Joyce And The Perverse Ideal

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Representations of masochism - both overt and oblique - permeate the work of James Joyce. While a number of critics have noted this, to date there has been no sustained and focused analysis of this trope in his writings. David Cotter argues that such an examination is key to understanding the meanings and messages of Joyce's work. Adding further dimensions to moral, political and aesthetic considerations in the novels and stories - particularly Ulysses - this book provides a comprehensive account of masochistic elements in James Joyce's work. Cotter draws upon psychoanalytic theory and social history to illustrate the subversive power of perversity in the literature of the modern period. This edition first Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Representations of masochism - both overt and oblique - permeate the work of James Joyce. While a number of critics have noted this, to date there has been no sustained and focused analysis of this trope in his writings. David Cotter argues that such an examination is key to understanding the meanings and messages of Joyce's work. Adding further dimensions to moral, political and aesthetic considerations in the novels and stories - particularly Ulysses - this book provides a comprehensive account of masochistic elements in James Joyce's work. Cotter draws upon psychoanalytic theory and social history to illustrate the subversive power of perversity in the literature of the modern period. This edition first Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Joyce and Jung offers a provocatively original chapter-by-chapter analysis of Stephen Dedalus' psychosexual growth in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The author frames this within the Jungian soul-portrait gallery known as the «four stages of eroticism» in which Eve, Helen, Mary, and Sophia are the soul-portraits of Western civilization, drawing the collective eros into the psychic field to be witnessed as universal spectacle. In James Joyce's twentieth-century classic, Stephen's soul-portraits are the mother, the prostitute, the Virgin Mary, and the Bird-Girl.

«Hiromi Yoshida's innovative approach to 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' demonstrates how Joyce's Stephen Dedalus reaches a heightened state of creativity through his gradual integration of feminine elements into his psyche. This illuminating and stunning analysis presents a valuable contribution to psychoanalytic feminist theory as well as to Joyce studies.» (Nancy Bombaci, Assistant Professor of Writing and Literature, Mitchell College, New London, Connecticut).

This book offers a fundamental and comprehensive re-evaluation of one of Joyce’s most pervasive themes. By showing that betrayal was central to how Joyce understood and depicted the difficulties and terrors at the heart of all relationships, this book re-conceives Joyce’s approach to history, politics, and the other. Leaving behind the pathologizing discourses by which Joyce’s interest in betrayal has been treated as an ‘obsession,’ this book offers a vision of Joyce as both dramatist and theorist of betrayal. It demonstrates that, rather than being compelled by some unconscious urge to produce and reproduce textual betrayals, Joyce had a deep and hard-won conception of the specific dramatic energies wrapped up in the language and structures of betrayal and repeatedly found ways to make use of this understanding in his work.

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

In his comprehensive study of love in James Joyce's writings, Christopher DeVault suggests that a love ethic persists throughout Joyce's works. DeVault uses Martin Buber's distinction between the true love for others and the narcissistic desire for oneself to frame his discussion, showing that Joyce frequently ties his characters' personal and political pursuits to their ability to affirm both their loved ones and their fellow Dubliners. In his short stories and novels, DeVault argues, Joyce shows how personal love makes possible a broader social compassion that creates a more progressive body politic. While his early protagonists' narcissism limits them to detached engagements with Dublin that impede effective political action, Joyce demonstrates the viability of his love ethic through both the Blooms’ empathy in Ulysses and the polylogic dreamtext of Finnegan's Wake. In its revelation of Joyce's amorous alternative to the social and political paralysis he famously attributed to twentieth-century Dublin, Joyce's Love Stories allows for a better appreciation of the ethical and political significance underpinning the author's assessments of Ireland.