A critical analysis of how James Joyce used language in his work

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." Stephen Dedalus's famous complaint articulates a characteristic modern attitude toward the perceived burden of the past. As Robert Spoo shows in this study, Joyce's creative achievement, from the time of his sojourn in Rome in 1906-07 to the completion of Ulysses in 1922, cannot be understood apart from the ferment of historical thought that dominated the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tracing James Joyce's historiographic art to its formative contexts, Spoo reveals a modernist author passionately engaged with the problem of history, forging a new language that both dramatizes and redefines that problem.

The papers collected in this volume capture some of the excitement of the 11th International James Joyce Symposium, held in Venice and Trieste, June 1988. 'The contents of this book are by no means as restrictive as the title might suggest. The contributors explore not only Joyce's 'languages' and modes of communication and meaning, but, as well, concepts of significance and communication in broader contexts. Through Joyce, the writers explore and develop their own approaches and theories about language and languages, about semiotics and understanding. And about psychology, gender, physiology, politics, philosophy, linguistics, science, and culture. About literature in other words.'

This definitive work on Joyce's life has been revised and expanded to include the discovery of much primary material - including a new love affair, Boswellian records of his brother's conversations by Stanislaus Joyce, a limerick about Samuel Beckett, a dream notebook, previously unknown letters, and much more.

First published in 1988, this classic text is established as one of the most important discussions of the language of literature. Re-issued as a result of recent critical interest, this edition includes a new preface by the author.