Genetic Joyce: Manuscripts and the Dynamics of Creation (The Florida James Joyce Series)

An introduction to the fascinating world of Joyce’s manuscripts This book shows how the creative process of modernist writer James Joyce can be reconstructed from his manuscripts.Daniel Ferrer offers a practical demonstration of the theory of genetic criticism, the study of the manuscript and textual development of a literary text.Using a concrete approach focused on the materiality of Joyce’s writing process, Ferrer demonstrates how to recover the process of invention and its internal dynamics. Using specific, detailed examples, Ferrer analyzes the part played by chance in Joyce’s creative process, the spatial dimension of writing, the genesis of the “Sirens” episode, and the transition from Ulysses to Finnegans Wake.The book includes a study of Joyce’s mysterious Finnegans Wake notebooks, examining their strange form of intertextuality in light of Joyce’s earlier forms of note-taking.Moving beyond the single author perspective, Ferrer contrasts Joyce’s notes alluding to Virginia Wool