What Is Authorial Philology? I a Paola Italia, Giulia Raboni, Et Al
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I TAL What is Authorial Philology? I A PAOLA ITALIA, GIULIA RABONI, ET AL. R , ABON A stark departure from traditional philology, What is Authorial Philology? is the first comprehensive treatment of authorial philology as a discipline in its I , , own right. It provides readers with an excellent introduction to the theory ET and practice of editing ‘authorial texts’ alongside an exploration of authorial AL philology in its cultural and conceptual architecture. The originality and . distinction of this work lies in its clear systematization of a discipline whose W autonomous status has only recently been recognised. What is Authorial This pioneering volume offers both a methodical set of instructions on how to read critical editions, and a wide range of practical examples, expanding Philology? 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, Giulia HAT Raboni and their co-authors successfully reconceptualize the authorial text as I S an ever-changing organism, subject to alteration and modification. A UTHO 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 RI AL methods such as the use of the digital medium and its implications. Spanning P PAOLA ITALIA, GIULIA RABONI, ET AL. the whole Italian tradition from Petrarch to Carlo Emilio Gadda, and with H I examples from key works of European literature, this ground-breaking volume LOLO 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 G Y nature of what we read. ? As with all Open Book publications, this entire book is available to read for free on the publisher’s website. Printed and digital editions, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at www.openbookpublishers.com Cover Image: Ludovico Ariosto, Frammenti autografi dell’Orlando furioso, c. 26r, Ferrara, Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, Classe I A. Cover Design by Anna Gatti. book eebook and OA editions also available OPEN ACCESS OBP www.openbookpublishers.com 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. 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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 3 Moroncini 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 vi What is Authorial Philology? 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 89 minuta 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 viii What is Authorial Philology? 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).