Watch out for literary critics. They can get feisty.
You'd be surprised how many fights a bunch of bibliophiles can get into. Is there a comma in this line in this play by Shakespeare, or isn't there? Is that word capitalized in Paradise Lost, or isn't it? Is that name spelled this way or that way?
And these are just the small fights.
The big fights revolve around a couple of hot issues. The first of these concerns the authority of the copy-text. McKerrow was the first Textual Critic to define the copy-text, and in his view, this is the text that a Textual Critic uses as the basis of his or her own edited edition of a literary work.
So, let's say you're a Textual Critic who has to present an edited version of a famous old literary work. You've got a bunch of different versions to work from, and you have to decide which of these versions is the most authoritative—that is, the closest to the author's true intentions—and you have to use that version as the copy-text for your own edited edition.
One school in Textual Criticism believes that the copy-text is the bedrock of Textual Criticism. For them, your job as Textual Critics is to figure out which is the most authoritative, most uncorrupted version of a given literary work and then use that as the basis of your own criticism and editing. This was McKerrow's view.
But another school of Textual Critics disagrees with that approach. Dudes like Greg, Bowers, and Tanselle developed what came to be known as the "eclectic" method. What they said was that yeah, a copy-text is important, but it's important only as far as little things like spelling and punctuation are concerned.
These guys say that if you want to get at the most uncorrupted, the most authoritative version of a text, the version that's closest to an author's original intentions, then you can't just rely on one copy-text. Instead, you have to look at different textual versions of a literary work and then cut and paste as necessary in order to create an authoritative work.
But there are other Textual Critics, like John Bryant and Jerome McGann, who disagree with this approach, too, because they take issue with the whole idea of an "authoritative" text in the first place. They ask: Who says that only one version of a literary work expresses an author's intentions? And who says that it's only an author who has authority over his or her work? Editors and publishers also have a say over the "final" version of a work.
According to Bryant and McGann, we shouldn't be talking about "authoritative" texts at all. Instead, we should be talking about fluid texts (John Bryant's term), or socialized authorship (Jerome McGann's term).
So there's a lot of debate in the field about where textual authority lies. Does it lie with authors? With author and their publishers? With authors and their publishers and editors? With authors and their buddies who gave them feedback?