Genetic criticism.

The editors thank Catherine Rainwater, Thomas Whitbread, and Michael Winship for their indispensable help in selecting the essays for this issue.

The term I use for this issue of TSLL comes from Herman and Krafft's study of the manuscripts of Pynchon's V. at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas. By sorting out Pynchon's revisions of a typescript of V. with the completed novel, with the help of letters between Pynchon and his editors, Herman and Krafft show how the text developed, cutting some elements and further developing others. That is one important type of genetic study. Another, more psychological approach is evident in how Lowe and Meyer elaborate Plath's and Sontag's created topologies of early loss and trauma. Lowe demonstrates how Plath's poems and stories set in beaches in Massachusetts, England, and France play out the lost paradise of the originary beach at Nauset that she associates both with the traumatic loss of her father and her own recurrent wish to join him in death. The beach becomes the border not only between land and water but also between life and death, with Plath yearning more and more toward the latter of these oppositions, dissolution of self by water. Sontag ...