The witness of the text in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Browning (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Browning)

This thesis argues that a more reception-oriented textual criticism is needed for the works of Romantic writers because we risk today losing a full sense of how those works shaped nineteenth-century literary history. The predominance of critical, eclectic editing in twentieth-century editions of Romantic writers has produced texts that obscure in problematic ways our conception of what readers actually received. I suggest that this situation be tempered with Hans Robert Jauss' view of literary history, in which literature achieves historicity only through readers and in which reading can change the way that one lives. Furthermore, the figure of witness encourages an historicised sense of reception, for we should focus on how readers function as witnesses to the presence of texts—particularly in the nineteenth century, when printed texts and increasing literacy made the utility of reading a prevalent subject. As a consequence, Romantic writers embedded concerns with witness in their works, making such concerns crucial to the effects of those works upon literary history. To ignore these concerns also ignores the historical record of reception.; Investigations of William Wordsworth's Prelude, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's work of the late 1790s, and Robert Browning's engagement with the Higher Criticism thus demonstrate the ways in which editing affects reception and offer suggestions for producing texts that recuperate nineteenth-century literary history. The Prelude's twentieth-century editors severely distort the poem's role in literary history by favouring its earliest, unpublished versions while marginalising its 1850 published edition. Coleridge's editors tend to confuse the historical specifics of his texts owing to an investment in the instability of his intentions, working against his interests in unity. For both Wordsworth and Coleridge, then, we need the texts that nineteenth-century readers actually received. Browning offers a specifically nineteenth-century perspective from which to justify this need: like the Higher Criticism, he conceived of texts and history as characterised by development, not instability; thus, we should heed this development, not obscure it. Works developed in front of nineteenth-century readers as unities, textual problems included, and this fact—not editorial constructions of texts that never existed—should constitute our focus.