Versioning

The term "versioning" exists in the critical vocabularies of both theorists and scholars of literature and of hypertext. Donald H. Reiman offers a theory of "versioning" in relation to the editorial procedure and philosophy behind parallel or synoptic editions of literary works. For Reiman, versioning denotes the presentation of "enough different primary textual documents and states of major texts (not all of which need to be critically edited) so that readers, teachers, and critics can compare for themselves two or more widely circulated basic versions of major texts."(1) In their formulation of a hypertext book, George Landow and Paul Delany take the notion of versioning a step further:

One can imagine hypertext versions of books in which the reader could call up all the reviews and comments on that book; the 'main' text would then inevitably exist as part of a complex dialogue rather than as the embodiment of a voice or thought that speaks it unceasingly.(2)

For Landow and Delany, versioning comprises not only the collaborative energies of communally constructed texts (in which, say, "one worker produces a draft that another person then later edits by modifying and adding"), it also includes surrounding cultural and interpretive material.(3) Because a printed work is socially constructed, a versioning of it requires an accounting of the hands that authored, printed, and edited it, as well as of those that received, reviewed and interpreted it. Although, Landow and Delany rightfully suggest that hypertext is a bibliographically and historiographically useful model for developing a sociology of or a reception history of a work, their notion of the literary work--or to use their phrase, of the "'main' work"--presupposes a textually stable work. In the case of "Christabel," there is not one singular "main work." The poem is dialogical, not monological.

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Notes

1. "Versioning" Romantic Texts and Contexts (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 169; Reiman's emphasis. Hans Zeller offers explores the "concept of version" in "A New Approach to the Constitution of Literary Texts." Studies in Bibliography 28 (1975): 231-64; See in particular, 236-41. (back)
2. "Hypertext, Hypermedia and Literary Studies: The State of the Art" Hypermedia and Literary Studies, ed. Paul Delany and George P. Landow (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 13. (back)
3. "Hypertext, Hypermedia and Literary Studies: The State of the Art," Hypermedia and Literary Studies 15. (back)