The Future of the Scholarly Edition

The scholarly edition, the fruit of painstaking academic research on the texts and contexts of significant literary works, has been a fixture in institutions of learning for more than 2, years. But now, with the changing demands of academics and the advent of electronic databases, the traditional concept of the scholarly edition is being questioned, in practice and in principle, as never before. Linda Bree asks whether we still need scholarly editions and, if so, in what form they will best serve the twenty‐first century academic community.