European Joyce Studies

This is the first-time publication of long-lost letters by a crucial figure in modernist publishing. Carefully edited and extensively contextualised, they document Beach’s unwavering, all-embracing support for Joyce’s art by publishing his controversial Ulysses in Paris in 1922 and other efforts such as getting fragments of Work in Progress published. They also reveal her difficulties with his uncompromising and demanding personality, as it is vividly illustrated in the Frankfurter Zeitung affair. The edition moreover includes all extant letters to Paul Léon, her successor after their break-up following severe disagreements over the American edition of Ulysses. Joyceans and scholars of modernism will find this an indispensable resource for further research.

The essays in Retranslating Joyce for the 21st Century straddle the disciplines of Joyce studies, translation studies, and translation theory. The newest scholarly developments in these fields are well reflected in recent retranslations of Joyce’s works into Italian, Portuguese, French, Hungarian, Dutch, Turkish, German, South Slavic, and many other languages. Joyce critics and Joyce translators offer multi-angled critical attention to the issues of translation and retranslation, enhanced by their diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds and innovative methodologies. Because retranslations of Joyce have also exerted significant influence on target language cultures, students and readers of Joyce and, more broadly, of modernist and world literature, will find this book highly relevant to their appreciation of literature in translation.

Joyce’s art is an art of idiosyncratic transformation, revision and recycling. More specifically, the work of his art lies in the act of creative transformation: the art of the paste that echoes Ezra Pound’s urge to make it new. The essays in this volume examine various modalities of the Joycean aesthetic metamorphosis: be it through the prism of Joyce engaging with other arts and artists, or through the prism of other arts and artists engaging with the Joycean aftermath. We have chosen the essays that best show the range of Joycean engagement with multiple artistic domains in a variety of media. Joyce’s art is multiform and protean: influenced by many, it influences many others.

James Joyce and Genetic Criticism presents contemporary scholarship in genetic criticism and Joyce studies. In considering how evolutionary themes enhance the definition of the genetic method in interpreting texts, this volume presents a variety of manuscript-based analyses that engage how textual meaning, through addition and omission, grows. In doing so, this volume covers a wide-range of topics concerning Joycean genetics, some of which include Joyce’s editorial practice, the forthcoming revised edition of Finnegans Wake, the genetic relationship between Giacomo Joyce and Ulysses, the method and approach required for creating an online archive of Finnegans Wake, and the extensive genesis of “Penelope”.

Contributors are: Shinjini Chattopadhyay, Tim Conley, Luca Crispi, Robbert-Jan Henkes, Sangam MacDuff, Genevieve Sartor, Fritz Senn, Sam Slote, Dirk Van Hulle.

In Reading Joycean Temporalities, Jolanta Wawrzycka gathered scholars who address James Joyce’s experimental treatment of narrative time in terms that go beyond the much-discussed monologue intérieur and stream of consciousness. Contributors examine Joyce’s attempts to render temporal simultaneity through inescapably spatial means of language, including his deployment of Lessing’s concepts of nacheinander and nebeneinander; analyse Joyce’s handling of modalities of time, (in)finitude and temporal disharmonies in time/sense; and tackle Joyce’s engagements with historical time, Homeric time, and with poetic “markers of time”. The essays re-contextualize modernist and postmodernist critical, theoretical, philosophical and narratological polemics on time/temporality, relativity, language, and memory, and offer insightful readings of Joyce’s “double-timing”, “writing of finitude”, “time without measure”, and psychological vs. mechanically measured time.

Contributors are: Valérie Bénéjam, Tim Conley, Erika Mihálycsa, Stephanie Nelson, Christine O’Neill, Cóilín Owens, Fritz Senn, Annalisa Volpone and Jolanta Wawrzycka.

Appearing in an era of rapid change in the printing and publishing industries, James Joyce’s Ulysses exploited and exemplified those industries to the degree that the book can be seen as a virtual museum of 1904 media. Publishing in Joyce's “Ulysses”: Newspapers, Advertising and Printing, edited by William S. Brockman, Tekla Mecsnóber and Sabrina Alonso, gathers twelve essays by Joyce scholars exploring facets of those trades that pervade the substance of the book. Essays explore the book’s incorporation of mass-market weekly magazines, contemporary advertising slogans, newspaper clippings, the “Aeolus” episode’s printing office and the varied typographic styles of successive editions of Ulysses. Placing Joyce’s work in its historical milieu, the collection offers a fresh perspective on modern print culture.

Contributors are: Sabrina Alonso, Harald Beck, William S. Brockman, Elisabetta d'Erme, Judith Harrington, Matthew Hayward, Sangam MacDuff, Tekla Mecsnóber, Tamara Radak, Fritz Senn, David Spurr, Jolanta Wawrzycka.

New Quotatoes, Joycean Exogenesis in the Digital Age offers fourteen original essays on the genetic dossiers of Joyce’s fiction and the ties that bind the literary archive to the transatlantic print sphere of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Availing of digital media and tools, online resources, and new forms of access, the contributions delve deeper than ever before into Joyce’s programmatic reading for his oeuvre, and they posit connections and textual relations with major and minor literary figures alike never before established. The essays employ a broad range of genetic methodologies from ‘traditional’ approaches to intertextuality and allusion to computational methods that plumb Large-scale Digitisation Initiatives like Google Books to the possibilities of databasing for Joyce studies.

Contributors: Scarlett Baron, Tim Conley, Luca Crispi, Ronan Crowley, Sarah Davison, Tom De Keyser, Daniel Ferrer, Finn Fordham, Robbert-Jan Henkes, John Simpson, Sam Slote, Dirk Van Hulle, Chrissie Van Mierlo, and Wim Van Mierlo.

A LONG THE KROMMERUN offers a selection of the best papers delivered at the XXIV International James Joyce Symposium hosted by Utrecht University, the Netherlands, June 2014. The essays offer fresh insights into Joyce and De Stijl aesthetic movement which originated in the Netherlands, Joyce’s (language) politics, his use of multilingualism and dialects, and, by way of close readings and genetic approaches of Finnegans Wake, the intricate ways Joyce communicates with his readers.

Contributors: Boriana A. Alexandrova, Stephanie Boland, Austin Briggs, Tim Conley, Catherine Flynn, Philip Keel Geheber, Robbert-Jan Henkes, Maria Kager, Katherine O’Callaghan, So Onose, David Pascoe, Sam Slote, David Spurr, and Dirk Van Hulle.

As unusual or esoteric as the subject might seem, Joyce’s punctuation offers a way to study and appreciate his stylistic innovations and the materiality of his textual productions. Joyce’s shunning of what he called “perverted commas” and the general absence of punctuation in Molly Bloom’s monologue are only the most infamous instances of a deeply idiosyncratic and changeable use of punctuation. The essays collected in Doubtful Points: Joyce and Punctuation investigate ellipses, parentheses, commas, dashes, colons, semi-colons, full stops, and even diacritics to explore a surprising array of contingent subjects: Joyce’s working relationships with publishers; questions of editing and translation; hermeneutic and epistemological dilemmas and reading strategies; linguistic nationalisms; the ideological effects of regulated writing; and more. This book is sure to edify and intrigue “fullstoppers” and “semicolonials” alike.

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.

Joyce, Benjamin and Magical Urbanism offers for the first time a sustained exploration of parallels between the fiction of James Joyce and the cultural criticism of Walter Benjamin. Benjamin is perhaps modernism’s most eloquent theorist, Joyce its finest writer of fiction; both haunted the same Paris streets at the height of the modernist moment, and both developed accounts of the flaneur’s encounter with the city, with commodity culture and with others, that were revolutionary in their day and continue to set the agendas for culture and cultural critique. To place some of the work of each side by side is to make evident their affinities: the skills of each as new cartographers of the urban, the interest of each in ethnicity, nationalism, and exile, the way in which the ‘Profane illumination’ celebrated by Benjamin meets the ‘Epiphany’ of Joyce’s A Portrait, as each rethought the epistemology of insight in the modernist moment. This collection explores these parallels between two of the greatest modernists, casting the aesthetic strategies of Joyce in the light of the aesthetic critique of Benjamin, opening up the politics of the one in the light of those of the other, and discerning the parallels between Joyce’s version of a modern urban world in which self and society effect an uneasy rapprochement and Benjamin’s modernist scenarios in which the aura might still linger. This collection discovers extraordinary parallels between the two writers who, writing in Paris, offered new accounts of urban selfhood and survival to the world.

Joyce was fascinated by error throughout his writing career, from the malapropisms of characters in Dubliners, through to misquotations and misappropriations in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the errors and gaffes committed by Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. This interest culminates in the ceaseless perversions of language, perspective and fact in Finnegans Wake. Error is not, however, something that Joyce only writes about: it happens to him and his texts in the form of misprints and inadvertent factual errors, through the interventions of others and through lapses in Joyce’s own practice. Indeed, part of the richness of this topic for those who are interested in Joyce’s writing is the difficult process of disentangling deliberate features of the text from unintended slippages.
Errears and Erroriboose is the first major collection of essays to address the topic of Joyce and error. It brings together eight essays in order to provide readers with an understanding of the diverse ways in which error features in Joyce’s writings. A variety of different critical perspectives and approaches to the topic can be found here and the volume is of interest to students of Joyce’s work at all levels. These include archival and genetic study of the role of error in the composition of Joyce’s works; consideration of the psychological implications of error; work on the material and historical consequences of error; and close readings of the verbal effects of errors and mistakes.

The essays of this volume show how Joyce’s work engaged with the many upheavals and revolutions within the French nineteenth-century novel and its contexts. They delve into the complexities of this engagement, tracing its twists and turns, and reemerge with fascinating and rich discoveries. The contributors explore Joyce’s explicit and implicit responses to Alexandre Dumas, Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo and Émile Zola and, of course, Flaubert. Drawing from the wide range of Joyce’s writings - Dubliners, A Portrait..., Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and his life, letters, and essays - they resituate Joyce’s relation to France, the novel, and the nineteenth century.

Unlike many recent Joyce studies, De-familiarizing Readings eschews the theoretical and ideological and instead plants itself on firmer ground. Its seven outstanding Joyce scholars share a love of the “stuff” of texts, contexts, and intertexts: data and dates, food and clothing, letters and journals, literary allusions, and other quotidian desiderata. Their inductive approaches - whether to Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses, or Finnegans Wake - are thoroughly researched, argued with meticulous, even nit-picking, precision, and offer the pleasurable reading experience of forensic analysis. And in the end they provide the satisfaction of reaching persuasive conclusions that seem both striking and inevitable.

Joyce, “Penelope” and the Body is a collection of twelve essays about “Penelope”, the famous final episode of Joyce’s Ulysses in relation to contemporary literary, cultural, philosophical and psychoanalytical theories of the body. As such it offers an unusually close look at that episode itself and it also becomes the very first book on Joyce that takes the idea of the body as its announced central theme. The contributors represented here come from England, Ireland, Europe and North America and they include some of the best established critics of Joyce alongside newcomers to academic publication. The essays include an encouraging diversity of approaches but they have in common a marked intellectual ambition, a surprisingly fresh and innovative approach and above all a devoted fascination for Joyce’s text. Taken together they offer much new potential for the reading of Joyce and Modernism and a range of possibilities for understanding the body and its representation through language and in culture that have resonances across the cultural sphere.

This collection presents articles that examine Joyce and Beckett’s mutual interest in and use of the negative for artistic purposes. The essays range from philological to psychoanalytic approaches to the literature, and they examine writing from all stages of the authors’ careers. The essays do not seek a direct comparison of author to author; rather they lay out the intellectual and philosophical foundations of their work, and are of interest to the beginning student as well as to the specialist.

The first volume to collect essays from the emergent field of cultural studies that specifically address the work of James Joyce, Cultural Studies of James Joyce includes work from both well-established Joyce scholars such as Margot Norris and Cheryl Herr and by such younger writers as Tracey Teets Schwarze and Paul Saint-Amour. Topics range over the whole field of culture, from “Nipper” the Victrola dog to the statuary of Praxitiles, from the Tank Girl comics to studies of Irish schizophrenia, from the history of University College Dublin to the political ferment over choral singing at the turn of the century. The volume should be of interest to Joyceans, to students of literature and culture in the twentieth century, and especially to those interested in the interactions of different cultural levels between the nineteenth century and our own time. An introductory survey by R. Brandon Kershner discusses the rise of cultural studies and places the issue within modern debates in literary theory.

This book presents for the first time a collective examination of the issue of audience in relation to Joyce’s work and the cultural moments of its reception. While many of the essays gathered in this volume are concerned with particular readers and readings of Joyce’s work, they all, individually and generally, gesture at something broader than a specific act of reception. Joyce’s Audiences is an important narrative of the cultural receptions of Joyce but it is also an exploration of the author’s own fascination with audiences, reflecting a wider concern with reading and interpretation in general. Twelve essays by an international cast of Joyce critics deal with: the censorship and promotion of Ulysses; the ‘plain reader’ in modernism; Richard Ellmann’s influence on Joyce’s reputation; the implied audiences of Stephen Hero and Portrait; Borges’s relation with Joyce; the study of Joyce in Taiwan; the promotion of Joyce in the U.S.; the complaint that there is insufficient time to read Joyce’s work; the revisions to “Work in Progress” that respond to specific reviews; strategies of critical interpretation; Joyce and feminism; and the ‘belated’ readings of post-structuralism.

In Dublin in June 2022, a symposium of scholars celebrated the centenary of the original publication of Joyce’s Ulysses. This volume, a gathering of selected papers presented at that event, displays how vibrant and varied are the avenues of inquiry and research into Joyce’s works today. From orality to elegy, contemplating comparisons with artists as different as Ovid, Derek Walcot, and John Cage, these essays project inward (centripetally) and outward (centrifugally) to examine the receptions of Joyce’s works, their legacies, and the possible futures of Joyce studies.