James Joyce And The Exilic Imagination

James Joyce left Ireland in 1904 in self-imposed exile. Though he never permanently returned to Dublin, he continued to characterize the city in his prose throughout the rest of his life. This volume elucidates the ways Joyce wrote about his homeland with conflicting bitterness and affection—a common ambivalence in expatriate authors, whose time in exile tends to shape their creative approach to the world. Yet this duality has not been explored in Joyce’s work until now. The first book to read Joyce’s writing through the lens of exile studies, James Joyce and the Exilic Imagination challenges the tendency of scholars to stress the writer’s negative view of Ireland. Instead, it showcases the often-overlooked range of emotional attitudes imbuing Joyce’s work and produces a fuller understanding of Joyce’s canon.

'That is my fear. That I stand between her and any moments of life that should be hers...' Set against the backdrop of the Home Rule Crisis of 1912, Exiles is James Joyce's only surviving play. It tells the story of writer Richard Rowan and his common-law wife Bertha, characters drawn from Joyce's own life with Nora Barnacle. After a decade of absence from Dublin, Richard and Bertha have returned home from Rome, still unmarried, with their young son Archie. Richard hopes that he will be greeted as a returning genius and rewarded with a comfortable university position. But this aspiration ends up taking a back seat to the erotic crisis that is unleashed by the couple's return to the place where they first met, and their encounters with two old flames and friends. In this play, Joyce revisits his own agonizing feelings of jealousy that were precipitated by similar trips home to Dublin. In the introduction and notes, Keri Walsh provides a comprehensive look issues of gender, sexuality, and performance as well as considering the nationalist and sectarian contexts of Dublin in 1912, the year of the play's setting.

Prompted by centuries of warfare, political oppression, natural disasters, and economic collapses, exile has had an enormous impact not only on individuals who have undergone transplantation from one culture to another but also on the host societies they have joined and those worlds they have left behind. Written by prominent literary critics, creative authors, and artists, the essays gathered within Exile in Global Literature and Culture: Homes Found and Lost meditate upon the painful journeys—geographic, spiritual, emotional, psychological—brought about due to exilic rupture, loss, and dislocation. Yet exile also fosters potential pleasures and rewards: to extend scholar Martin Tucker’s formulation, wherever the exile might land in flight, he bears with him the sweetness of survival, the triumph of transcendence, the luxury of liminality, and the invitation to innovate and invent in new lands. Indeed, exile embodies both blessing and curse, homes found and lost. Furthermore, this book adheres to (and tests) the premise that exile‘s deepest and innermost currents are manifested through writing and other artistic forms.

This 3-act play was first published in 1918; and like much of Joyce's other works, it is an imaginative reconstruction of his own life. In it, Richard Rowan, an Irish writer who has spent much time abroad, feels estranged from Irish society when he returns to Dublin.

What if our notions of the nation as a site of belonging, the home as a safe place, or the mother tongue as a means to fluent comprehension did not apply? What if fluency were a hindrance, whilst our differences and contradictions held the keys to radical new ways of knowing? Taking inspiration from the practice of language learning and translation, this book explores the extraordinary creative possibilities, politics, and ethics of adopting a multilingual approach to reading. Its case study, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), is a text in equal measures exhilarating and exasperating: an unhinged portrait of European modernist debates on transculturalism and globalisation, here considered on the backdrop of current discourses on migration, race, gender, and neurodiversity. This book offers a fresh perspective on the illuminating, if perplexing, work of a beloved European modernist, whilst posing questions far beyond Joyce: on negotiating difference in an increasingly globalised world; on braving the difficulty of relating across languages and cultures; and ultimately on imagining possible futures where multilingual literature can empower us to read, relate, and conceptualise differently.

James Joyce and Classical Modernism contends that the classical world animated Joyce's defiant, innovative creativity and cannot be separated from what is now recognized as his modernist aesthetic. Responding to a long-standing critical paradigm that has viewed the classical world as a means of granting a coherent order, shape, and meaning to Joyce's modernist innovations, Leah Flack explores how and why Joyce's fiction deploys the classical as the language of the new. This study tracks Joyce's sensitive, on-going readings of classical literature from his earliest work at the turn of the twentieth century through to the appearance of Ulysses in 1922, the watershed year of high modernist writing. In these decades, Joyce read ancient and modern literature alongside one another to develop what Flack calls his classical modernist aesthetic, which treats the classical tradition as an ally to modernist innovation. This aesthetic first comes to full fruition in Ulysses, which self-consciously deploys the classical tradition to defend stylistic experimentation as a way to resist static, paralyzing notions of the past. Analysing Joyce's work through his career from his early essays, Flack ends by considering the rich afterlives of Joyce's classical modernist project, with particular attention to contemporary works by Alison Bechdel and Maya Lang.

"Exiles: A Play in Three Acts" by James Joyce follows four players and two couples, Richard Rowan, a writer and his "common-law wife" Bertha, and Robert Hand with his cousin and previous lover Beatrice, both old friends of the previous couple. Richard, a writer, returns to Ireland from Rome with Bertha, the mother of his illegitimate son, Archie. While there, he meets his former lover and correspondent Beatrice Justice and former drinking partner and now successful journalist Robert Hand. Robert was also Beatrice's lover, and here the complications begin.