Table Of ContentRevised Pages
Proofs of Genius
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editorial theory and literary criticism
George Bornstein, Series Editor
Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities,
edited by George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams
Contemporary German Editorial Theory, edited by Hans Walter Gabler,
George Bornstein, and Gillian Borland Pierce
The Hall of Mirrors: Drafts & Fragments and the End of Ezra Pound’s Cantos,
by Peter Stoicheff
Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing,
by Marta L. Werner
Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice, Third Edition,
by Peter L. Shillingsburg
The Literary Text in the Digital Age, edited by Richard J. Finneran
The Margins of the Text, edited by D. C. Greetham
A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos,
edited by Lawrence S. Rainey
Much Labouring: The Texts and Authors of Yeats’s First Modernist Books,
by David Holdeman
Resisting Texts: Authority and Submission in Constructions of Meaning,
by Peter L. Shillingsburg
The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture,
edited by George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle
Collaborative Meaning in Medieval Scribal Culture: The Otho Laȝamon,
by Elizabeth J. Bryan
Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books, by Nicholas Frankel
Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books,
by William W. E. Slights
The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen, by John Bryant
Textual Awareness: A Genetic Study of Late Manuscripts by Joyce, Proust, and Mann
by Dirk Van Hulle
The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age, edited by Amy E. Earhart and
Andrew Jewell
Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850,
edited by George Hutchinson and John K. Young
The Texuality of Soulwork: Jack Kerouac’s Quest for Spontaneous Prose,
by Tim Hunt
Proofs of Genius: Collected Editions from the American Revolution to the Digital Age,
by Amanda Gailey
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Proofs of Genius
Collected Editions from
the American Revolution
to the Digital Age
Amanda Gailey
University of Michigan Press
Ann Arbor
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Acknowledgments
I am indebted to many people who were generous with their time and sup-
port as I wrote this book. Kenneth M. Price offered crucial advice in the
early stages, and he and Susan Belasco read the whole draft, making in-
valuable suggestions. George Bornstein offered a careful reading and en-
couragement. Thomas Dwyer, formerly of the University of Michigan Press,
encouraged me to expand the scope of the book to its current form. My
experience years ago working on the Whitman Archive first led me to think
about the history and significance of editing, and the Archive’s resources
were later critical to thinking through Whitman’s complex relationship to
literary collection. The staff and affiliated faculty of the Center for Digi-
tal Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska- Lincoln have
been continually helpful in consulting about digital editing. I especially
thank my friends and colleagues Elizabeth Lorang, Andrew Jewell, Brett
Barney, and Katherine Walter for their support.
Portions of some of these chapters were presented at the Society for Tex-
tual Scholarship, where I received valuable feedback and encouragement:
in particular, Martha Nell Smith and Peter Shillingsburg offered comments
and queries that helped shape the direction of the chapter on Cold War
editing. Additionally, Bethany Nowviskie, Amy Earhart, Ed Folsom, and
Melissa Homestead answered crucial questions, and Jerome McGann made
very helpful suggestions that strengthened the final chapter in particular.
My readers for the University of Michigan Press gave extremely helpful
feedback. The Peoria Public Library sent me scans of a fascinating docu-
ment in their special collections, and Leo D. Blake of the Walt Whitman
House sent me materials that helped me understand Whitman’s difficulties
with his tomb.
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viii acknowledgments
Most of all, I thank my daughter, Millie, and son, Ned, who patiently
cooperated as their mother finished this book; my parents, Jerry and Vicky
Gailey, who were continually supportive; and my husband, Leo Iacono, who
read it again and again.
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Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter 1. America Collecting Itself: National Identity and
Intellectual Property in the Early Republic 10
Chapter 2. Dickinson’s Remains 33
Chapter 3. Whitman’s Shrines 55
Chapter 4. Cold War Editing and the Rise of the
“American Literature Industry” 83
Chapter 5. The Death of the Author Has Been
Greatly Exaggerated 107
Notes 141
Index 157
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Introduction
This book originates from my interest in the history of literary editing, par-
ticularly in how it has shaped my own field of American literature. How has
the way we organize, package, and represent literature impacted the cul-
ture in which it is produced? The subject of editing seems straightforward,
and to its critics even dry,1 but editorial choices have stealthily shaped the
American literary canon for centuries, forging authorial legacies, producing
regional and national propaganda, and generally working as a determinant
for what and how we consider American literature. There are many kinds
of editing, of course, including commercial editors who work with authors
to publish their texts2 in magazines or books for the first time, consultants
who improve the readability of a work, scholars who treat historical materi-
als, and so on— editing is really a broad term that includes a range of labor
that has grown increasingly specialized, from the early stationers who edit-
ed, printed, and sold books in one shop to the highly segmented scholarly
and commercial markets of today. But through the radical transformations
of the American literary marketplace from the eighteenth to the twenty-
first century, one kind of editing has held firm as the gold standard, as the
way we assert the lasting value of an author and his or her works within the
canon: the creation of collected editions.
From the earliest days of the Republic when printer Francis Bailey
helped produce a collected edition of Philip Freneau, “the Poet of the Revo-
lution,” to the digital age, when scholars at research universities collaborate
to create a dynamic and ever-g rowing collected edition of the works of Walt
Whitman, collected editions have powerfully but for the most part silently
helped shape the way authorship and textuality have been viewed in the
American cultural imaginary. This book examines how collected editions
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2 proofs of genius
have helped shape American literature, erecting monuments to individual
people on the cultural landscape. My study does not attempt to be compre-
hensive, but instead examines several important periods and cases in the
development of the genre within the American national context. In doing
so it looks at how representative authors, editors, publishers, and readers
have used the collected edition to build national and regional cultural iden-
tity, to assert intellectual property, to market books, to construct feminized
and private literary marketplaces, to manage authorial reputation, to influ-
ence the humanities, and to construct the field of digital literary scholar-
ship. A more encyclopedic, international examination of the collected edi-
tion— a massive undertaking— would also be valuable to book history, but
my focus on American collected editions allows this study to more clearly
examine the way the genre has functioned within a specific national liter-
ary economy, helping to forge an American literary canon and providing
an aspirational standard for professional and amateur authors, as well as
publishers and editors, as those roles were becoming defined and redefined.
This introduction will describe the book’s working definition of “collected
edition,” discuss how the concept of genius provided a motivation for many
of the volumes, and offer a brief overview of how the collected edition has
helped build a national literary identity.
1. Defining “Collected Edition”
Historical shifts in the genre of the collected edition demand that any wide-
ranging study work with a flexible understanding of the form. Except when
they provide illuminating examples, I have omitted collected editions of theo-
logical, political, and historical materials, limiting this study to literary texts.
Even with that limitation, I find “collected edition” tricky to define. Today we
think of collected editions as complete collections of a single author’s writ-
ings (with “writings” itself being a fraught category with nebulous bound-
aries) professionally published after his or her death. But almost none of the
features in this definition have been historically obligatory: some collected
editions were conspicuously incomplete (usually omitting works that were
deemed so minor as to not affect the edition’s comprehensiveness), some-
times they collected works by more than one author, sometimes they were
published while the author was still alive and productive, and sometimes they
were published by friends, family, enemies, or the author himself.
Even though there are few characteristics that all collected editions have
