Sheds new light on James Joyce's use of sexual motifs as cultural raw material for Ulysses and other works Joyce/Foucault: Sexual Confessions examines instances of sexual confession in works of James Joyce, with a special emphasis on Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Using Michel Foucault's historical analysis of Western sexuality as its theoretical underpinning, the book foregrounds the role of the Jesuit order in the spread of a confessional force, and finds this influence inscribed into Joyce's major texts. Wolfgang Streit goes on to argue that the tension between the texts' erotic passages and Joyce's criticism of even his own sexual writing energizes Joyce's narratives-and enables Joyce to develop the radical skepticism of power revealed in his work. Wolfgang Streit is Lecturer, Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich.

Sheds new light on James Joyce's use of sexual motifs as cultural raw material for Ulysses and other works Joyce/Foucault: Sexual Confessions examines instances of sexual confession in works of James Joyce, with a special emphasis on Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Using Michel Foucault's historical analysis of Western sexuality as its theoretical underpinning, the book foregrounds the role of the Jesuit order in the spread of a confessional force, and finds this influence inscribed into Joyce's major texts. Wolfgang Streit goes on to argue that the tension between the texts' erotic passages and Joyce's criticism of even his own sexual writing energizes Joyce's narratives-and enables Joyce to develop the radical skepticism of power revealed in his work. Wolfgang Streit is Lecturer, Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich.

Using Augustine as a conversation partner, this text explores the value of Michel Foucault's controversial writings for theologians, ethicists, philosophers and cultural theorists. It demonstrates the possibilities and difficulties of applying Foucault's social criticisms within Christian contexts.

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

Obscenity, Psychoanalysis and Literature offers a fascinating psychoanalytic reading of four landmark obscenity trials involving the texts of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce. By tracing the legal histories of Lawrence and Joyce, from censorship to their eventual redemption and transformation into champions of sexual freedom, the book draws a narrative of changing legal, literary and cultural investments. The book examines the four trials of these authors in detail to show how the literary text can function as a symbol of both life and death and the political uses of figuring them as such. Taking a psychoanalytic perspective, we can see how this narrative of sexual repression to sexual liberation may itself be an emergent form of the superego imperative to enjoy and consume. Through close readings of trial transcripts and archival documents, this book helps elucidate the fantasies operating throughout the trials: the unquestioned assumptions of the nature of sexuality, gender, drugs and truth. It demonstrates with clarity how, through its attempt to suppress the sexual, the law confronts its own nature as language and in doing so troubles the distinctions between law, literature and desire that it usually wishes to protect. Offering a uniquely psychoanalytic account of the obscenity trials of these authors, this text will be of great interest to scholars from across the fields of psychoanalysis, law and literature.

The first sustained analysis of the place of homoeroticism in Joyce's cultural politics

'That is my fear. That I stand between her and any moments of life that should be hers...' Set against the backdrop of the Home Rule Crisis of 1912, Exiles is James Joyce's only surviving play. It tells the story of writer Richard Rowan and his common-law wife Bertha, characters drawn from Joyce's own life with Nora Barnacle. After a decade of absence from Dublin, Richard and Bertha have returned home from Rome, still unmarried, with their young son Archie. Richard hopes that he will be greeted as a returning genius and rewarded with a comfortable university position. But this aspiration ends up taking a back seat to the erotic crisis that is unleashed by the couple's return to the place where they first met, and their encounters with two old flames and friends. In this play, Joyce revisits his own agonizing feelings of jealousy that were precipitated by similar trips home to Dublin. In the introduction and notes, Keri Walsh provides a comprehensive look issues of gender, sexuality, and performance as well as considering the nationalist and sectarian contexts of Dublin in 1912, the year of the play's setting.