Despite having expanded an initial focus upon his most renowned novel Infinite Jest (1996)
, 2015), pp. xvii + 336, £60.00 Luca Crispi's exploration through the many draft layers of Ulysses in Joyce's Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in Ulysses: Becoming the Blooms brings both the novel and its extensive textual archaeology to life by focusing on the central characters of Leopold and Molly Bloom. Besides making a significant contribution to criticism of Joyce's most iconic novel, Becoming the Blooms cautiously humanises the often bewilderingly complex study of the Joycean textual process. That said, while the book does provide an intriguing fusion of textual and biographical genetics, it would also benefit from a fuller engagement with 'genetic criticism'. Following the publication of the James Joyce Archive (1977-1979) and Hans Walter Gabler's genetic edition of Ulysses (1984), numerous critics have applied ideas developed by genetic criticism to the study of Joyce; hence the creation of the electronic journal Genetic Joyce Studies in 2001 by Dirk van Hulle. Crispi's book is relatively unique, however, in that, unlike previous genetic studies of Ulysses, which focus on one particular episode or draft, Becoming the Blooms tracks the development of Molly and Leopold 'across all the relevant episodes in all of the relevant surviving manuscripts and note repositories [emphasis added]' (p. 3). This range, combined with the fact that the book, based on decades of research, includes groundbreaking work on the important new Ulysses manuscripts donated to the National Library of Ireland (NLI) in 2000, 2002 and 2006, means it acts as a compendium for genetic research into Ulysses. 1 Becoming the Blooms contains a number of fascinating insights which are continually fleshed out with examples from the drafts. Crispi suggests storytelling provides the foundation of Ulysses and thus stories take precedence over detail, character or place. Joyce's frequent reassignment of particular stories or pieces of dialogue to different characters demonstrates this. Joyce also made recurrent use of blanks or 'non-names' as 'placeholders' for a location/subject to be filled in later on; in the NLI 'Penelope' draft, Joyce has Molly recall a letter from 'Mrs X Y Z' (p. 128). Like the eventual author of Molly's letter, Crispi suggests Joyce included most of the minor characters 'simply to elaborate the stories he was telling of Leopold and Molly' (p. 23). Finally, Joyce's dissemination of precise verbal echoes while drafting Ulysses can be regarded
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