Thread by @friede

As someone trained in scholarly editing, I'm encouraging us to EXPLAIN the choice of an edition. After teaching the 18th century novel for over a decade (including w/digital 1st editions), most newcomers to early novels NEED the editorial support a modern edition provides. 🧵

https://twitter.com/Artchivesgrrl/status/1567201910528114690

A LOT of stuff is in the public domain -- including entire textbooks written to be Open Access, and some scholarly/teaching editions made freely available! By all means, use them if you've got them. Hell, part of my job (the @18thConnect part) is to help make more discoverable.

But for an 18th centuryist like me, using sites that make public domain editions of works available (bless them) means either the 1st edition of a novel (Hathi) or 19th century editions (Gutenberg). Neither will have explanatory notes or contextual info.

But that's just Prob 1.

The *bigger* problem is harder to note: 19th century editors often played merry hell with earlier texts. Y'all, this is the century that coined the term "Bowdlerization" (a form of censorship that shaped texts to fit perceived "standards")

I could go on about this but I'm low on spoons, but it suffices to say that relying on 19th century editions of 18th century (or earlier) works is asking for a real bad time. I know what those editors thought about "lady novelists" (for example) -- I don't trust their judgment.

TL,DR: the cost of *textbooks* is often extortionately high, built on a system of planned obsolescence & rental fuckery.

What is ALSO true is that editorial work matters, & teaching editions are vital to the study of works outside our own context. We need to explain this more.

Finally, a plug for one of the best examples of when a modern edition matters: the Anonymous 1808 novel THE WOMAN OF COLOR, edited by Dr. Lyndon Dominique with an *enormous* supporting apparatus, including a timeline of heiresses of color in prose fiction. broadviewpress.com/product/the-wo…

BTW: please DO read 18th century novels. Read stuff written in the actual #Regency alongside your #Bridgerton fix. Modern Regency is delightful, but it shows us who WE are. Regency-era fiction gives us a better understanding of who #Austen & her contemporaries thought THEY were.

Also, when our students hunt down cheaper editions of the books we assign, they often find garbage Print on Demand copies that are incomprehensible messes, or in some cases, even wilder stuff, as Dr. Shanafelt reports:

https://twitter.com/carrideen/status/1567530226170601476