Editorial Practice

Editorial practice (textological) is the applied part of textology that develops the principles and methods of the scholarly edition of works: the selection and establishment of the base text, its rendering (transcription), the compiling of the apparatus (variants, variant readings, notes, commentary), and the structure of the edition. The main types of scholarly editions are the academic (complete, with an exhaustive textological apparatus), the critical (with a cleansed, verified text and variants), and the popular-scholarly. Editorial practice resolves complex questions: which text to take as the base (the author's 'final creative will' or one published in their lifetime), how to render orthography and punctuation, and how to present authorial and censorship corrections. Ukrainian academic editorial practice has weighty achievements: the multi-volume complete editions of Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, and Lesia Ukrainka, prepared by the Institute of Literature, free the texts from the censorship distortions of the Soviet era.