Textual Awareness analyzes the writing process in Finnegan's Wake, Remembrance of Things Past, and Doctor Faustus (works in which time itself appeared as a theme) and relates these to Anglo-American, French, and German editorial theories. After a theoretical examination of the relationship between genetic and textual criticism, Dirk Van Hulle uses the three case studies to show how and why the texts proceeded the way they did-when, at each stage in the writing process, they had the potential to become something entirely different.