James Joyce Sexuality And Social Purity

In James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity, Katherine Mullin offers a richly detailed account of Joyce's lifelong battle against censorship. Through prodigious archival research, Mullin shows Joyce responding to Edwardian ideologies of social purity by accentuating the 'contentious' or 'offensive' elements in his work. Ulysses, A Portrait and Dubliners each meticulously subvert purity discourse. This important and highly original book will change the way Joyce is read and offers crucial insights into the sexual politics of Modernism.

Working Girls: Fiction, Sexuality, and Modernity investigates the significance of a new form of sexual identity at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Young women of the lower-middle and working classes were increasingly abandoning domestic service in favour of occupations of contested propriety. They inspired both moral unease and erotic fascination. Working Girls considers representations of four highly glamorised yet controversial types of women worker: telegraphists and typists (in newly-feminised offices), shop assistants (in the new department stores), and barmaids (in the new 'gin palaces' of major British cities). Economically emancipated (more or less) and liberated (more or less) from the protection and constraints of home and family, shop-girls, barmaids, typists, and telegraphists became mass media sensations. They energised a wide range of late-Victorian and Modernist fiction. This study will bring late-Victorian and Modernist British writers into intimate conversation with a substantial new archive of ephemeral sources often regarded as remote from high art and its concerns: popular fiction; music hall and musical comedy; beauty pageants and fairground exhibitions; visual art and early film; careers manuals; magazine and periodical journalism; moral reform crusades, Royal Commissions, and attempts at protective legislation. Working Girls argues that these seductive yet perilous young women helped writers negotiate anxieties about the state of literary culture in the United Kingdom. Crucially, they preoccupy novelists who were themselves beleaguered by anxieties over cultural capital, the shifting pressures of the literary marketplace, or controversies about the morality of fiction (often leading to the threat of censorship). In articulating questions about sexual integrity, Working Girls articulate often submerged questions about textual integrity and the role of the modern novel.

A highly original exploration of Joyce's engagement with sexual questions.

Thisis the first book focused on Forster's Maurice and its legacies in modernand contemporary fiction, film and new media. Ground-breaking essays by leadingscholars offernew readings by exploring overlooked contexts including: feminism and the'social purity' movement; anti-Fascism; religion and allegory; and earlytwentieth-century contestations over body-soul relation.

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2-, , language: English, abstract: First of all, and before we proceed with the actual description and basic layout of the term paper, it would be quite interesting to cite an extract from a letter that James Joyce himself wrote to his lover and partner Nora Barnacle. “How could I like the idea of home? ... My mother was slowly killed, I think, by my father’s ill-treatment, by years of trouble, and by my cynical frankness of conduct. When I looked on her face as she lay in the coffin – a face grey and wasted with cancer- I understood that I was looking on the face of a victim and I cursed the system which had made her a victim.” (Letters, II, 48) 1 This quotation roused my interest and became my first motivation concerning the study of gender roles and sexual morality in ‘ Dubliners’, as it summarizes the cruel reality of the position of women at that period of time. In addition to that, it provides us with a general impression of what the situation in Dublin might have been, focusing on the rather inharmonic relations between the two sexes.This small study and description of the gender roles in ‘Dubliners’ is organized in two main parts. As Joyce’s intention was “to write a chapter of the moral history of my [his] country” (D, xxxi), it is essential that the first part provides us with the general historical background of that age. The historical part may conveniently be divided into two sections. The first concerns the roles of both sexes in the Victorian era, whereas the second section brings us closer to the reality of men and women in Ireland, and to be more specific in Dublin. This second section is of great importance, because as already implied by the last quotation, this collection of fifteen short- stories, published in 1914, are expected to mirror the reality of the society of Dublin of that time, and to be more specific, this is done in a very representative way, as the stories involve nearly all stages and aspects of life.After having a general impression of the roles of men and women living in the Irish capital, we will go on to check whether this is in fact true and representative of the people described in the stories of ‘ Dubliners’. This will consist the main topic of the second part of the term paper, which is in turn divided into three sections...

This is the first book to explore the cultural significance of the color yellow, showing how its psychological and aesthetic value marked and shaped many of the intellectual, political, and artistic currents of late modernity. It contends that yellow functions during this period primarily as a color of stigma and scandal. Yellow stigmatization has had a long history: it goes back to the Middle Ages when Jews and prostitutes were forced to wear yellow signs to emphasize their marginal status. Although scholars have commented on these associations in particular contexts, Sabine Doran offers the first overarching account of how yellow connects disparate cultural phenomena, such as turn-of-the-century decadence (the "yellow nineties"), the rise of mass media ("yellow journalism"), mass immigration from Asia ("the yellow peril"), and mass stigmatization (the yellow star that Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany). The Culture of Yellow combines cultural history with innovative readings of literary texts and visual artworks, providing a multilayered account of the unique role played by the color yellow in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and European culture.

In Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars, Margot Gayle Backus charts the rise of the newspaper sex scandal across the fin de siècle British archipelago and explores its impact on the work of James Joyce, a towering figure of literary modernism. Based largely on archival research, the first three chapters trace the legal, social, and economic forces that fueled an upsurge in sex scandal over the course of the Irish Home Rule debates during James Joyce’s childhood. The remaining chapters examine Joyce’s use of scandal in his work throughout his career, beginning with his earliest known poem, “Et Tu, Healy,” written when he was nine years old to express outrage over the politically disastrous Parnell scandal. Backus’s readings of Joyce’s essays in a Trieste newspaper, the Dubliners short stories, Portrait of the Artist, and Ulysses show Joyce’s increasingly intricate employment of scandal conventions, ingeniously twisted so as to disable scandal’s reifying effects. Scandal Work pursues a sequence of politically motivated sex scandals, which it derives from Joyce's work. It situates Joyce within an alternative history of the New Journalism’s emergence in response to the Irish Land Wars and the Home Rule debates, from the Phoenix Park murders and the first Dublin Castle scandal to “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” and the Oscar Wilde scandal. Her voluminous scholarship encompasses historical materials on Victorian and early twentieth-century sex scandals, Irish politics, and newspaper evolution as well as providing significant new readings of Joyce’s texts.

James Joyce and Catholicism is the first historicist study to explore the religious cultural contexts of Joyce's final masterpiece. Drawing on letters, authorial manuscripts and other archival materials, the book works its way through a number of crucial themes; heresy, anticlericalism, Mariology, and others. Along the way, the book considers Joyce's vexed relationship with the Catholic Church he was brought up in, and the unique forms of Catholicism that blossomed in Ireland at the turn of the last century, and during the first years of the Irish Free State.