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rejects the reconstructed typed text on the lost typescript and the ‘correction’ to ‘Mother’ entered in a hand other than Joyce’s on the fifth and final set of proofs. The best known passage in this edition that is not part of any previous printed edition of Ulysses is the so-called ‘love’ passage in ‘Scylla and Charybdis.’ In the middle of his discussion of Shakespeare, Stephen asks, ‘—Will he not see reborn in her, with the memory of his own youth added, another image?’ and then thinks, ‘Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all men. Amor vero aliquid alicui bonum vult untie et ea quae concupiscimus . . .’ (9.427-31). The passage is in the Rosenbach Manuscript; the final working draft used by the typist is lost. Gabler reasons that the working draft did not differ from the surviving fair copy at this point and that the typist skipped from one ellipsis at the end of an underlined passage indicating italics in the line before Stephen’s question (the line ends ‘L’art d’être grandp....’) to a similar nearby ellipsis after another underlined passage (Stephen’s Latin thought ending with ‘concupiscimus’), thus omitting Stephen’s question and subsequent thought. In each case, and in the case of ‘gums’ as well, the editor’s justification for his choices was textual and bibliographical, not critical; none of these examples presented a problematic or ambiguous textual situation. It is important to note, though, that an edition prepared under other assumptions (for example, one privileging the transmitted text over the written one) might in each case choose the reading that this edition rejects.

These few details are part of the large system that makes up any editing project. The full system includes not only the editorial assumptions and procedures that are visible in all the particular readings but also responses to broader questions about the nature of literary works and their texts, the relationship of the author to the work, the role of the editor, and the nature of authority in an edition. In being a text-based, rather than an author-based, edition; in its use of genetic editing theories and methods; and in its synoptic presentation, this edition of Ulysses offers an alternative to dominant Anglo-American methods of editing that questions and challenges the accepted paradigms. As Gabler has acknowledged, the edition can be discomforting.

Along similar lines, Jerome McGann in his review claimed that the edition ‘raises all the central questions that have brought such a fruitful crisis to literary work in the postmodern period’ and suggested that it should be ‘a required object of study for every scholar working in English literature.’ As an object of study, Gabler’s work—his assumptions and his procedures—can be discussed and debated, but, as Vicki Mahaffey has noted, the controversy that erupted over the edition deflected the kind of questioning that McGann envisioned. Specific details were discussed apart from their relationship to the editor’s basic assumptions and methods as a whole. More important, as Mahaffey argues,

many of the most widely publicized attacks are based on premises about textual editing that the general reading public takes for granted, so that when a critic proves that Gabler has violated these guidelines, his editorial competence is implicitly or explicitly called into question. It takes a reasonably specialized reader to realize that the weakness of such arguments, which seem logically convincing on their own terms, is at the level of the premise, since Gabler does not share many of the premises on which the critique is based.

Gabler’s loudest and most persistent critic, John Kidd, has since 1988 steadily and relentlessly attacked the edition. With a great deal of rhetorical flurry and a few oft-repeated examples, Kidd captured a great deal of attention. But all his pages of supposed analysis, and the sixty pages of tables and charts of Gabler’s alleged errors and inconsistencies in his ‘Inquiry’ into the edition, managed finally to demonstrate only two errors—mistranscriptions