A critical edition of Ford Madox Ford's "The questions at the well" (1893)

The thesis represents the first critical edition of Ford Madox Ford's first volume of poems, The Questions at the Well (1893), accumulating all relevant bibliographical material and providing an original methodology for the editing of literary texts. A long prefatory essay discusses the theory, practice and paradoxes of cutting-edge textual editing, e.g. types of intention, 'intentional error', authorial and editorial revision, forms of censorship, the 'ideal' text, 'final version', 'last version' and 'separate work', 'textual primitivism', hypertext, and New Historicism and the 'socialization' of texts. This essay provides the theoretical basis for the editorial procedure I have created, which rests on taking as reading text the first printed version, including probable errors (authorial or otherwise), and to use an extensive critical apparatus to register textual variants, to discuss cruces in the copy-text and to supply explanatory notes. The thesis also supplies details of the variant states in which the poems appeared, a 'Bibliography of Unpublished Poems', an 'Index of Titles' and an 'Index of First Lines'. This edition is the foundation for a larger project: the Complete Poems.