An indispensable resource for scholars and students of James Joyce, Joyce Studies Annual gathers essays by foremost scholars and emerging voices in the field.

An indispensable resource for scholars and students of James Joyce, Joyce Studies Annual gathers essays by foremost scholars and emerging voices in the field.

What if our notions of the nation as a site of belonging, the home as a safe place, or the mother tongue as a means to fluent comprehension did not apply? What if fluency were a hindrance, whilst our differences and contradictions held the keys to radical new ways of knowing? Taking inspiration from the practice of language learning and translation, this book explores the extraordinary creative possibilities, politics, and ethics of adopting a multilingual approach to reading. Its case study, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), is a text in equal measures exhilarating and exasperating: an unhinged portrait of European modernist debates on transculturalism and globalisation, here considered on the backdrop of current discourses on migration, race, gender, and neurodiversity. This book offers a fresh perspective on the illuminating, if perplexing, work of a beloved European modernist, whilst posing questions far beyond Joyce: on negotiating difference in an increasingly globalised world; on braving the difficulty of relating across languages and cultures; and ultimately on imagining possible futures where multilingual literature can empower us to read, relate, and conceptualise differently.

In this book, the first to explore the role of disability in the writings of James Joyce, contributors approach the subject both on a figurative level, as a symbol or metaphor in Joyce’s work, and also as a physical reality for many of Joyce’s characters. Contributors examine the varying ways in which Joyce’s texts represent disability and the environmental conditions of his time that stigmatized, isolated, and othered individuals with disabilities. The collection demonstrates the centrality of the body and embodiment in Joyce’s writings, from Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Essays address Joyce’s engagement with paralysis, masculinity, childhood violence, trauma, disorderly eating, blindness, nineteenth-century theories of degeneration, and the concept of “madness.” Together, the essays offer examples of Joyce’s interest in the complexities of human existence and in challenging assumptions about bodily and mental norms. Complete with an introduction that summarizes key disability studies concepts and the current state of research on the subject in Joyce studies, this volume is a valuable resource for disability scholars interested in modernist literature and an ideal starting point for any Joycean new to the study of disability. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles Contributors: Rafael Hernandez | Boriana Alexandrova | Casey Lawrence | Giovanna Vincenti | Jeremy Colangelo | Jennifer Marchisotto | Marion Quirici | John Morey | Kathleen Morrissey | Maren T. Linett 

An obsession with “degeneration” was a central preoccupation of modernist culture at the start of the 20th century. Less attention has been paid to the fact that many of the key thinkers in “degeneration theory” – including Cesare Lombroso, Max Nordau, and Magnus Hirschfeld – were Jewish. Unfit: Jewish Degeneration and Modernism is the first in-depth study of the Jewish cultural roots of this strand of modernist thought and its legacies for modernist and contemporary culture. Marilyn Reizbaum explores how literary works from Bram Stoker's Dracula, through James Joyce's Ulysses to Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, the crime movies of Mervyn LeRoy, and the photography of Claude Cahun and Adi Nes manifest engagements with ideas of degeneration across the arts of the 20th century. This is a major new study that sheds new light on modernist thought, art and culture.

James Joyce's Ulysses is considered one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. This new edition - published to celebrate the book's first publication - helps readers to understand the pleasures of this monumental work and to grapple with its challenges. Copiously equipped with maps, photographs, and explanatory footnotes, it provides a vivid and illuminating context for the experiences of Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Molly Bloom, as well as Joyce's many other Dublin characters, on June 16, 1904. Featuring a facsimile of the historic 1922 Shakespeare and Company text, this version also includes Joyce's own errata as well as references to amendments made in later editions. Each of the eighteen chapters of Ulysses is introduced by a leading Joyce scholar. These richly informative pieces discuss the novel's plot and allusions, while also explaining crucial questions that have puzzled and tantalized readers over the last hundred years.

Joyce as Theory is the first book-length examination of James Joyce to argue he can be read as a theorist. Joyce is not just a favourite case study of literary theory; he wrote about how we make meaning, and to what effect. The present volume traces his hermeneutics in those narratives in Finnegans Wake which deal with textual production and interpretation, showing that the Wake’s difficulty exemplifies Joyce’s theoretical stance. All reading involves responding to problems we cannot quite fathom. This preoccupation places Joyce alongside Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. Joyce as Theory revives debates on theory with a linguistic focus, laying open misconceptions that have muddled attempts to be over and done with this kind of thought. It demonstrates that Derrida and Lacan, almost exclusively presented as rivals, converge on a common position. It opposes the myth of linguistic theory as a formalist approach, instead showing that Joyce, Derrida, and Lacan give us a hermeneutic ethics alert to how meaning-making impacts our lived experience. And it challenges the notion that theory imposes matters alien to Joyce, demonstrating that it is an appreciation of Joyce’s arguments in Finnegans Wake that generates a theoretical perspective. Joyce as Theory is essential reading for researchers and students in Joyce studies, continental philosophy, literary theory, and modernist literature.