Framed in this way, the question is open to any number of responses: for the “interpreter,” the critic, is entirely free to decide which material in the literary event shall be salient for interpretation. The “circumstances of publication,” therefore, can make a big difference, or no difference at all, or they can make various kinds of intermediate differences that could be specified.

I do not say this to be sophistical, but to call attention to some of the critical assumptions which generated the question. The question assumes that “circumstances of publication” make a difference to interpretation, and that such a difference has been demonstrated in certain critical discussions, perhaps in some of the work that I myself have done. But the question is aware that these demonstrations create a theoretical problem for some of the most important governing protocols of our received critical ideas: for instance, that bibliography and interpretation are different modes of literary enquiry and do not (as it were) naturally correspond with each other; that the social (as opposed to the purely authorial) dimensions of textual events have no necessary or essential relation to literary meaning; in general, that hermeneutics must preserve a theoretical (as opposed to an heuristic) distinction between the “extrinsic” and the “intrinsic” in literary study.

I disagree with these three ideas. Indeed, my own assumptions – the frames of my critical practice – are in each case precisely the inverse of each one.