Panepiphanal World

Panepiphanal World is the first in-depth study of the forty short texts James Joyce called “epiphanies.” Composed between 1901 and 1904, at the beginning of Joyce’s writing career, these texts are often dismissed as juvenilia. Sangam MacDuff argues that the epiphanies are an important point of origin for Joyce’s entire body of work, showing how they shaped the structure, style, and language of his later writings. Tracing the ways Joyce incorporates the epiphanies into Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, MacDuff describes the defining characteristics of the epiphanies—silence and repetition, materiality and reflexivity—as a set of recurrent and inter-related tensions in the development of Joyce’s oeuvre. MacDuff uses fresh archival evidence, including a new typescript of the epiphanies that he discovered, to show the importance of the epiphanies throughout Joyce’s career. MacDuff compares Joyce’s concept of epiphany to classical, biblical, and Romantic revelations, showing that instead of pointing to divine transcendence or the awakening of the sublime, Joyce’s epiphanies are rooted in and focused on language. MacDuff argues that the Joycean epiphany is an apt characterization of modernist literature and that the linguistic forces at play in these early texts are also central to the work of Joyce’s contemporaries including Woolf, Beckett, and Eliot. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles An Open Access edition of this book was published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Philosophical Allusions in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is the first study to offer complete and comprehensive explanations of the most significant philosophical references in James Joyce's avant-garde masterpiece. Philosophy is important in all of Joyce's works, but it is his final novel which most fully engages with that field. Robert Baines shows the broad range of philosophers Joyce wove into his last work, from Aristotle to Confucius, Bergson to Kant. For each major philosophical allusion in Finnegans Wake, this book explains the original idea and reveals how Joyce first encountered it. Drawing upon extensive research into Joyce's notebooks and drafts, Baines then shows how Joyce developed and adapted that idea through repeated revisions. From here, the final form of the idea as it appears in the Wake is explored. In carefully examining the Wake's key philosophical allusions, essential themes within the novel come into focus, including history, time, language, being, and perception. We see also how those allusions combine to create a network of ideas, thinkers, and texts which has a logic and an integrity. Ultimately, Philosophical Allusions in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake shows that the more one knows of the Wake's philosophical allusions, the more one can find meaning and reason in this famously perplexing book of the night.

This collection is the first book-length study to re-evaluate all of James Joyce's major fictional works through the lens of cognitive studies. Cognitive Joyce presents Joyce's relationship to the scientific knowledge and practices of his time and examines his texts in light of contemporary developments in cognitive and neuro-sciences. The chapters pursue a threefold investigation—into the author's "extended mind" at work, into his characters' complex and at times pathological perceptive and mental processes, and into the elaborate responses the work elicits as we perform the act of reading. This volume not only offers comprehensive overviews of the oeuvre, but also detailed close-readings that unveil the linguistic focus of Joyce's drama of cognition.

A rich examination of the influence of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas on James Joyce In this book, Fran O’Rourke examines the influence of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas on James Joyce, arguing that both thinkers fundamentally shaped the philosophical outlook which pervades the author’s oeuvre. O’Rourke demonstrates that Joyce was a philosophical writer who engaged creatively with questions of diversity and unity, identity, permanence and change, and the reliability of knowledge. Beginning with an introduction to each thinker, the book traces Joyce’s discovery of their works and his concrete engagement with their thought. Aristotle and Aquinas equipped Joyce with fundamental principles regarding reality, knowledge, and the soul, which allowed him to shape his literary characters. Joyce appropriated Thomistic concepts to elaborate an original and personal aesthetic theory. O’Rourke provides an annotated commentary on quotations from Aristotle that Joyce entered into his famous Early Commonplace Book and outlines their crucial significance for his writings. He also provides an authoritative evaluation of Joyce’s application of Aquinas’s aesthetic principles. The first book to comprehensively illuminate the profound impact of both the ancient and medieval thinker on the modernist writer, Joyce, Aristotle, and Aquinas offers readers a rich understanding of the intellectual background and philosophical underpinnings of Joyce’s work. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

Panepiphanal World is the first in-depth study of the forty short texts James Joyce called "epiphanies." Composed between 1901 and 1904, at the beginning of Joyce's writing career, these texts are often dismissed as juvenilia. Sangam MacDuff argues that the epiphanies are an important point of origin for Joyce's entire body of work, showing how they shaped the structure, style, and language of his later writings. Tracing the ways Joyce incorporates the epiphanies into Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, MacDuff describes the defining characteristics of the epiphanies-silence and repetition, materiality and reflexivity-as a set of recurrent and inter-related tensions in the development of Joyce's oeuvre. MacDuff uses fresh archival evidence, including a new typescript of the epiphanies that he discovered, to show the importance of the epiphanies throughout Joyce's career. MacDuff compares Joyce's concept of epiphany to Classical, Biblical, and Romantic revelations, showing that instead of pointing to divine transcendence or the awakening of the sublime, Joyce's epiphanies are rooted in and focused on language. MacDuff argues that the Joycean epiphany is an apt characterization of modernist literature, and that the linguistic forces at play in these early texts are also central to the work of Joyce's contemporaries including Woolf, Beckett, and Eliot.

How does perception operate in James Joyce's fiction? This question is addressed from a unique perspective in "The Veil of Signs." Sheldon Brivic uses the theories of Jacque Lacan to create a radically new concept of the mechanics of mental life in the novels, including "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake." This is the first book to make use of Lacan's writings and seminars on Joyce.

Yeats's Poetry and Poetics brings together some of the finest Yeats criticism ever published, together with some new pieces specially written for this volume. Spanning the whole of Yeats's career, the essays are organised into three main parts. The first deals with Yeats's concern with the speaking voice and its bearing on public and private readings of his verse; and on his use of certain kinds of images in his poetry and plays, from ghosts and fairies, to figures borrowed from painters and sculptors and, extraordinarily, to the actual dancer for whom he makes room in his work. The second section puts Yeats's poetry in context with the work of Synge, D.H. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare and other 'Georgians', and with that of T.S. Eliot and other modernists; assessing the continuities (real and asserted) in Yeats's long poetic career against the revolutions in the poetry of his time. The profound connections between the writings of Yeats and Joyce, including the coupling of Finnegans's Wake and 'The Wanderings of Oisin' are also examined. Rounding off the volume 'Phantasmagoria', explores the implications for his poetics of Yeats's spiritualist philosophy, especially in terms of his conception of the poetic self, and, finally, the last section analyses two works animated by Yeats's quest for the 'faery bride' and his desperate attempt to attract, through his work, a real one.

While postcolonial studies has contributed much to our understanding of Irish modernism, it has also encouraged less-than-accurate portrayals of Joyce and Yeats as polar opposites: Yeats as the inventor of Irish mystique and Joyce as its relentless demythologiser. Alistair Cormack's complex study provides a corrective to these misleading characterisations by analysing the tools Yeats and Joyce themselves used to challenge representation in the postcolonial era. Despite their very different histories, Cormack suggests, these two writers can be seen as allies in their insistence on the heresy of the imagination. Reinvigorating and politicising the history of ideas as a powerful medium for studying literature, he shows that Joyce and Yeats independently challenged a linearity and materialism they identified with empire. Both celebrated Ireland as destabilising the accepted forms of thought and the accepted means of narrating the nation. Thus, 'unreadable' modernist works such as Finnegans Wake and A Vision must be understood as attempts to reconceptualise history in a literally postcolonial period.