James Joyce A Critical Introduction

This is a collection of Joyce's non-fictional writing, including newspaper articles, reviews, lectures and essays. It covers 40 years of Joyce's life and maps important changes in his political and literary opinions.

James Joyce has a reputation for being one of modern literature's most difficult writers. This introduction gives students the necessary tools they will need to get the most out of reading him. It provides the essential biographical information and situates his life and works in broader cultural, historical, and literary contexts. Students will also find detailed examinations of the major works including Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. In addition, Bulson lets students see how Joyce evolved as a writer. This introduction also provides a brief history of the critical reception of Joyce's life and works and explains what a variety of critical approaches can teach us. A guide to further reading has been included for those interested in consulting some of the more influential secondary works. This accessible and lively introduction gives students everything they will need to get started reading, understanding, and appreciating Joyce.

From Ulysses to Finnegans Wake, James Joyce’s writings rank among the most intimidating works of literature. Unfortunately, many of the books that purport to explain Joyce are equally difficult. The Critical Lives series comes to the rescue with this concise yet deep examination of Joyce’s life and literary accomplishments, an examination that centers on Joyce’s mythical and actual Ireland as the true nucleus of his work. Andrew Gibson argues here that the most important elements in Joyce’s novels are historically material and specific to Ireland—not, as is assumed, broadly modernist. Taking Joyce “local,” Gibson highlights the historical and political traditions within Joyce’s family and upbringing and then makes the case that Ireland must play a primary role in the study of Joyce. The fall of Charles Stewart Parnell, the collapse of political hope after the Irish nationalist upheavals, the early twentieth-century shift by Irish public activists from political to cultural concerns—all are crucial to Joyce’s literary evolution. Even the author’s move to mainland Europe, asserts Gibson, was actually the continuation of a centuries-old Irish legacy of emigration rather than an abandonment of his native land. In the thousands, perhaps millions, of words written about Joyce, Ireland often takes a back seat to his formal experimentalism and the modernist project as a whole. Yet here Gibson challenges this conventional portrait of Joyce, demonstrating that the tightest focus—Joyce as an Irishman—yields the clearest picture.

James Joyce: A Critical Guide presents a full and comprehensive account of the major writing of the great modernist novelist James Joyce. Ranging right across Joyce's literary corpus from his earliest artistic beginnings to his mature prose masterpieces Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, the book provides detailed textual analysis of each of his major works. It also provides an extended discussion of the biographical, historical, political and social contexts that inform Joyce's writing and a wide-ranging discussion of the multiple strands of Joyce criticism that have established themselves over the last eighty years. The book's combination of sustained close reading of individual texts and critical breadth makes it an ideal companion for both undergraduate students and the wider community of Joyce's readers.

Presents twelve critical essays on the Irish writer and his works.