These questions sketch the outlines of a theoretical and practical debate on editorial positionality that underpins literary interpretation, the scholarly (re)production of culture, and the relationship between editorial, literary and cultural studies. 1 If indeed the materiality of the text at hand is crucial to our reading of it, what do the forms that editors choose 'mean,' and in turn, how does that meaning impact on what non-editing literary critics say? What are the dominant modes of editorial production within Hispanic Studies? What implications do particular editorial practices hold for the representation of the work, literary-critical interpretation, and textual availability? Despite the insights of deconstruction and particularly the 'cultural turn' in literary studies that has led more scholars to analyze the modes of production, dissemination and consumption of culture, critics have still to generate a debate that problematizes the production of Hispanic literature by academic editors and, therefore, both the form in which we consume texts and its impact on our critical readings of them. That is, critical editing stands as a kind of 'mechanism' that makes literary texts available to the reader, a shifting discourse that shapes and produces a text for the reader's consumption. Nonetheless, Chartier's focus on the particular physicality, the materiality of the literary text and its impact on the reader and interpretation invites us to consider a field within Hispanic literary and cultural studies that has yet to be rigorously theorized or systematically questioned: the editorial construction of literature.

Concerned as he is with the relationship between reader and text, Chartier's observation that form produces meaning has largely been held as a given by most cultural and literary critics, especially since structuralist theory, as they set to work creating readings of texts.

Suites by Federico García Lorca