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From the ephemeral newspaper to the scholarly edition intended to last for decades, the multiplicity of ‘editions’ encompasses every level of literary production and points to numerous questions about the aims and effects of published writing. The use of scholarly expertise to produce new editions of established literary works either for specialists or for a broader readership is a long-established activity within the Department and within English studies more generally since the early twentieth century. At that time, the new discipline claimed one kind of legitimacy by honouring its acknowledged great writers with scholarly editions on the model of those associated with Latin and Greek authors. In recent years, the dramatic expansion of student numbers in British universities, together with the continuing popularity of English as a degree subject, has led to an exceptionally high output of accessible footnoted editions of standard texts in series such as Oxford World’s Classics. Such changing practices prompt reflection on the purposes and theory of editing in its many scholarly and less scholarly forms.

Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê English is involved in many kinds and levels of editing, spanning many genres and periods.

Gregory Dart is General Editor of a new Collected Edition of the Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, which is to be published in Oxford University Press’s English Authors series. He is himself editing the volumes devoted to Lamb’s Works of 1818, the Elia essays, and the Uncollected Prose.

Paul Davis’s edition of Rochester’s Selected Poems (OUP),Ìýthe first selection of his work in modern spelling to take account of recent revolutionary advances in textual scholarship, was published in 2013. He is General Editor of the Oxford University Press edition of The Non-Periodical Works of Joseph Addison in 4 volumesÌý(forthcoming, 2025)Ìýand volume editor for the Poems and Translations, as wellÌýasÌýa co-editor on the volume containing The Temple in the Oxford University Press edition of The Complete Works of George Herbert.

Mark Ford has edited selections and collections of a number of contemporary New York poets. These include, Frank O’Hara, ‘Why I Am Not a Painter’ and Other Poems (Carcanet, 2003); The New York Poets I (Carcanet, 2004), and II (with Trevor Winkfield, Carcanet, 2006); and John Ashbery: Collected Poems, Vol. 1, 1944-1990 (Library of America, 2008) and Collected Poems, Vol. 2, 1991-2000 (Library of America, 2017).

Philip Horne is General Editor of the Cambridge University Press edition of in 35 volumes, theÌýfirst fullyÌýscholarly edition of James's fiction. He is himself editing The Golden Bowl and James’s notebooks.

Susan Irvine has edited (with Malcolm Godden) the first English translation of Boethius’sÌýLatin The Consolation of Philosophy, published as (Oxford, 2009).

Julia Jordan is one of the co-editors (withÌýJonathan Coe and Philip Tew) of (London: Picador, 2013).ÌýThisÌýanthologyÌýmarks both the 80th anniversary of Johnson's birth and a resurgence in interest in his work, andÌýmakes availableÌýa selection of previously unpublished or uncollected writing,Ìýfrom his journalism and plays to his majorÌýprose workÌýAren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs?

John Mullan has edited Samuel Johnson’s Ìý (OUP, 2009) as well as Daniel Defoe’s (OUP, 1988) and (Pickering & Chatto, 2004). He has also edited (Routledge, 1996) and (Oxford University Press, 2000).

Richard North has edited two Old Norse Skaldic poems: The ‘Haustlöng’ of Þjóðólfr of Hvinir (London: Hisarlik Press, 1997), and Úlfr’s Húsdrápa, featured with commentary in Image, Word, Text: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature and its Insular Context, ed. Minnis and Roberts (Turnhout, 2006). He has also edited poems and prose included in The Longman Anthology of Old English, Old Icelandic and Anglo-Norman Literatures (London: Pearson, 2011). He is currently working on an edition of Andreas, a 1722-line English poem on St Andrew, probably dating from around 900 AD.

Peter Swaab has produced the first edition Sara Coleridge’s Ìý (Carcanet, 2007) and the first edition of her literary criticism, (Macmillan, 2012).

Matthew Beaumont’s edition of Walter Pater’s (OUP, 2010) reproduces the first edition of 1873 and recaptures the impact made by the book on its first appearance.

René Weis has edited for the Arden Shakespeare (Bloomsbury, 2013), and an influential Parallel Text King Lear (Longman, 1993).

Many of the department’s publications on ‘Editions’ are available to download and read for free from .

Ezra Horbury’s .

Peter Swaab’s .

Peter Swaab’s

Paul Davis’s .

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