Modern Manuscripts

Dirk Van Hulle is Professor of English Literature at the Centre for Manuscript Genetics, University of Antwerp, Belgium. He is President of the European Society for Textual Scholarship and his previous books include Textual Awareness (2004).

• 1. ‘Avante-Texte': the Golden Age of Modern Manuscripts \ 2. Exogenetics: Observation, Documentation and External Source Texts \ 3. Endogenetics: the Preservation of Unfavoured Traces \ 4. Epigenetics: the Continuation of the Genesis After Publication \ 5. ‘Apres-Texte': Between Completion and Incompletion \ Bibliography \ Index.

Dirk van Hulle proves with admirable clarity that textual genesis has become the new science of literature, and that it works both ways, from scrutinized manuscripts to original re-readings of canonical works, and from their authors’ progression in language to the laws of evolution governing creativity. His convincing remapping of modernism, from Darwin to Beckett via Conrad, Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Kafka and Flann O’Brien, definitely splices textual genetics with cognitive studies, thus rendering an invaluable service to literary studies in general.