First Published in 1997. These essays deal with the scholarly study of the genesis, transmission, and editorial reconstitution of texts by exploring the connections between textual instability and textual theory, interpretation, and pedagogy.

Acknowledgments, Textual Instability, Literary Studies, and Recent Developments in Textual Scholarship, Oral Tradition into Textuality, Reading in and around Piers Plowman, Context and Text: Navajo Nightway Textual History in the Hands of the West, The Tongues of the learned are insufficient: Phillis Wheatley, Publishing Objectives, and Personal Liberty, Hideous Progenies: Texts of Frankenstein, My thought is undressed: Some Theoretical Implications of the Texts of Dickinson's Poems, Multiple Editorial Horizons of Leaves of Grass, A Very Different Dance: Intention, Technique, and Revision in Henry James's New York Edition, Discourse versus Authorship: The Baedeker Travel Guide and D. H. Lawrence's Twilight in Italy, The Key to the Whole Book: Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, the Compson Appendix, and Textual Instability, The Rhetoric of Interactive Fiction, Converging (or Colliding) Traditions: Integrating Hypertext into Literary Studies, Notes on Contributors, Notes