Textual Criticism State of the Theory

Does anyone still read this stuff?

As long as we have books, and different versions of books, we'll have Textual Criticism. And yeah, that even applies to e-books. The field is now moving in a direction that's taking more and more account of digital technology: not only are we reading contemporary literature on our Kindles or iPads, but we're also reading Shakespeare and Chaucer and Marlowe on our Kindles or iPads.

But whether we're talking about print texts, or digital texts, or manuscripts, there are often many variants of a literary work. And it's the job of Textual Critics to sort through all those to figure out which of them we should be reading, or whether we should be reading all of them.