ABSTRACT
The technology is proving invaluable in facilitating straightforward access to kinds of material previously very hard to find and it therefore has a particular role to play in undoing the various intractable formations of the literary canon, and its burden of historical preferences. A historicism which is not coherently Marxist has no framework for assigning value, or for justifying moral judgement. As one leading New Historicist critic of the Renaissance has put it, historical or contextual 'facts help us imaginatively to return a now-lifeless Elizabethan text to its living context in the material relations of Elizabethan people'. The move to a principle of electronic archiving is, in effect, the exact opposite of such a conception of the editorial function. The aspiration to an achieved inclusive editorial statement is rendered obsolete, and with it any possibility that the living culture will express to and for itself a determinate scholarly vision of the past.
