SOURCE: “Is There a Romantic Ideology? Some Thoughts on Schleiermacher's Hermeneutic and Textual Criticism,” in Text: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship, edited by D. C. Greetham and W. Speed Hill, AMS Press, 1988, pp. 59-77.

In the following essay, Rajan provides an overview of the development of Schleiermacher's hermeneutic philosophy in the context of Romantic ideas regarding discourse, criticism, and creation.

Since the appearance of Jerome J. McGann's A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism in 1983, we have begun to reconceive significantly a textual criticism based on a theory of final authorial intentions. In taking issue with traditional textual criticism, McGann attacks both the notion of the author as an autonomous and unitary subject and the related notion of a definitive text that reflects the author's final intention and protects it from the errors of transmission and the intrusion of other voices. My argument is not with McGann's...