Textual Transformations: Purposing and Repurposing Books from Richard Baxter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• Published in: Bunyan studies no. 24; pp. 135 - 138
• Main Author: Whelan, Timothy
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.01.2020
• Subjects: 18th century; Audiences; Autobiographies; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834); Essays; Friendship; Historical text analysis; Libraries; Popularity; Professional relationships; Publishing; Writers; United Kingdom > UK; United States > US; England
• ISSN: 0954-0970

[...]editors wielded extraordinary power in creating editions that determined an audience's response to the writer and the text. In professing their indebtedness to the work of Professor Rivers in their preface, the editors note the undeniable value of her contribution to the study of English book history and print culture throughout the long eighteenth century, with one passage particularly worth quoting for its relevance to the essays in Textual Transformations and the object of the volume's creation: The history of a book is often the history of multiple, sometimes competing, agencies as its text is re-presented, and its sense redirected and transformed in ways that its original author might hardly recognize' (p. 4). [...]authors, editors, readers, and collaborators, as well as printers, publishers, and booksellers, all helped to determine the form, meaning, dissemination, and, in many cases, transformation of eighteenth-century texts, of which Textual Transformations provides a dozen worthy examples.