Cirrus@Austlit

'Paul Eggert’s The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies builds on his accomplished record as an editor and editorial theorist, most recently in Securing the Past (2009) and Biography of a Book (2013), to, quite fittingly, revise his idea of the literary work and its conceptual and practical connections to editing. As the second half of the title suggests, Eggert foregrounds the role of the reader here in ways that have been more implicit, though hardly obscured, in his previous contributions to the discipline, with the ultimate aim of (re)connecting readerly, book historical, and editorial approaches to “ those vehicles of material textuality that, for simplicity, we call books” (8). Accordingly, the focus of this inquiry is on the editorial presentation of books (that is, of the documents underlying an edition, especially in electronic form) more so than on the artistic and architectural examples that have drawn Eggert’s previous attention, especially in Securing the Past. (Though The Work and the Reader does occasionally reference non-literary examples, such as Venice’s Teatro la Fenice, and draws from philosophical arguments about the ontology of musical works.)' (Introduction)