Copyright

Karin Kukkonen;

Published On

2024-12-17

Page Range

pp. 17–34

Language

  • English

Print Length

18 pages

2. Metagenesis

Manuscripts, and How Metanarration and Metafiction Contribute to Their Analysis

Chapter of: Genetic Narratology: Analysing Narrative across Versions(pp. 17–34)
This article proposes that moments of metanarration and metafiction can make an important contribution to the project of a genetic, manuscript-oriented narratology. When literary texts reflect on their own madeness, this may be fictional invention, but it also can serve as a means to (re)focus the analysis of the manuscripts underlying the text. Metagenesis, I suggest, can be used to expand the genetic dossier and to bring manuscript genetics into further dialogue with narratology. It offers in particular the opportunity to draw on insights from embodied approaches to the study of narrative and literature, as well as bring manuscript genetics further into conversations around literary creativity. In the first section, then, I will define metagenesis and sketch out its place in an enlarged genetic dossier. In the second section, I propose an example analysis of two passages from Charlotte Brontë’s writings to demonstrate how metagenetics works in practice. The third section, finally, addresses theoretical and methodological challenges that may arise from such a dialogue between manuscript genetics, narratology and literary studies, and propose a number of ways in which they can be met.

Contributors

Karin Kukkonen

(author)
Professor in Comparative Literature at University of Oslo
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5240-3280

Karin Kukkonen is Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo. She serves as director of LCE—Centre for Literature, Cognition and Emotions and leads the ERC Project JEUX—Literary Games, Poetics and the Early Modern Novel (2024–2028). Kukkonen specialises in the long history of the novel, cognitive poetics, manuscript genetics and narratology. She has published studies on the manuscripts of Frances Burney (in her monograph How the Novel Found its Feet, 2019) and on the manuscripts for the Three Musketeers (in Orbis Litterarum, 2019). In her most recent work, Creativity and Contingency in Literary Writing (forthcoming), Kukkonen develops a model for creativity in literature on the basis of literary theory, author interviews and manuscript analysis.