A Nexus of Worlds: Stephen King’s Concurrent Work on IT, The Talisman, and The Tommyknockers
This essay examines the dynamic interplay between Stephen King’s largely concurrent writing processes for IT (1986), The Talisman (1984) and The Tommyknockers (1987) between 1980 and 1985. In doing so, it takes up Dirk Van Hulle’s proposal to expand the scope of genetic criticism from the study of t...
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| Udgivet i: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/variants, |
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| Hovedforfatter: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Sprog: | Anglais |
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Variants
2025
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| Online adgang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Summary: | This essay examines the dynamic interplay between Stephen King’s largely concurrent writing processes for IT (1986), The Talisman (1984) and The Tommyknockers (1987) between 1980 and 1985. In doing so, it takes up Dirk Van Hulle’s proposal to expand the scope of genetic criticism from the study of the genesis of single works by introducing “a principle of concurrent writing” to reconstruct how a work interacted with the other works that occupied the author’s writing desk at any given moment. I will demonstrate how this period of intense creativity by King reverberated in his work for the next two decades, most notably in the development of the unified fictional universe that he subsequently created in what he calls his “über-tale”, the Dark Tower series. The evolution of these ideas becomes clearer when examining the drafts of these novels and the order in which they were written, as the published texts and their publication order somewhat misrepresent their genesis. |
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