I Do, I Undo, I Redo: The Textual Genesis of Modernist Selves »

Finn Fordham took studied English at Trinity College Cambridge and then went on to work with Steven Connor at Birkbeck College London. He wrote a thesis on Joyce's Finnegans Wake (which, unfortunately, ran into copyright problems) but then, with a Leverhulme Fellowship, wrote a different study of Finnegans Wake (which, fortunately, didn't). He has published widely and edited volumes on 'transcultural hoaxes', on Joyce and the 19th Century French Novel. He has been invited to give talks around the world, including in Poland, Beijing, Belgrade, Trieste, Dublin, St Andrew's, Oxford, Chicago. He is currently a lecturer in English at Royal Holloway, University of London.

This book is a study of writing processes of six modernist authors: Hopkins, Yeats, Conrad, Forster, Joyce, and Woolf, from the 'golden age of manuscripts'. Finn Fordham examines how these processes relate to selfhood and subjectivity, both of which are generally considered to have come under an intense examination and reformulation during the modernist period. The study addresses several questions: what are the relations between writing and subjectivity? To what extent is a 'self' considered as a completed product like a book? Or how are selves, if considered as things 'in process' or 'constructs', reflections of the processes of writing? How do the experiences of writing inform thematic concerns within texts about identity?

There are three theoretical and methodological chapters (about 'genetic' criticism, about critical studies of selfhood within modernism, and the 'effacement' of manuscripts in philosophies of the subject). There then follow chapters on each of the six authors, with a different topic on each - compression, selection, doubling, hollowing out, multiplying and class. The study comprises much new material from archives, and many fresh ideas stemming from the combination of different critical approaches: genetic, psychological, political criticism and close reading. Readers of its contents described it as 'excellent', 'a very creative study', 'original, timely and extremely suggestive'.

List of Illustrations

List of Abbreviations

Introduction 1

Pt. I Critical Frameworks

1 Texts and Selves in Process: Writing between self and selflessness 7

2 Modernism and the Self: Inside-Out 34

3 The Self in Descartes and Heidegger: Overlooking Drafts, Erasing Process 61

Pt. II Genetic Explorations

4 Hopkins and Compression 79

5 The Young Yeats and Selection 111

6 Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness': Doubling and Doubling Back 141

7 Forster's A Passage to India: Blurring and Hollowing Out 179

8 Joyce's Ulysses and Multiplying Personalities 213

9 Woolf's The Waves and Writing Classes 227

Conclusion 259

Bibliography 265

Index 275