Doubtless, the factual content was improved more often than not, but a residual confusion remains when the specimen at hand may be either a true copy of an ancient document or a medieval scholar's version of the subject matter.
The young women were to have good food, brightly coloured clothing, and they were not to be tormented by the staff about their past – though inevitably Dickens, a voracious collector of stories, learned of their past histories, and some Dickens scholars believe versions of the women's lives made their way into many of his books.
One local historian, an elderly Arab named Yasin Ali al-Hussein, told me that Kirkuk was built by Jewish slaves of the Babylonian captivity; although scholars doubt this version, until the creation of Israel, in 1948, several thousand Jews lived in the city's twisted back streets, many of them near the old souk at the foot of the citadel.
In its interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, the Supreme Court appears to have adopted the first approach (Balkin 2001), but many legal scholars endorse some version of the second in understanding the constitutional guarantee of equality (Karst 1989).
It was the subject of Dr. Silverstein's first book in 1935, and in 1997, he and Anthony Hilhorst, a Dutch scholar, cooperated on a version that many scholars consider definitive.
The stories, An Ocean Full of Bowling Balls – which Salinger had prohibited publication of until 2060 – Paula, and Birthday Boy, are kept in university libraries in the US, for use by scholars, but scanned versions were released online in November.
While certainly useful for Carver scholars, these earlier versions of his stories, if they are anything like "Beginners," may greatly disappoint readers like me who revere Carver's work in the form we've come to know it.
These days, many scholars still champion versions of Incongruity Theory, including such prominent figures as Victor Raskin, a linguistics professor at Purdue University and the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Humor, who refined Incongruity Theory into the Script-Based Semantic Theory of Humor, in 1985.
For many years scholars mistakenly believed that version had been prepared by Gregory.
His work was widely celebrated by scholars as a modern version of Machiavelli's Renaissance study of power, "The Prince".
