TY - JOUR
AU - Kaufman, Will
AB - BOOK REVIEWS 269 also implies a key question regarding the mechanics of fiction in general: why are we as readers interested in this question in the first place if not out of a primal curiosity and empathetic concern about other (real or fictional) people’s thoughts and motivations? In the volume’s third part – ‘Approaches and Receptions’ – the matter of authorial intention recurs again in a magnificent essay by Daniel Ferrer on the dynamics of invention. Significantly, the title is not ‘Joyce’s Manuscripts’ but ‘The Joyce of Manuscripts’. Ferrer duly points out that many of Joyce’s published works (Epiphanies, Stephen Hero, Giacomo Joyce) were never pub- lished by Joyce: ‘as far as he was concerned, they never went beyond the stage of manuscripts’ ( p. 287). This approach again implies a concern with Joyce’s own concerns. And Ferrer acknowledges a spontaneous tendency to read those texts as data that ‘help us understand the mind that created the sub- sequent masterpieces’ ( p. 287). Yet by means of numerous wonderful examples Ferrer also demonstrates that ‘a writer’s purpose is not an absolute, but a fluctuating, time-bound transaction between a series of writing events and a series of external constraints: the 
TI - A Concise Companion to American Fiction, 19001950
JF - English
DO - 10.1093/english/efp029
DA - 2009-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/a-concise-companion-to-american-fiction-19001950-2rMinVBKUg
SP - 269
EP - 272
VL - 58
IS - 222
DP - DeepDyve
ER -