WORK
A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism
McGann's 1983 Chicago monograph that dismantled the intentionalist editorial tradition — Greg-Bowers copy-text theory — and replaced it with the social-text framework.
A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983) was McGann's first major theoretical intervention in editorial studies. The book systematically challenged the Greg-Bowers tradition, which had dominated Anglo-American textual scholarship since the 1950s and held that the editor's task was to recover the author's final intention by identifying and removing the corruptions introduced by non-authorial agents. McGann argued that authorial final intention was not a recoverable fact but a theoretical construct — and a construct that systematically erased the contributions of editors, publishers, compositors, and other agents whose work was constitutive of the published text. The book laid the foundation for the social-text framework that McGann would develop across his subsequent career.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book was controversial when it appeared. The Greg-Bowers tradition had produced editorial projects of enormous institutional investment — scholarly editions of major authors underwritten by universities, presses, and funding agencies — and McGann's argument implied that the theoretical premises of these projects were unsound. The controversy