Genetic Criticism: Tracing Creativity in Literature

In Genetic Criticism, Dirk Van Hulle introduces the study of creative processes to an Anglophone audience. As a method in the study of literary writing processes, genetic criticism is also a reading strategy. The idea behind this book is to introduce this strategy to a broader audience, from interested readers and graduate students to early career researchers and literary critics. In literary studies, it is often obvious that a particular work somehow seems to hit a nerve, but more challenging to pinpoint exactly why it 'works'. This book therefore starts from a clear, basic assumption: knowing how something was made can help us understand how and why it works. This strategy is at the basis of many disciplines, including art history. By means of X-ray technology or hyperspectral imaging, it is possible to look at a painting as a multilayered object with not only spatial dimensions, but also a temporal one. This temporal dimension is the core of the reading strategy introduced in this book. Note books, marginalia, manuscripts, and typescripts (even if one works with scans) give a concrete dimension to literature, which is a helpful reading strategy for many students. On the one hand, this involves concrete, transferrable skills such as aspects of transcription and digital scholarly editing. On the other hand, it also involves more abstract theoretical issues relating to matters of authorship, collaboration, authority, agency, intention and intertextuality.

About the Author :
Dirk Van Hulle is Professor of Bibliography and Modern Book History at the University of Oxford. He directs the Oxford Centre for Textual Editing and Theory (OCTET), and the Centre for Manuscript Genetics at the University of Antwerp. With Mark Nixon, he is co-director of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. He is the editor of the Journal of Beckett Studies. His publications include Textual Awareness (Michigan, 2004), Modern Manuscripts (Bloomsbury, 2014), The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett (Cambridge, 2015), the Beckett Digital Library, and several editions in the MLA award-winning Beckett Digital Manuscript Project.

Review :
Van Hulle's Genetic Criticism is an annotated handbook to the method, offering useful typologies of texts and variants, modes of classification, and a survey of interpretive strategies that can be used to engage manuscripts, drafts, and other traces of composition...this carefully constructed book provides the kind of up-to-date survey that has been missing from English scholarship. Van Hulle's book remains an essential contribution to textual scholarship. It provides both theoretical depth and practical insights into the evolving landscape of genetic criticism, serving as a powerful reminder that literary works are not fixed entities but dynamic and evolving creations.