Timeline
About the Criticism Archive
The Criticism Archive is and for many years will remain a work in progress, with new material being uploaded once or twice per year. At present the focus is on published literary criticism by British women writers of the “long” romantic period. Eventually, coverage can expand both chronologically and nationally, with the aspiration to provide a robust international archive of literary criticism by early women writers.
Editing Decisions
Copytext of published material relies on accurately representing the text as published. Few of the selections in this archive appeared in more than one edition, but where multiple versions exist, the earliest published version is emphasized, with aspirations to make later revisions available when time and labor permits. Currently, editing focuses on accessible teaching and research as well as coarse data mining. Thus, both person identifications and annotations are brief, while titles are simply encoded as such.
A few specific decisions are worth mentioning. Excepting a few basics (full stop, comma, semi-colon, colon, and hyphen) punctuation and characters outside those in the English language alphabet were encoded as HTML entities. Quotation marks indicating block quotes, running titles, compositor’s catchwords, and dashes within line breaks all have been silently eliminated. Spelling has not been regularized except that the long “s” has been silently modernized.
Encoding Decisions
Encoding conforms to TEI guidelines, allowing for representation of some features of the original text while still enabling expedient publication to extend text availability. Here you will find the Criticism Archive Encoding Decisions manual, providing details about TEI encoding using the Poetess Archive schema.
Criticism Archive: An Introduction
Criticism Archive Editor
Ed. Mary A. Waters
Mary A. Waters, editor of the Criticism Archive, is Melba V. Hughes Professor of English at Wichita State University. Specializing in literary criticism by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British women writers, Dr. Waters is author of British Women Writers and the Profession of Literary Criticism, 1789-1832 and the editor of British Women Writers of the Romantic Period: An Anthology of their Literary Criticism. Her essays have appeared in venues such as Eighteenth-Century Studies, Nineteenth-Century Prose, Women's Writing, and collections from Ashgate and Cambridge University Press.