This article uses text alteration to illuminate literary style, the creation of the fictional world within literary texts, and the connections between textual features and interpretation. After briefly examining some previous uses of this technique, it discusses some recent work on how the world of the text is created and understood and then argues that altering texts can help us to understand text world creation and mind style. A series of changes of different kinds in the opening paragraph of Henry James’s The Ambassadors illustrates some of the uses of text alteration in the characterization of authorial style. The results are sometimes surprising and suggest that making focused alterations in texts can be an effective analytic tool for stylistic study more generally. Finally, I briefly re-examine the question of the connection between stylistic features and interpretation through the lens of text alteration.
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