The Handling of Vernon Lee's Words: Literary Editions in the Age of Hypertext

The scholarly edition canonizes and centralizes the work of any writer and provides an academic touchstone for further research. Drawing upon a model of scholarly editions proposed by Christopher Ohge based in philosophical pragmatism, the authors of this paper consider the methodological implications of a hypertextual environment for the development of editing work on the writer Vernon Lee (1856-1935). We simultaneously propose a frame for the development of a prototype edition of Lee's Proteus; Or, The Future of Intelligence (1925) and suggest how hypertextual methodology might be deployed in the preparation of a print edition. Using Lee's literary scholarship to provide shape to our approach, we suggest both a Protean 'edition to be' and consider how we might embed these Protean principles in a more traditional print edition.