Daniel Ferrer

Originally published in 1990, Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language explores the relationship between madness and the disruption of linguistic and structural norms in Virginia Woolf’s modernist novels, opening new ground in Woolfian studies, as well as in psychoanalytic criticism. Focusing on Mrs Dalloway, The Waves, To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts, it investigates narrative strategies, showing that Woolf’s writings question their own origins and connection with madness and suicide. By combining textual analysis with an original use of autobiographical material, the books cause us to reconsider the full complexity of the articulation between an author’s life and work.

Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language

James Joyce

Geert Lernout

Vincent Deane

The Finnegans Wake Notebook Edition is a fully integrated and cross-referenced edition of all the extant work-books compiled by Joyce after the completion of Ulysses. It will be published as a series of fascicles, one per authorial notebook, three per scribal notebook, fifty-five in all. This will make individual notebooks available to scholars as they appear and allow critical feedback, laying the foundations for an electronic edition that will be prepared simultaneously. The editorial aim is to bring together all of the information relevant to each note in as concise and simple a way as possible. The Finnegans Wake Notebook Edition will provide a reference library of comprehensively quoted source material-in effect an annotated digest of Joyce's working library-which will serve as a new star-ting point not just for exegesis of Finnegans Wake, but also for biographical, textual, and literary criticism of Joyce. Furthermore, the Edition will allow for a reconstruction of Joyce's intellectual concerns and compositional habits during the drafting of Work in Progress / Finnegans Wake.

The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo

Michael Groden

Jed Deppman

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.

Daniel Ferrer

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