The Editorial Void: Notes toward a Study of Oblivion

Editing is too often considered narrowly as a rule-bound craft in the service of literature. But that overfamiliar, undervalued branch of scholarly activity is a small segment of a vast array of interconnected human perceptions and actions. William Blake’s largest painting, The Ancient Britons—which no longer exists—and other extreme instances of objects remembered and forgotten, lost and preserved, help to reveal the broader outlines of perception, control, desire, and memory that make editing a paradigm of human effort, even the human condition.