Joycean Unions

This exciting new volume presents recent research by internationally recognised Joyce scholars from Europe and North America. EnTitled Joycean Unions: Post-Millennial Essays from East to West, it pays particular attention to contemporary Eastern and Western European perspectives on the immensely influential work of the Irish writer James Joyce (1882-1941). The essays collected in this volume uncover various European sources of inspiration for Joyce’s early aesthetic theories, for the “Sirens”, “Cyclops”, “Circe” and “Eumaeus” episodes of his modernist masterwork Ulysses (1922) and for his last tour de force Finnegans Wake (1939). They present inspiring new ways of reading Joyce’s work, re-investigate the fascinating phenomenon of literary “error”, and review aspects of Joyce’s varied afterlife in Ireland and Eastern Europe. The book will be of interest to scholars, students and the general Audience interested in English literature, Modernism, European Studies, Irish Studies and of course the works of James Joyce.

These twelve essays analyze the complex pleasures and problems of engaging with James Joyce for subsequent writers, discussing Joyce's textual, stylistic, formal, generic, and biographical influence on an intriguing selection of Irish, British, American, and postcolonial writers from the 1940s to the twenty-first century.

This book sheds light on how the text and physical design of James Joyce’s two most challenging works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, reflect changes that transformed Europe between World War I and II.

Making the case that legal issues are central to James Joyce’s life and work, international experts in law and literature offer new insights into Joyce’s most important texts. They analyze Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Giacomo Joyce, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake in light of the legal contexts of Joyce’s day. Topics include marriage laws, the Aliens Act of 1905, laws governing display and use of language, minority rights debates, municipal self-government, rentier culture, and regulations on alcohol consumption and licensing. This volume also highlights Joyce’s own fascination with law and legal inquiry and explores how, by adopting a unique visual and linguistic style, Joyce constructed an authorial identity that mirrored the process of trademark. It also offers a deeper understanding of Judge John Woolsey’s decision in the Ulysses obscenity case and reveals the many ways copyright has affected publication of Joyce’s work and the scholarly and aesthetic use of his words. These discussions show how reading Joyce alongside the law enriches both legal studies and literary scholarship.  A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

"This book was crying out to be written." The Irish Times "Scandalously readable." Literary Review James Joyce's relationship with his homeland was a complicated and often vexed one. The publication of his masterwork Ulysses - referred to by The Quarterly Review as an "Odyssey of the sewer" - in 1922 was initially met with indifference and hostility within Ireland. This book tells the full story of the reception of Joyce and his best-known book in the country of his birth for the first time; a reception that evolved over the next hundred years, elevating Joyce from a writer reviled to one revered. Part reception study, part social history, this book uses the changing interpretations of Ulysses to explore the concurrent religious, social and political changes sweeping Ireland. From initially being a threat to the status quo, Ulysses became a way to market Ireland abroad and a manifesto for a better, more modern, open and tolerant, multi-ethnic country.

Trilingual Joyce is a detailed comparative study of James Joyce's personal involvement in both French and Italian translations of the iconic 1928 text Anna Livia Plurabelle, which later became the eighth chapter of Finnegans Wake. Considered to be completely untranslatable at the time of its publication, the translation of Anna Livia Plurabelle represented a fascinating challenge to Joyce, who collaborated in experimental renderings of the text, first into French and later into Italian. Patrick O'Neill's Trilingual Joyce is the first comparative study of all three of the Anna Livia Plurabelle variations, and fills a long-standing gap in Joyce studies. O'Neill, an Irish-born professor who has written widely on texts in translation, also discusses in detail the avant-guard novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett's contribution as a young man to the French rendering of Anna Livia Plurabelle.

Publishing in Joyce's “Ulysses”: Newspapers, Advertising and Printing gathers twelve essays by Joyce scholars exploring facets of the printing and publishing trades that pervade the substance of the novel.

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.