Genetic Criticism and its Logics
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Genetic criticism is the study of authors' drafts and manuscripts, looking at all that is tried or discarded in the course of the creative process, along the way to a final text. Daniel Ferrer's Genetic Criticism and its Logics: The Draft and the Text offers a variety of miniature chapters of argument and philosophy that serve to illuminate this controversial branch of literary criticism. Discussion moves from music to modernism, or from recipes to photography; Poe appears along with Ponge, and Delacroix not far from Hogarth. The book is meant for readers at any stage of the genetic journey from the keen to the curious, and from the not yet convinced to the seriously sceptical or dismissive. All of them, it is guaranteed, will find they are delighted as well as informed by Daniel Ferrer's writing. For the novice in criticism, too, this translation from the original French will open up new worlds of possible questions as well as a specific field of thinking.
Daniel Ferrer is Professeur Emeritus (and former director) at the Institut des Textes Modernes et Manuscrits, Paris. He is one of the leading proponents of genetic criticism and the author of Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language (1990) and Genetic Joyce (2023). Rachel Bowlby is Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at University College London. Most recently, she is the author of Unexpected Items: Shopping, Parenthood, Changing Feminist Stories (2024) and Émile Zola: Writing Modern Life (2025).