The sociology of the text has been instrumental in the development of the discipline of book history, but it has also had (and is still having) an impact on genetic criticism. This chapter argues that a rapprochement between both disciplines can be mutually beneficial, exploring a sociology of writing. Joyce was well aware of the ‘human agency’ involved in his literary enterprises. He had a knack for finding all kinds of textual agents to help him produce his works. The increased attention to human agency beyond the myth of solitary authorship has had quite an impact on textual scholarship, including in Joyce studies. The chapter discusses how this development impacts on our study of the writing, reading, revising, editing, and archiving of Joyce’s works, as well as on the ways in which we present them in the digital age, enabling a next generation of Joyce scholars to examine not only the teleological development of Joyce’s works towards a published text but also the dysteleological dead ends, the ‘vestigial’ notes that did not make it into Joyce’s published texts yet played a discreet, but no less valuable, role in the creative ecology of Joyce’s writing practice.

This chapter is devoted to Ishiguro’s archive and aims to suggest ways in which our understanding of the author’s work can be developed and enhanced by an examination of his drafts, notes, plans and other documents. It first offers a brief description of the scope and contents of Ishiguro’s papers, which the author carefully selected, organized, and prepared before their transfer to the Harry Ransom Center. It then discusses his conscientious methods of composition as revealed by the archives and as presented by Ishiguro himself in an explanatory piece entitled ‘How I Write’: months or years of planning precede the first formal drafts, which are extensively revised or sometimes discarded altogether. As a case study, the chapter examines some of the ‘precursors’ to The Remains of the Day in order to show how access to the archives and preliminary steps to a published text may illuminate the complex process of creation.

From its inception, genetic criticism has faced the problem of synthesis. The challenging accumulation of data has become even more pronounced since the turn of the millennium, with the unearthing of major caches of prepublication materials and the unprecedented availability of Joyce’s reading material through large-scale digitization initiatives. Genetic critics now know a great deal more both about the books that crossed Joyce’s desk and about his notetaking and drafting processes. Crowley’s chapter describes the digital means through which we can begin to aggregate genetic findings and pathways through the dossiers of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in order to uncover broader patterns. It presents new tools of visualization that interrelate and make sense of – and make accessible – Joyce’s system of writing. These movements towards the macrogenesis of Joyce’s final two works have the potential not only to impact Joyce criticism but also to influence the procedures of literary criticism more widely.

Evidence of work clearly connected to the composition of the Eroica is traceable from 1802 onwards. This consist of letters, sketches and other materials in the composer’s hand but also by copyists and collaborators, who worked with him. Although some fundamental documents ‘such as the autograph score’ are now lost, these materials make it possible to reconstruct in detail many aspects of the genesis of the symphony. This chapter seeks to reconstruct the different stages in the genesis of the Eroica, on the basis of a well-established research tradition ‘represented by scholar such as Gustav Nottebohm, Alan Tyson, Otto Biba, Michael C. Tusa, Bathia Churgin and Lewis Lockwood’. It focuses on general aspects of Beethoven’s creative process and draw attention to the variety of possible methodological approaches developed by musicologists during nearly two centuries of research on the subject.

This chapter explores the genesis and development of the two novels that brought J. M. Coetzee significant international notice, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Life & Times of Michael K (1983). It makes use of Coetzee’s papers which are housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, in particular Coetzee’s manuscripts and notebooks, in giving an account of his creative processes in the formative stages of his career. The chapter shows that ‘composition and craft’ in Coetzee involved a creative tension between self-discipline, organization, and rigour, and openness to the uncertainties of invention.

What does Dickinson’s writing on used, printed, or already written-upon scraps of paper indicate about her poetics? I argue that Dickinson’s late writing on bits of envelopes and advertisements resembles the inscriptive writing of her peers and was part of a mass culture of elegy, souvenir, and memory place. If associationism and skepticism transform rhetoric and science, they also affect the way ordinary people think about their lives. Dickinson participates in a popular culture that understands memory to be associative, unbidden, and dependent upon particulars. I examine emblem culture, the popularity of friendship albums, and scrap-keeping to argue that Dickinson’s participation in a culture which ascribes memorial meaning to the artifacts of everyday life is the key to her inscribing on scraps. Dickinson works self-consciously with ideas of inscription, elegy, and epitaph, dwelling in the tension between an abstract general statement and the specificity of the site and its associations.