Author’s variants in Vicente Riva Palacio’s brief narratives. An stemmatics proposal for nineteenth-century author’s philology

Abstract

This article analyzes variants in three short stories by Vicente Riva Palacio (1832-1896). In order to understand the nature and sense of the textual modifications, which often respond to 19th-century Mexican literary tradition specific demands on publication and reprints, I adopt the terminology of Giorgio Pasquali’s “author’s philology”. I divide the variants into two categories: ideological and literary. To more efficiently reveal the genealogical family of the stories under scrutiny, I conducted in parallel the philological exercise of establishing a stemma codicum adapting the methodology of textual criticism. My proposal is supported by the idea that a critical edition is a path to the interpretation of literary creation since it offers alternative hermeneutical roads into the work without abandoning its textual limits or the material support of its editorial variants.