- "Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts (mss) or of printed books."
This subfield focuses on exploring the ways in which texts are constructed and interpreted, with a particular emphasis on identifying and analyzing the underlying assumptions, biases, and power dynamics that shape our understanding of written works.
Manuscripts: Understanding the different manuscript traditions, their importance, and how they have been used to reconstruct the original text.
Editions: The history of editions, their development, and the choices editors have to make when constructing their texts.
Text Types: The identification and classification of textual variants based on their similarity to other variants.
Sources: The various sources used by ancient authors, including oral tradition, literary tradition, and other historical documents.
Textual Variants: The different types of textual variants and how they can affect the meaning of a text.
Textual criticism methodology: The process of evaluating and assessing different textual variants to determine the original text.
Historical-Critical Method: Understanding the history of critical methods used in the study of texts and how they influence contemporary approaches.
Canonical Interpretation: How to interpret texts within the broader canon of literature, and the different criteria used to determine which texts belong in a particular canon.
Literary Theory: The application of literary theory to textual analysis, including structuralism, deconstruction, and postmodernism.
Translation Theory: The influence of translation on textual interpretation, particularly the challenges posed by linguistic and cultural differences.
Reception Theory: Investigation of how text meaning arises within readers and how literary texts can be received and interpreted across cultures and over time.
Textual criticism and religious studies: Understanding the role textual criticism plays in the study of religious texts, particularly biblical studies.
Digital Textual Criticism: Techniques for working with digital texts and digital methods for textual analysis.
Ethics in textual criticism: The importance of ethical considerations in textual criticism, particularly with regard to issues of censorship and scholarship.
Reader-response criticism: This type of textual criticism emphasizes the role and perspective of the reader in interpreting and understanding a text.
New Criticism: This type of textual criticism focuses on the text itself and how it creates meaning through language, form, and structure.
Marxist criticism: This type of textual criticism looks at how class, power, and economics shape the meaning of a text and its representation of society.
Feminist criticism: This type of textual criticism examines the representation and treatment of women in literature, as well as the portrayal of gender roles and power dynamics.
Psychoanalytic criticism: This type of textual criticism applies Freudian or Jungian psychology to analyze the unconscious motivations and desires of characters in a text.
Deconstruction: This type of textual criticism challenges the idea of objectivity and argues that meaning is constructed through language and power structures in society.
Postcolonial criticism: This type of textual criticism looks at how the representation of colonized peoples and cultures in literature reflects and reinforces power dynamics in the real world.
Queer theory: This type of textual criticism looks at how sexuality and gender norms are represented in literature and how they interact with power dynamics and identity formation.
Religious criticism: This type of textual criticism is concerned with examining the religious and philosophical views and beliefs of authors and how they are reflected in their literary works.
- "Such texts may range in dates from the earliest writing in cuneiform, impressed on clay, for example, to multiple unpublished versions of a 21st-century author's work."
- "This means that unintentional alterations were common when copying manuscripts by hand. Intentional alterations may have been made as well, for example, the censoring of printed work for political, religious, or cultural reasons."
- "The objective of the textual critic's work is to provide a better understanding of the creation and historical transmission of the text and its variants."
- "This understanding may lead to the production of a critical edition containing a scholarly curated text."
- "If a scholar has several versions of a manuscript but no known original, then established methods of textual criticism can be used to seek to reconstruct the original text as closely as possible."
- "The one original text that a scholar theorizes to exist is referred to as the urtext (in the context of Biblical studies), archetype or autograph."
- "However, there is not necessarily a single original text for every group of texts."
- "Notably eclecticism, stemmatics, and copy-text editing."
- "Quantitative techniques are also used to determine the relationships between witnesses to a text."
- "In some domains, such as religious and classical text editing, the phrase 'lower criticism' refers to textual criticism."
- "In some domains, such as religious and classical text editing, the phrase 'higher criticism' refers to the endeavor to establish the authorship, date, and place of composition of the original text."
- "This means that unintentional alterations were common when copying manuscripts by hand."
- "Intentional alterations may have been made as well, for example, the censoring of printed work for political, religious, or cultural reasons."
- "The same methods can be used to reconstruct intermediate versions, or recensions, of a document's transcription history."
- "Such texts may range in dates from the earliest writing in cuneiform, impressed on clay, for example, to multiple unpublished versions of a 21st-century author's work."
- "Textual variants, or different versions."
- "Stemmatics is one of the approaches or methods used in textual criticism."
- "This understanding may lead to the production of a critical edition containing a scholarly curated text."
- "Quantitative techniques are also used to determine the relationships between witnesses to a text, with methods from evolutionary biology (phylogenetics) appearing to be effective on a range of traditions."