Textual criticism is a philological speciality centered in a work-in-progress of text-production and/or its transmission. Textual criticism works on the author manuscripts and all the marks left by him, which document the process of textual representation conditioned by the author's intention and the linguistic system he/she uses, since the most primitive form (sketches) to its terminal level or final form. Also, textual criticism considers the existent manuscript (if present), or conjecture its original form (if absent), and then the tradition derived from it, studying the departures from the tradition when compared to the original (if present); or reconstruct the closest lesson to what the original would have been (if absent). The present essays document a set of theoretical reflections and practices of the author on textual criticism in general, and genetics in particular, applied to medieval manuscripts and to manuscripts of great Portuguese writers such as Camilo Castelo Branco, Antero de Quental, Eça de Queiroz, Fernando Pessoa or Vitorino Nemésio. |