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...

"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...

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...