WordNet
n. comparison of a particular text with related materials in order to establish authenticity
Wikipedia
Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants in either manuscripts or printed books. Ancient scribes made alterations when copying manuscripts by hand. Given a manuscript copy, several or many copies, but not the original document, the textual critic might seek to reconstruct the original text (the archetype or autograph) as closely as possible. The same processes can be used to attempt to reconstruct intermediate versions, or recensions, of a document's transcription history. The ultimate objective of the textual critic's work is the production of a "critical edition" containing a scholarly curated text.
There are three fundamental approaches to textual criticism: eclecticism, stemmatics, and copy-text editing. Techniques from the biological discipline of cladistics are currently also being used to determine the relationships between manuscripts.
The phrase "lower criticism" is used to describe the contrast between textual criticism and " higher criticism", which is the endeavor to establish the authorship, date, and place of composition of the original text.
Usage examples of "textual criticism".
This is a difficult objection to deal with because one cannot, there and then, start teaching the whole science of textual criticism.
He sent Tolkien detailed criticisms of the poem, which he jestingly couched in the form of a mock textual criticism, complete with the names of fictitious scholars (Pumpernickel, Peabody, and Schick) who suggested that weak lines in Tolkiens poem were simply the result of scribal inaccuracies in the manuscript, and could not be the authentic work of the original poet.
In Oxford at this hour, the dons would still be up, wrangling metaphysics or textual criticism, undergraduates carousing or scurrying through the streets, gowns billowing behind them, in the course of some rag or other.