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Annotation and commentary have been little considered in discussions about scholarly editing, despite being some of the most used segments of the scholarly edition. What treatments do exist mostly focus on practical aspects about the quality and style of annotation. This essay analyses some of the theoretical assumptions that underlie annotational practices with specific reference to the editing of modernist works. It puts into question, first of all, some common perceptions about annotation, which is sometimes viewed as interfering with the readerly experience, to address the matter of the reader: what kind of reader are annotations for? Because annotations are a contextual and hermeneutic device to bridge the gap between the literary work that has come to us from the past and the reader's present, not all readers are served by a single style of annotation. Conversely, to accept this hermeneutic value also means that annotation is never neutral or objective; while editorial practices tend to avoid open interpretive annotation, annotations nonetheless direct the process of reading and interpretation. Annotation thus participates in the sense-making process and, like all other editorial interventions, it represents an act of mediation.

In 1967, the French scholar Louis Hay published an opinion piece in Le Monde under the title “Des manuscrits, pour quoi faire?” Hay’s piece came at the start of a critical practice, called “critiqu...

What happens when we consider the traditional, ‘Romantic’ notions of inspiration and imagination in the light of the often messy, chaotic traces of the creative process that we observe in a poet’s drafts and manuscripts? Although the archive may at first sight belie that there is such a thing as inspiration at all, Wim Van Mierlo contends that composition and inspiration are not simply each other’s opposite. Instead, he argues that inspiration and the imagination are very much integral to composition and revision. In discussing Wordsworth’s and Yeats’s composition methods—how they begin and complete their poems—he puts into question the perceived dichotomy between ‘first’ and ‘second thoughts’, original composition and revision. Adopting a cognitive perspective, he finds that there are no grounds to accept that revisions are somehow less inspired and creative. The creative economy at work in revision is no less the result of a ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Library & Information History on 18 June 2019, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17583489.2019.1571811.

Joyce’s works have been blessed—some might say: burdened—with a vast body of critical writing. While that body of writing is not all academic—it began with a good number of critical appreciations by Joyce’s friends, supporters and acolytes in literary journals and booklength studies that appeared alongside book reviews and critical notices in the popular press—it is certainly worth reflecting on how academic writing has shaped and guided the reception of Joyce’s œuvre. That this is not purely an academic question is contained in the fact that readers (whether they belong to that first generation of readers puzzled by Joyce’s radically modernist style in the thirties and forties or to the vast class of Joyce enthusiasts and graduate students who struggle with the allusive detail or narrative and intertextual complexity of the later writings) so often approach Joyce through the critics. 1 Sifting through the various responses to academic Joyce criticism, a striking paradox emerges: on the one hand, an utterly hostile dismissal of Joyce criticism, amounting to a veritable industry with all its connotations of being overbearing and overproduced, comes from readers who find it hard to cope with the abstruse, self-indulgent discourse of academic criticism; on the other hand, the continuing use of “classics” of Joyce criticism, such as Ellmann’s biography, Gifford’s and McHugh’s annotations, Kenner, Hayman and Hart, Glasheen, Atherton, Campbell and Robinson, Tyndall