The Bibliographical Note in the History of English Studies

Abstract

This piece places the history of the bibliographical note in the context of David Nichol Smith’s establishment of Oxford’s BLitt degree in 1925 to argue that both bibliographical scholarship and literary criticism became professionalized—and tied to recognizable scholarly forms, such as the bibliographical note and the interpretive essay—at midcentury. The similarities between bibliographical scholarship and close reading are greater than their differences, and we argue that the note and its indexical function—its work of pointing out to a potential scholarly audience something of interest—is central to the practice of literary study past and present.