Author and Printer in Victorian England demonstrates that printing technology shapes texts. The technology involved was a nineteenth-century revolution in printing methods; the texts were classic literary works by Victorian authors. What was at stake was textual control: who would decide how the text would read-author, compositor, printer's reader, or publisher? In a unique fusion of literary history and printing history, Allan C. Dooley explores the interactions between individual authors and their publishers and printers. He takes the reader through each stage of a work's development, illustrating how authors attempted to perfect and protect their writings from compositional manuscript through stereotyped reprints. His analysis includes details of a wide range of technical innovations and changes in practices in the printing of books between the development of printing machines in the 1830s and 1840s and the introduction of the Linotype in the 1890s. Drawing on the experiences of leading Victorian authors, he shows how nineteenth-century printing practices both enhanced and diminished writers' abilities to control texts. He reveals that much more was under their control than has commonly been believed and that many authors took advantage of printing technologies in order to gain and maintain control over the texts of their works. But new kinds of errors and new sources of inaccuracy were introduced by the technology as well.

Author and Printer in Victorian England demonstrates that printing technology shapes texts. The technology involved was a nineteenth-century revolution in printing methods; the texts were classic literary works by Victorian authors. What was at stake was textual control: who would decide how the text would read-author, compositor, printer's reader, or publisher? In a unique fusion of literary history and printing history, Allan C. Dooley explores the interactions between individual authors and their publishers and printers. He takes the reader through each stage of a work's development, illustrating how authors attempted to perfect and protect their writings from compositional manuscript through stereotyped reprints. His analysis includes details of a wide range of technical innovations and changes in practices in the printing of books between the development of printing machines in the 1830s and 1840s and the introduction of the Linotype in the 1890s. Drawing on the experiences of leading Victorian authors, he shows how nineteenth-century printing practices both enhanced and diminished writers' abilities to control texts. He reveals that much more was under their control than has commonly been believed and that many authors took advantage of printing technologies in order to gain and maintain control over the texts of their works. But new kinds of errors and new sources of inaccuracy were introduced by the technology as well.

In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning's known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning's life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.? With this seventeenth and final volume, The Complete Works of Robert Browning concludes the major phase of a great scholarly project: the accurate preservation and transmission of the poet's works for future generations of readers. Volume XVII begins with Browning's last collection of poems, Asolando: Fancies and Facts, published on the day of the poet's death, 12 December 1889. Wonderful in its diversity and intensity, Asolando contains lyrics of startling emotion, autobiographical narratives, and a few of the dramatic monologues for which Browning had become famed. Also in this final volume are ninety-nine fugitive pieces, either unpublished or uncollected during the poet's lifetime. Ranging from experimental poems of Browning's youth to Greek translations to joking couplets and witty ephemera, these works illustrate the endless variety of the poet's talent. Finally, Volume XVII includes "Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford," a biographical essay that Browning coauthored with John Forster in 1836. The historical research done for this work formed a basis for Strafford, a play Browning completed the following year. Comprehensive explanatory notes for the works in this volume are provided, as is a title index to all seventeen volumes of The Complete Works.