First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Publishing, Editing, and Reception is a collection of twelve essays honoring Professor Donald H. Reiman, who moved to the University of Delaware in 1992. The essays, written by friends, students, and collaborators, reflect the scholarly interests that defined Reiman's long career. Mirroring the focus of Reiman's work during his years at Carl H. Pforzheimer Library in New York and as lead editor of Shelley and his Circle, 1773-1822 (Harvard University Press), the essays in this collection explore authors such as Mary Shelley, William Hazlitt, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley; moreover, they confirm the continuing influence of Reiman's writings in the fields of editing and British Romanticism. Ranging from topics such as Byron's relationship with his publisher John Murray and the reading practices in the Shelley circle to Rudyard Kipling's response to Shelley's politics, these essays draw on a dazzling variety of published and manuscript sources while engaging directly with many of Reiman's most influential theories and arguments.

Both an intellectual autobiography and a chronicle of the ideological and methodological upheaval in textual studies during the last two decades, this book presents provocative essays by one of the foremost textual scholars of our day. As founder and executive director of the interdisciplinary Society for Textual Scholarship, Professor Greetham has had the opportunity to observe and engage with the main players of the textual revolution during its most turbulent years and enlivens his account with revealing character sketches.

Through the concept of contamination, David Greetham highlights various ways that one text may invade another, carrying with it a residue of potential meaning. While the focus of this study is on written works, the scope ranges widely over music, politics, art, science, philosophy, religion, and social studies. Greetham argues that this sort of contamination is not only ubiquitous in contemporary culture, but may also be a necessary and beneficial circumstance. Tracing contamination from the Middle Ages onward, he takes up issues such as the placement of quote marks in Keats's "Ode to a Grecian Urn," the controversy over the use of evidence for "yellowcake" uranium in Niger, and the reconstitution of reality on YouTube, to illustrate that the basic questions of evidence, fact, and voice have always been slippery concepts.