Textual Instability and the Contemporary Novel: Reading Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing On and Off the Page

Abstract

An acknowledgment of textual instability is built into our understanding of the history of the novel. The significance of the different physical forms in which novels have been printed over time, and the material circumstances that have determined their manner of publication and reception, are now an acknowledged part of scholarly debate. The impact of social theories of bibliography and textual editing espoused by writers such as D. F. McKenzie and Jerome McGann has shifted attention away from a stable, ‘ideal’ text, edited and understood according to authorial intentions, towards a more fluid notion of textuality as the product of history and the material processes of composition, production and recep-tion.¹ This development has coincided with — and also supported — the rise in Anglo-American scholarship of the discipline of book history, which seeks to recover and interpret knowledge about the physical forms and commercial and cultural contexts in which texts have circulated.