G. Thomas Tanselle

G. Thomas Tanselle (born 1934) is an American textual critic, bibliographer, and book collector, especially known for his work on Herman Melville. He was Vice-President, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, 1978-2006.

Tanselle is a native of Lebanon, Indiana and received his undergraduate degree from Yale University. Tanselle attended graduate school at Northwestern University where he studied with Harrison Hayford among others. He received his PhD in 1959 from the Department of English where his dissertation was titled Faun at the Barricades: the life and work of Floyd Dell. From 1960 through 1978 he taught at the University of Wisconsin. After moving to New York City in 1978, he served as vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation until 2006. He was an adjunct professor of English at Columbia University, and co-editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of the writings of Herman Melville. He was president of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia 1993-2006. He is also a member of the board of directors and textual consultant of the Library of America.

Tanselle held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1969–70), American Council of Learned Societies (1973-74), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (1977–78).

Tanselle absorbed the principles of Walter W. Greg and Fredson Bowers, who developed the theory of textual criticism, a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification and removal of transcription errors in texts, both manuscripts and printed books, in order to create a text which most closely reflects the author's intent. He has been called the "most prominent, consistent, and authoritative defender of the Greg-Bowers approach to editing," which is now the "dominant theoretical and practical position in Anglo-American editing." Tanselle has sought to accommodate legitimate critiques of its limitations, such as the insistence on the difference between substantive and accidentals, that is, the difference between the words and their spelling and punctuation. Tanselle, says one scholar, like Greg and Bowers, postulates the notion of an "ideal 'correct' text, measured against which extant texts show various degrees of 'corruption' that the editor seeks to remove." Tanselle follows this tradition more flexibly, but still comes to rest on the "principle of the author's final intention,'" which the "editor (or critic) seeks first to understand and then to implement..." This position is opposed to the New Criticism, which rejects the intentional fallacy, since the author's intentions are not relevant to the work of art once it is finished.

...
Wikipedia