Role of Editor and Critic in Producing a Text

Invention of printing technology was one of the milestones of the Renaissance/early modern age. Printing technology made the ideas to be presented and disseminated in a rapid process.

Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change can be associated with the idea of the Renaissance, the importance of print technology to the vast cultural changes for the literary transmission as well as for the demonstration of the meaning of the books. But, different generations of scholars interpret the development of print culture differently; traditional scholars tend to interpret this development as a glorious invention of the Renaissance but newer scholars are arguing that the Renaissance was failing to establish the universal notion of print culture. Newer scholars are attracted by the new technologies that made them to shift their ideas.

As new technologies are coming day per day we can analyze the development of print culture in terms of Renaissance/early modern studies too, the former is still creeping towards authorial intention inside of the text but the latter is attracted more towards the instability, indeterminacy and, the two quote Barthes again, towards the “Death of the Author”.

D.F. McKenzie has tried to depict the change in print culture of autonomy to the “sociology of text”. “Sociology to text”, in D.F. McKenzie’s view refers to the complex economic and a social trend along with related changes in institutions like patronage, the stationers’ company, the printing house, and the bookstall that exerted strong pressures on the form and function of literature.