1Genetic criticism is currently undergoing a phase of expansion and diversification, both with regard to its associated methods as well as its range of research objects. Sakari Katajamäki’s and Veijo Pulkkinen’s edited collection of eight chapters showcases the growing diversity of the field half a century after the early stages of its own genesis. The volume does so in four sections: “Writing Technologies” (15–58), “Digitality and Genetic Criticism” (59–90), “Draft Reading” (91–132) and “Multimodality” (133–74).
2Admitting the oxymoronic nature of the phrase “modern palaeography” (17), Wim Van Mierlo sets out to chart “an archaeology of the manuscript” through the analysis of a number of selected case studies from anglophone literary history, charting their compositional dynamics through a study of their handwriting (18). He shows that parts of John Keats’s single surviving draft of “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819) were “careful and controlled”, with clearly marked stanza breaks indicating “that the stanzas were fair copied from an earlier exemplar” (21). Van Mierlo then uses the examples of W. B. Yeats and Alfred Tennyson to argue that a writer’s use of writing spaces is a cultural practice, before concluding by showing how Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters (1998) were formed by the way in which he used his notebooks as both places of composition and as spaces where the sequence of these poetic compositions could then be rearranged. Van Mierlo’s modern palaeographic method is enlightening for what it can teach us about individual geneses, the culture(s) and history of writing as well as what it suggests regarding the possible methods for the systematic study of other materials involved in the creative process.
3While, for Van Mierlo, “we can speak of a modern culture of handwriting and manuscript production that persists in the era of mechanized text production” (28), Pulkkinen demonstrates the value of paying close attention to one of the most familiar twentieth-century forms of mechanized text production, putting the manuscripts of Elina Vaara’s unpublished poem “Kuun pata” [The Cauldron of the Moon] under the microscope of “forensic typewriting”. Tracing its origin to Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective story “A Case of Identity” (1891) later collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (37), Pulkkinen proves forensic typewriting to be a helpful resource for manuscript dating and the identification of writing campaigns in Vaara’s dossier. For any scholar who has spent time staring at a typeface to determine the nature of an authorial manuscript, forensic typewriting offers a promising set of tools to crack the case.
4While Van Mierlo and Pulkkinen highlight the dialogic nature of technologies of inscription, Dirk Van Hulle shows how such dialogism between different eras of writing technology is important when it comes to the concepts we use, arguing that “the notion of the ‘version’ does not necessarily become obsolete when dealing with born-digital texts” (61). Having demonstrated the materiality of digital texts, Van Hulle charts a link between the document and the concept of an immaterial “version” through an analysis of the born-digital short story “De mens is de robot van de machine” [Man Is the Machine’s Robot], which Ronald Giphart composed with the help of a writing bot while being observed by researchers at the University of Antwerp. Borrowing from writing studies the concept of TPSF, or “text produced so far”, Van Hulle shows how the way in which the writing bot completed Giphart’s sentences had a decisive influence on how the rest of compositional process unfolded, thus coining the helpful concept of WTPSF, or “the way in which the text was produced so far” (66). When shifting between a nano-genetic analysis of every single keystroke and broader perspectives on the text in process, Van Hulle suggests that “we always make explicit the size of the textual unit” (68).
5The size of the textual unit is crucial to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Upon starting work on a typewriter in 1882, he claimed that “unser Schreibzeug arbeitet mit an unseren Gedanken” [our writing tools assist in our thought processes] (Nietzsche 2002, 61; qtd. and trans. Van Hulle 2024, 15), and this may have shaped his trademark aphoristic style (Van Hulle 2022, 52). But he also was aware of the influences of other agents on him as a writer. In mapping his ongoing work on the digital genetic edition of Nietzsche’s “Der Wanderer und sein Schatten” [The Wanderer and His Shadow] from Menschliches, Allzumenschliches [Human, All Too Human], Paolo D’Iorio quotes the philosopher identifying the natural environment as a doppelgänger to the self (74). Since such thoughts came to Nietzsche im Gang [in the act of going, or walking] (75), his notebooks became a crucial repository for his thoughts that he quickly could jot down and thus capture. It is the capacity of a digital genetic edition to offer the reader the opportunity to leaf through Nietzsche’s notebook as well as reconstituting what D’Iorio terms “a true and proper constitution of the text” (81) that he highlights as a couple of the many benefits of this edition for other scholars. Bearing in mind Nietzsche’s own focus on the plurality of textual interpretations, we can look forward to this edition as a means of pluralising our possible interpretations of the philosopher’s own work.
6Taking another approach to exploring the concept of the work, Mateusz Antoniuk examines Zbigniew Herbert’s “Narzeczona Attyli” [Attila’s Betrothed] as “an ‘avant-text’, that does not refer to any final text” (95). Since this prose piece — Antoniuk contends that it briefly resembled a drama — by the Polish poet, essayist and playwright was not published before his death, he regards it as “an interrupted work in progress” (99). By studying nine different versions of the work’s ending, this chapter brings the “interrupted work” to meaning-making life, in an analogous manner to how archival box sets of postwar singer-songwriters have stimulated audience analyses of recorded but never before published works. Ultimately, Antoniuk shows how a draft version of the final line, “Miałam wspaniałe życie — cierpiałam” [I had a wonderful life — I suffered] found its way, adapted to the male gender, into the final lines of Herbert’s late poem “Do Piotra Vujičića” [To Peter Vujičić], published in the collection Rovigo (1992). Such close analysis of variants, he demonstrates, can draw our attention to a “hidden intertext” within a published text (115).
7While writers such as Seamus Heaney pointed to the “impact of translation” when it came to Slavic-language poets (including Herbert) during the Cold War (Heaney 1989, 36–44), our knowledge regarding the power dynamics involved in such translations can gain much from genetic analysis, as Julia Holter shows in her analysis of the collaborative translation of Russian poet Vadim Kozovoï’s collection Прочьотхолма into French as Hors de la colline (1984). As a translator himself of Francophone works into Russian, Kozovoï may well have agreed that “each published translation from French was a revelation and a victory over official Soviet culture” (119). But his own attempt to translate his russophone poetry into French with fellow poets Michel Deguy and Jacques Dupin was fraught with tension, as Holter demonstrates. Starting with a list denoting who collaborated on the different poems of Hors de la colline, Holter tells us that Kozovoï would sometimes bring poems to both translators, increasing the rivalry between the two. He also felt that the French language was “нерасщепляемое” [unsplittable] (Kozovoï 2005, 149; qtd. and trans. 126), and thus unsuited to the avant-garde poetics he had developed in Russian. Outlining his preferred method of “radical foreignization” as one of the reasons for the tensions in translation (127), Holter draws on a previously confidential archive to outline the subtle power plays involved in any translation as representation of the Other.
8To open the final section, Claire Doquet and Solène Audebert-Poulet study the genesis of an illustrated children’s book, Yvan Pommaux’s Puisque c’est ça, je pars [Since That’s It, I’m Leaving] (2017) to provide an example of multimodal genetic criticism. Unlike sketches in a dossier of an Émile Zola novel (for instance), these images form an integral part of the published work, which means that they require analytic tools other than the discrete analytic units of language that accompany them. By following the children of the story step by step through the hedge they traverse — the most edited section of the main characters’s adventure — Doquet and Audebert-Poule demonstrate the interaction of text and image at an interpretative level for the work’s first reader: the author. “Thus, after some hesitation throughout eight pages of mainly textual drafts, it is in the drawing that the solution is found” to a knotty narrative problem regarding a lost cuddly toy (145). Showing that Pommaux’s draft drawings are what attract primary schoolchildren’s attention when bringing his manuscripts to classrooms, Doquet and Audebert-Poule demonstrate the importance of engaging with readers in a mode familiar to them, thus giving us a further means of questioning the Romantic model of the author as solitary genius.
9In the closing chapter, Hanna Karhu focuses on Finnish poet Otto Manninen’s use of folklore materials, drawing attention to the traditionally undervalued rhyming folk songs of the Finnish tradition, and comparing these to Manninen’s use of the better regarded Kalevala metre (associated with the Finnish epic of that name). Departing from Henri Mitterand’s position that genetic criticism “carries the material strata of history out into the open” (2004, 118; qtd. 156), Karhu shows how these disregarded folkloric elements played a key role in the oeuvre of a figure central to the formation of twentieth-century Finnish poetry. Here, genetic criticism plays a role in showing how a “little tradition” (folklore) helped shape the “great tradition” (literature) (Branch 1978, 14; qtd. 157), while also calling into question the hierarchical distinction between these modalities. While primarily serving Karhu’s own richly researched argument, such an observation is worth bearing in mind when considering the role genetic criticism can play in a shifting media environment which constantly produces new forms of writing.
10Analysing dossiers in eight different languages — as well as the relationships between some of them — these eight chapters show the potential of the field to create a truly “comparative genetics” (111). If anyone remains to be convinced of the ability of genetic criticism to translate between cultures, they should read this book.