In this important new book Guy and Small develop a new account of literary creativity in the late nineteenth century one that combines concepts generated by text-theorists concerning the embodied nature of textuality with the empirical insights of text-editors and book historians. Through these developments which the authors term the ‘textual turn ’ this study examines the textual condition of nineteenth-century literature. The authors explore works by Dickens Wilde Hardy Yeats Swinburne Fitz Gerald Pater Arnold Pinero and Shaw connecting questions about what a work textually ‘is’ with questions about why we read it and how we value it. The study asks whether the textual turn places us in a stronger position to analyze the value of a nineteenth-century text-not for readers of the nineteenth century but of the twenty-first. The authors argue that this issue of value is central to their discipline.
