This course offers an overview of historical and recent thinking about the “text,” considered as an object of literary and cultural analysis and in light of the text’s materialization, circulation, and reception. We’ll consider historical roots of textual theory in humanism, philology, and 19th-century literary studies; early 20th-century textual criticism and bibliography; formalist notions of aesthetic autonomy and post-structuralist critiques of authorial intention and meaning; book history and the material text; the question of publication and the sociology of texts; readers and publics; networks, media and the role of technology; and new understandings of the text entailed by digitization. The course counts as the required introduction to the Graduate Certificate in Textual and Digital Studies.