physical documents.
Alfred Lavern Bush is an American curator, writer, and editor. He was Curator of Western Americana at the Princeton University Library. Bush was an editor of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, where his study of Jefferson images produced The Life Portraits of Thomas Jefferson (1962). He is the author of numerous books and scholarly articles, many of which pertain to Native Americans.
Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia is a learned society founded in 1947 at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville to promote interest in books and manuscripts, maps, printing, the graphic arts, and bibliography and textual criticism. The society sponsors exhibitions, contests for student book collectors and Virginia printers, an international speakers’ series, and an active publications program which has produced over 175 separate publications in addition to its journal Studies in Bibliography.
David Greetham was an American literary critic and the founder of the Society for Textual Scholarship.
Harrison Mosher Hayford was a scholar of American literature, most prominently of Herman Melville, a book-collector, and a textual editor. He taught at Northwestern University from 1942 until his retirement in 1986. He was a leading figure in the post-World War II generation of Melville scholars who mounted the Melville Revival. He was General Editor of the Northwestern-Newberry The Writings of Herman Melville published by Northwestern University Press, which established reliable texts for all of Melville's works by using techniques of textual criticism.
Walter E. Bezanson was a scholar and critic of American literature best known for his studies of Herman Melville and contributions to the Melville revival that restored the writer to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s. Bezanson's research and editorial work rescued from neglect Mevlille's unappreciated epic poem, Clarel, and he published essays on Moby-Dick that were widely cited and reprinted.
Ruth Mortimer was an American rare books curator and librarian, known for her work at both Harvard University and Smith College. From 1988 to 1992, Mortimer served as the president of the Bibliographical Society of America, the first woman to inhabit the role.
