Society for Textual Scholarship

The Society for Textual Scholarship is an international organization of scholars working in textual studies, editing and editorial theory, electronic textualities, and issues of textual culture within and across a wide range of disciplines. The Society welcomes all those whose work explores the ideological structures and material processes that shape the creation, transmission, reception, production, and interpretation of texts, broadly conceived.

Our annual conference and biannual journal, Textual Cultures, bring together scholars from disciplines such as literature (in all languages), history, musicology, classical and biblical studies, ethnic studies, women’s/gender/LGBTQ+ studies, philosophy, art history, legal history, history of science and technology, computer science, book history, bibliography, media studies, library science, lexicography, epigraphy, paleography, codicology, cinema studies, theater, linguistics, and textual and literary theory.

2024 CONFERENCE: TEXT UNDER PRESSURE

Our 2024 conference, hosted by the University of Tulsa, will take place June 6 – 8.

Tulsa, Oklahoma, perhaps more than any other American city, invites us to consider the deep roots and long legacies of cultural conflict. Set in the middle of “Indian Territory” carved out for indigenous tribes forcibly displaced from the southeast, it became a supply depot for new railroads, a ranching capital, an oil boomtown, a Western Art Deco mecca, and the home of “Black Wall Street,” the vibrant African American community leveled by a brutal massacre in 1921. In the city’s current incarnation, the stresses of history are sometimes visible and sometimes glimpsed in transformation: Tulsa flaunts its vintage neon signage and riverfront parks, celebrates counter-culture heroes Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, and hosts several museums within the former paper plant that supplied newsprint to area newspapers.

In this setting, steeped in many varieties of cultural encounter and collision, marked by repression, assertion, protest, and celebration, it is fitting that we explore the textuality of pressure. Pressure flattens, coerces, contains, and restrains–forces that can precipitate paradoxical responses: collapse, transformation, resistance, liberation. Texts manifest many varieties of creative, social, and political pressure in their expressive content and form. But text is also often a matter of technological pressure: printing techniques rely on the pressure of a platen, roller, or squeegee; other recording and playback processes require the pressure of a stylus, a chisel, a nib, or the gentle pulse of a wifi wave. Such pressurized circumstances, symbolic and material, reveal core issues of textual production, circulation, reception, and contestation. 

For more information, or to register, please go to the CONFERENCE 2024: INFORMATION AND REGISTRATION page.

TEXTUAL CULTURES 16.2

The new issue of Textual Cultures (16.2) for fall 2023 is out, with path-breaking essays and reviews in editorial theory, book history, and bibliography, addressing texts dating from 1300 BCE through the current moment.

• “A Rationale of Trans-inclusive Bibliography” by Heidi Craig, Laura Estill, and Kris L. May
• “Two Collections: Type on the Page at the Houghton and Newberry Libraries” by Paul F. Gehl
• “Walt Whitman’s Trunk” by Kevin McMullen, Kenneth M. Price, and Stefan Schöberlein
• “Reforming Oral Tradition by Elias Lönnrot and Otto Manninen: Nineteenth-century Textual Processes, Textualization, and Genetic Criticism” by Niina Hämäläinen and Hanna Karhu
• “Pourquoi le changement codique a une force créatrice: L’exemple des plans littéraires bilingues d’Alexandre Pouchkine” by Julia Holter
• “The Digitization of post-World War II Italian Literary Journals: The State-of-the-Art” by Elena Grazioli
• “Le ‘Making of’ de Eichmann in Jerusalem et quelques foyers de sa reception” by Michelle-Irène Brudny
• “Methods for Exploring Indeterminate Textuality in John Cage’s Practices of Bibliographic Encoding: The Case of M” by Zack Lischer-Katz
• “Testi teatrali tra performance e lettura: Il caso studio de Gli oltraggi d’amore e di fortuna dell’Accademico Intronato Alessandro Donzellini” by Anna Terroni
• “Questioni di filologia dantesca: Le parole del cibo nella Commedia” by Francesca Cupelloni
• “Dante and Aristotle on Voluntary and Involuntary Action: Nicomachean Ethics 3.1 in Inferno 5 and Paradiso 3–5” by Teodolinda Barolini
• “The Original Wordle” by Gary A. Rendsburg

Published twice a year, Textual Cultures invites essays from scholars around the world in English, French, German, Spanish and Italian. All articles will appear also with abstracts in English. For instructions regarding submissions, please see the journal’s information page.

Our randomized header images show details from the following sources:

Placidus Caloiro et Oliva, manuscript portolan atlas of the Mediterranean Sea, ca. 1641. VAULT folio Ayer MS map 34, Newberry Library.

Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (galley proof), 1901. Fine Arts and Special Collections Department, Cleveland Public Library. Via The Charles W. Chesnutt Archive.

Leo Tolstoy, drawing and manuscript page from the first version of War and Peace, ca. 1860. Ink and pencil on paper. The L. Tolstoy Museum. Via Russian Culture.

Unidentified artist, portrait of Phillis Wheatley. Pendleton Lithography Company, c. 1834. From the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Mrs. Donald Fenn.

Canon table, 17th-century manuscript with selections from the Ethiopic Bible, probably commissioned by Emperor Iyasu. British Library Or. 481.

Pixelated scan of Frances Burney, Evelina, or, The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, volume II, London 1779. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Scanned pages of Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Review, January 1855. Via Google Books.

Portrait of Ionuses Bassa, an official in Sultan Suleiman Chan’s army, and his wife, from Richard Knolles, The Generall Historie of the Turkes, from The first beginning of that Nation to the rising of the Ottoman Familie. London: Adam Islip, 1603. Rare Books Department of Special Collections at the J. Willard Marriott Library, The University of Utah.

Austrian music manuscript Lewis T673, ca. 1300. Free Library of Philadelphia.

Unidentified artist, plate showing enslaved workers manufacturing indigo. From Pierre Pomet, Histoire generale des drogues, traitant des plantes, des animaux, et des mineraux… Paris: J.-B. Loyson & A. Pillon, E. Ducastin, 1694. Via Wellcome Collection.

Unidentified artist, photograph showing the construction of the National Library of Brazil, ca. 1909. Via Atlas Obscura.

A document signed by Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart, marquise de Montespan (1641–1707). Convent of St. Joseph, Paris, 9 February 1689. Morgan Library & Museum.

Manuscript illumination of troubadours by an anonymous German artist, 14^th century. Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Emily Dickinson, [All men for honor hardest work], Amherst Manuscript # 128/Franklin # 1205/Johnson Poems # 1193. Amherst College Digital Collections.

Printed sutra scroll from the Hyakumantō Darani (百万塔陀羅尼), One Million Pagodas and Dharani Prayers, 756 CE. Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo, Japan. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Comparative versions of “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” by Jorge Luis Borges, originally written in 1941 and 1944, as transcribed and digitized by Ricardo Vázquez and Christopher D. Warnes. Borges Center, University of Pittsburgh.

Gustave Doré, illustration for Dante’s Inferno, plate VI, for the beginning of Canto II: “Day was departing.” This copy from the 1867 translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Cover of Zitkála-šá, American Indian Stories, Hayworth Publishing, 1921. From the Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University. Via Scribbling Women student blog post by Anna Leoncio.