This book addresses James Joyce’s borderlessness and the ways his work crosses or unsettles boundaries of all kinds. The essays in this volume position borderlessness as a major key to understanding Joycean poiesis, opening new doors and new engagements with his work. Contributors begin by exploring the circulation of Joyce’s writing in Latin America via a transcontinental network of writers and translators, including José Lezama Lima, José Salas Subirat, Leopoldo Marechal, Edmundo Desnoës, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Augusto Monterroso. Essays then consider Joyce through the lens of the sciences, presenting theoretical interventions on posthumanist parasitology in Ulysses; on Giordano Bruno’s coincidence of opposites in Finnegans Wake; and on algorithmic agency in the Wake. Cutting-edge cognitive narratology is applied to the “Penelope” episode. Next, the volume features innovative essays on Joyce in relation to early animated film and comics, engaging with animated film in the “Circe” episode, Joyce’s points of contact with George Herriman’s cartoon strip Krazy Kat, and structural affinities between open-world gaming and Finnegans Wake. The final essays focus on abiding human concerns, offering new research on Joyce’s creative use of “spicy books”; a Lacanian consideration of “The Dead” alongside Katherine Mansfield’s “The Stranger” and Haruki Murakami’s “Kino”; and a meditation on Joyce’s uncertainties about the boundary between life and death. For Joyce, borders are problems—but ones that provided precious fodder for his art. And as this volume demonstrates, they encourage brilliant reflections on his work, from new scholars to leading luminaries in the field. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

“A brilliantly collaged snapshot of the variety and wealth of literary criticism, and Joyce studies, today.”—Tony Thwaites, author of Joycean Temporalities “Celebrates the multiplicity and sheer rampant excess of Joyce’s prodigally polysemous text with seventeen different scholars employing a likewise prodigal range of critical methodologies.”—Patrick O’Neill, author of Impossible Joyce: Finnegans Wakes “Each of the scholars involved is at the top of his and her game. Their commitment and excitement about the task at hand is evident on virtually every page. This book makes the Wake relevant and accessible to a whole new generation of readers.”—Garry Leonard, author of Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce This is the first Finnegans Wake guide to focus exclusively on the multiple meanings and voices in Joyce’s notoriously intricate diction. Rather than leveling the text it illuminates many layers of puns, wordplay, and portmanteaus, celebrating the Wake’s central experimental technique. Renowned Joyce scholars explore the polyvocality of individual chapters using game theory, ecocriticism, psychoanalysis, historicism, myth, philosophy, genetic studies, feminism, and other critical frameworks. They set in motion cross-currents and radiating structures of meaning that permeate the entire text and open up satisfying readings of the Wake for novices and seasoned readers alike. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

In this book, the first to explore the role of disability in the writings of James Joyce, 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.

A rich examination of the influence of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas on James Joyce In this book, Fran O’Rourke examines the influence of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas on James Joyce, arguing that both thinkers fundamentally shaped the philosophical outlook which pervades the author’s oeuvre. O’Rourke demonstrates that Joyce was a philosophical writer who engaged creatively with questions of diversity and unity, identity, permanence and change, and the reliability of knowledge. Beginning with an introduction to each thinker, the book traces Joyce’s discovery of their works and his concrete engagement with their thought. Aristotle and Aquinas equipped Joyce with fundamental principles regarding reality, knowledge, and the soul, which allowed him to shape his literary characters. Joyce appropriated Thomistic concepts to elaborate an original and personal aesthetic theory. O’Rourke provides an annotated commentary on quotations from Aristotle that Joyce entered into his famous Early Commonplace Book and outlines their crucial significance for his writings. He also provides an authoritative evaluation of Joyce’s application of Aquinas’s aesthetic principles. The first book to comprehensively illuminate the profound impact of both the ancient and medieval thinker on the modernist writer, Joyce, Aristotle, and Aquinas offers readers a rich understanding of the intellectual background and philosophical underpinnings of Joyce’s work. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

In this book—one of the first ecocritical explorations of Irish literature—Alison Lacivita defies the popular view of James Joyce as a thoroughly urban writer by bringing to light his consistent engagement with nature. Using genetic criticism to investigate Joyce’s source texts, notebooks, and proofs, Lacivita shows how Joyce developed ecological themes in Finnegans Wake over successive drafts. Making apparent a love of growing things and a lively connection with the natural world across his texts, Lacivita’s approach reveals Joyce’s keen attention to the Irish landscape, meteorology, urban planning, Dublin’s ecology, the exploitation of nature, and fertility and reproduction. Alison Lacivita unearths a vital quality of Joyce’s work that has largely gone undetected, decisively aligning ecocriticism with both modernism and Irish studies.

Joyce and Geometry reveals the full extent to which the modernist writer James Joyce was influenced by the radical theories of non-Euclidean geometry. Tracing Joyce's obsession with measuring and mapping space throughout his works, Ciaran McMorran delves into a major theme in Joyce's work that has not been thoroughly explored until now.

Joyce's "After the Race" is a seemingly simple tale, historically unloved by critics. Yet when magnified and dismantled, the story yields astounding political, philosophic, and moral intricacy. In Before Daybreak, Cóilín Owens shows that "After the Race" is much more than a story about Dublin at the time of the 1903 Gordon Bennett Cup Race: in reality, it is a microcosm of some of the issues most central to Joycean scholarship. These issues include large-scale historical concerns--in this case, radical nationalism and the centennial of Robert Emmet's rebellion. Owens also explains the temporary and local issues reflected in Joyce's language, organization, and silences. He traces Joyce's narrative technique to classical, French, and Irish traditions. Additionally, "After the Race" reflects Joyce's internal conflict between emotional allegiance to Christian orthodoxy and contemporary intellectual skepticism. If the dawning of Joyce's singular power, range, subtlety, and learning can be identified in a seemingly elementary text like "After the Race," this study implicitly contends that any Dubliners story can be mined to reveal the intertextual richness, linguistic subtlety, parodic brilliance, and cultural poignancy of Joyce's art. Owens’s meticulous work will stimulate readers to explore Joyce's stories with the same scrutiny in order to comprehend and relish how Joyce writes.