Reviews changing approaches to the editing of Scottish literary texts, from the dominance of the Greg-Bowers theory of copytext to the emergence of the Social Text theory associated with Mackenzie and McGann; illustrates the developments from a variety of major Scottish authors and scholarly editions (specifically Thomas Carlyle and Walter Scott); and concludes by discussing the critical implications of differing approaches to editing two frequently-taught Scottish works, Robert Burns's "Tam o' Shanter" and Hugh MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle.