Joyce's methods of composition have only recently begun to be examined in a rigorous fashion. Already the work done on the genesis of Joyce's texts has fostered both new insights and new questions regarding the overall status of his oeuvre. The conference Genitricksling Joyce, held at Antwerp in 1997, testified to the variety and vitality of genetic investigations into Joyce's work. We have tried to recreate this vitality in the present volume with a double purpose, or double trick. First, the essays collected in Genitricksling Joyce are not only indicative of the growing body of genetic scholarship, they also signify methodological and theoretical changes among its practitioners towards a more open form of discussion and understanding. Second, we hope that these essays will clearly demonstrate the relevance of genetic criticism to current critical and cultural concerns in Joyce studies.

This is a detailed reader's guide to James Joyce's masterwork Ulysses, voted the most important novel of the 20th century. The guide provides episode by episode an in depth explanation of the action and symbolism, including a description of the related books of Homer's Odyssey and the correspondences. This guide is designed to give the user the keys to the kingdom of one of the wonders of Western civilization. The non-academic author, a retired lawyer and life long Joyce reader, brings new approaches to find the deep meaning of each of Joyce's episodes and the novel as a whole. The scope of this effort, the complete Joyce, is unique in an area monopolized by more narrowly focused academics. The analysis elucidates Joyce's technique to mimic patterns in history and nature in his architecture of coherence. His medicine for the diseased spirit of our age is a custom blend of Jesus and Buddha, not as they are marketed by institutional religions, but as they lived their lives as humans. Joyce's god is more possibilities in life and art, and this guide will do that for you.

James Joyce gave a life to Ulysses which is still felt today, after the shock of its realism and the dislocation of its techniques have been absorbed into the traditions they helped to establish. This study demonstrates the sources of that life, how Joyce's characters go through the conflicts he himself experienced and how Joyce was concerned not only with the grotesque potential of life but also with its comic dimension, attempting to transmit that 'feeling of joy' which he adopted early as his artistic commitment. Joyce's belief in the malleability and resilience of man's physical and spiritual nature attracted him to the transformation process as a technique for fiction and as an expression of his belief that we need to be linked with both our higher and lower natures, that the soul is transformed by its immersion in the life of the body. Integrating the views of Giorgano Bruno and Sigmund Freud into his thought and art, Joyce balanced the grotesque and the comic, the realistic and the idealistic, the psychological and the spiritual. Professor Gose traces in detail the development of the two important transformation processes in which Joyce involved Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. He also demonstrates Joyce's conception of the artist as necessarily involved in such a process himself. Joyce understood the psychopathology of everyday life; he also came to value and make a central concern of his art mankind's residence in the matrix of the bodily functions. Grotesque physical transformations are an important part of Ulysses. In the Nighttown episode Joyce combined the grotesque with the comic to purge Bloom's emotions, and the reader's. Essential as purging was to Joyce, however, he used it only as a preparation for the joyful affirmation of the last two episodes. Joyce reconciles his reader to the comedy of life by providing a cosmic view of our connection with the stars and our own corpuscles, with an eternal process in which our spirits naturally progress through all the forms of the universe. Elliott Gose offers a brilliant interpretation of this high and humane vision, and the transformation processes through which it is expressed.

This study examines the representation of marital and extramarital relations in James Joyce's texts, with reference to context and to Joyce's biography. Utell claims that Joyce uses these relations to imagine a different kind of love, one based in a radical acceptance and a rejection of a utilitarian and sexually repressive stance towards marriage.

"James Joyce and the Mythology of Modernism" examines anew how myth exists in Joyce's fiction. Using Joyce's idiosyncratic appropriation of the myths of Catholicism, this study explores how the rejected religion still acts as a foundational aesthetic for a new mythology of the Modern age starting with "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and maturing within "Ulysses". Like the mythopoets before him—Homer, Dante, Milton, Blake—Joyce consciously sets out to encapsulate his vision of a splintered and rapidly changing reality into a new aesthetic which alone is capable of successfully rendering the fullness of life in a meaningful way. Already reeling from the humanistic implications of an impersonal Newtonian universe, the Modern world now faced an Einsteinian one, a re-evaluation which includes Stephen's awakening from the "nightmare" of history, a re-definition of deity, and Bloom's urban identity. Written with both the experienced Joycean and the beginner in mind, this book tells how the Joycean myth is our own conception of the human being, and our place in the universe becomes (re)defined as definitively Modernist, yet still, through Molly Bloom's final affirmation, profoundly human.