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Authority (textual criticism)


The authority of a text is its reliability as a witness to the author's intentions. These intentions could be initial, medial or final, but intentionalist editors (most notably represented by Fredson Bowers and G. Thomas Tanselle editing school) generally attempt to retrieve final authorial intentions. The concept is of particular importance for textual critics, whether they believe that authorial intention is recoverable, or whether they think that this recovery is impossible.

Here are some examples of authority:

A text's authority is made more problematic when it has more than one author, when it falsely asserts itself to be someone else's work, or when it is revised many times. For instance:

Authority can also be related to a particular edition, especially if this edition reaches a degree of popularity.


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