After receiving the latest issue of CRITICAL INQUIRY I risked dropping everything for a week and writing a reply --hoping against precedent that they would take something from a real textual scholar.
July 19, 1972 diary: Fine letter of acceptance from CI. I had expected an acceptance, but hadn't worried once I realized on the 10th that it would be my new Introduction [to what became FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS]. Quite overjoyed--an ambition realized. [The ambition of showing that textual scholarship ought to be recognized as basic to theory.] July 20: And its importance is very far-reaching. When I submit the manuscript I will look far better with an Introduction which has already appeard in CI--not, say, in Studies in American Fiction. [As it turned out, in LA at MLA Jerry Graff asked for the book.] I did not win the battle, but gradually FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS has been used by more and more real textual scholars from editors of the Dutton BIBLE through many Medievalists and onward.
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