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HYPERTEXT

Jerome McGann, editor of the Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti hypermedia research archive (developed during the 1990s), proposes in Radiant Textuality (2001) that hypermedia archives provide the best current model for scholarly electronic editions. Such archives can

• promote a more comparative, intertextual, reader-centred approach - because of the ease of searching, linking between texts, and providing multiple, customised views;
• integrate the visual, auditory, and conceptual aspects of literary texts - by providing tools for comparative searching and analysis alongside simulations or digital facsimiles of material aspects of the text, such as its physical appearance;
• provide an opportunity for scholars to understand their author afresh - through the process of designing effective electronic systems to store, analyse and distribute his or her works.

McGann builds on seminal arguments laid out by the English scholars Jay David Bolter in Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (1991) and George Landow in Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (1992) - both of which have recently appeared in revised editions.

The largest undertaking of collective scholarship currently in progress within James studies is the Complete Letters of Henry James project, led by Greg Zacharias and Pierre Walker. They intend to produce an online version of their work, and this will undoubtedly be a major contribution to the resources available to James scholars across the world. But this project alone does not constitute a Henry James hypermedia archive. What is at stake in discussing such major e-initiatives?