This special issue of RoN takes as its starting-point an ostensibly straightforward question: What new texts will shape discussion of British literature 1780-1830 in the first decade of the twenty-first century? Simple as this sounds, the term "new" as used here has raised some important questions. While it is almost commonplace to claim that the topic of a scholarly monograph or the critical perspective advanced in a journal article is "new," as applied to the texts that we study the term has special significance, and obvious implications for teaching as well as research. A text may be "new"—or its editors may claim newness on its behalf—in one or more of several senses. It may be newly edited in toto from manuscript. It may have been re-edited with substantial changes from previously published versions. Or it may have been recovered from among the less-read literature of the period and may therefore be "new" in the sense of being wholly unfamiliar to all but a few specialists. These approximate definitions do not exhaust the possible implications of newness, however, since reconsideration of the "new" in Romantic-period texts can extend to questions about the nature of literary production, and of textuality itself. The widespread use of electronic media has increased our awareness of the material nature of the printed book, and this affects the reception of the printed text. Recent developments in textual scholarship (such as discoveries about the extent of collaboration between members of the Shelley-Byron circle) are changing our perception of the writing of this period. These developments also raise some very practical questions. How can editors best represent the known versions of literary works, in texts for students' or scholars' use? How will textual scholarship continue to reconfigure the anthologies, paperback editions, and other resources used in teaching the literature of the period? The interdependence, in the current academic marketplace, of texts used in the classroom and the production of a major scholarly edition is a leading theme of Susan J. Wolfson's "Editing Felicia Hemans for the Twenty-First Century." Hemans's work, from being nearly invisible in the critical landscape of the 1970s—mentioned, if at all, only to be contemptuously dismissed—has rapidly become the subject of conference sessions, collections of essays, and special issues of journals. This revival of critical interest both feeds on and in turn gives support to the increased representation of Hemans's work in such anthologies as McGann, Mellor and Matlak, Perkins, and Wu. But the picture Wolfson gives is not one of triumphant progress towards the full recuperation of Hemans's work. The feminism of the 1960s and 1970s dismissed Hemans's poetry as "facile" and Hemans herself as the kind of female author to be strenuously repudiated: long-suffering, affectionate rather than passionate, supremely feminine, rather than feminist. But as Wolfson shows in convincing detail, these characterisations were based on an uncritical acceptance of the Victorians' own remodelling of Hemans, a Mrs. Hemans reconstituted for the Victorian marketplace. Leading feminist scholars like Ellen Moers and Germaine Greer did not bother to read the works that were absent from Victorian editions, thereby ignoring precisely those works that would have shown Hemans's more troubled and contrarian facets. Yet the attempt by scholars of the 1980s and 1990s to reassess Hemans's significance has continued to be hampered, Wolfson argues, by the lack of a reliable critical edition. If the modern editor of Hemans faces virtually an open field, as long as she can persuade a publisher to take on the project, the modern editor of Percy Shelley confronts a very different situation: widespread recognition of the poet's lasting significance, but an …