This volume introduces English speakers to genetic criticism, arguably the most important critical movement in France today. In recent years, French literary scholars have been exploring the interpretive possibilities of textual history, turning manuscript study into a recognized form of literary criticism. They have clearly demonstrated that manuscripts can be used for purposes other than establishing an accurate text of a work. Although its raw material is a writer's manuscripts, genetic criticism owes more to structuralist and poststructuralist notions of textuality than to philology and textual criticism. As Genetic Criticism demonstrates, the chief concern is not the "final" text but the reconstruction and analysis of the writing process. Geneticists find endless richness in what they call the "avant-texte": a critical gathering of a writer's notes, sketches, drafts, manuscripts, typescripts, proofs, and correspondence. Together, the essays in this volume reveal how genetic criticism cooperates with such forms of literary study as narratology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, sociocriticism, deconstruction, and gender theory. Genetic Criticism contains translations of eleven essays, general theoretical analyses as well as studies of individual authors such as Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, Zola, Stendhal, Chateaubriand, and Montaigne. Some of the essays are foundational statements, while others deal with such recent topics as noncanonical texts and the potential impact of hypertext on genetic study. A general introduction to the book traces genetic criticism's intellectual history, and separate introductions give precise contexts for each essay.

The publication of James Joyce's Ulysses crowned years of writing and constant rewriting at almost every stage, so that as many as ten versions exist for some pages. To understand how Joyce worked, Michael Groden traces the book's history in detail, synthesizing evidence from notebooks, drafts, manuscripts, typescripts, and proofs. Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The publication of James Joyce's Ulysses crowned years of writing and constant rewriting at almost every stage, so that as many as ten versions exist for some pages. To understand how Joyce worked, Michael Groden traces the book's history in detail, synthesizing evidence from notebooks, drafts, manuscripts, typescripts, and proofs.

Originally published in 1987.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"What if you had never opened the book of your life? Or if that book had been even a little different? Ulysses "in Focus" takes up these vertiginous questions, raveling out episodes in the writing, critical reception, and editing of Joyce's masterpiece and twining them together with stories from a life spent elucidating it. Joyce himself would have admired the variety that Michael Groden offers us here: fascinating new readings of Ulysses by its foremost genetic critic; behind-the-scenes accounts of editorial contretemps and secret manuscript acquisitions; the sorrow of shelved projects and the thrill of the bibliographic quest. At its core, Ulysses in Focus tells the story of a reader and a book that seem to have been destined for one another. Yet its method is against destiny, seeking to free texts from the published state in which they ossify by restoring to us a sense of their evolution and their contingency. To read Groden is to think differently about reading and being: to suspect that a book, like a life, might be the sum of its untaken roads."--Paul K. Saint-Amour, University of Pennsylvania "This is an engaging, reflective, and highly personal set of essays and recollections by a leading Joyce scholar. It urges us to see "Ulysses," not as a finished monument, but as a mobile piece of writing in constant dialogue with its own processes of composition and avant-textes."--Anne Fogarty, coeditor of "Bloomsday 100: Essays on" Ulysses Michael Groden has been at the forefront of some of the most important developments in James Joyce studies over the past three decades. He was a major figure in and early adopter of genetic scholarship--the method of analyzing a literary work by looking at its development from draft to draft, particularly suited to Joyce's stories and novels. He defended Hans Walter Gabler's "Ulysses" edition in the "Joyce Wars" and helped introduce the National Library of Ireland's new Joyce manuscripts to the world. Bringing together twelve essays in three areas of Joyce criticism and scholarship, this refreshing book offers various personal adventures from a life lived with Joyce's work. In a manner that is at once modest, rigorous, and accessible, Ulysses "in Focus" engagingly connects these scholarly developments and contretemps to the author's personal history and provides fascinating new genetic readings of several episodes of "Ulysses" that advance our understanding of the novel's composition. Michael Groden is Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario.