These twelve essays analyze the complex pleasures and problems of engaging with James Joyce for subsequent writers, discussing Joyce's textual, stylistic, formal, generic, and biographical influence on an intriguing selection of Irish, British, American, and postcolonial writers from the 1940s to the twenty-first century.

The New Joyce Studies indicates the variety and energy of research on James Joyce since the year 2000. Essays examine Joyce's works and their reception in the light of a larger set of concerns: a diverse international terrain of scholarly modes and methodologies, an imperilled environment, and crises of racial justice, to name just a few. This is a Joyce studies that dissolves early visions of Joyce as a sui generis genius by reconstructing his indebtedness to specific literary communities. It models ways of integrating masses of compositional and publication details with literary and historical events. It develops hybrid critical approaches from posthuman, medical, and queer methodologies. It analyzes the nature and consequences of its extension from Ireland to mainland Europe, and to Africa and Latin America. Examining issues of copyright law, translation, and the history of literary institutions, this volume seeks to use Joyce's canonical centrality to inform modernist studies more broadly.

This collection, first published in 1982, brings together thirteen writers from a wide variety of critical traditions to take a fresh look at Joyce and his crucial position not only in English literature but in modern literature as a whole. Comparative views of his work include reflections on his relations to Shakespeare, Blake, MacDiarmid, and the Anglo-Irish revival. Essays, story and poems all combine to celebrate the major constituents of Joyce’s work – his imagination and comedy, his exuberant use of language, his relation to the history of his country and his age, and his passionate commitment to ‘a more veritably human tradition’. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

"This book was crying out to be written." The Irish Times "Scandalously readable." Literary Review James Joyce's relationship with his homeland was a complicated and often vexed one. The publication of his masterwork Ulysses - referred to by The Quarterly Review as an "Odyssey of the sewer" - in 1922 was initially met with indifference and hostility within Ireland. This book tells the full story of the reception of Joyce and his best-known book in the country of his birth for the first time; a reception that evolved over the next hundred years, elevating Joyce from a writer reviled to one revered. Part reception study, part social history, this book uses the changing interpretations of Ulysses to explore the concurrent religious, social and political changes sweeping Ireland. From initially being a threat to the status quo, Ulysses became a way to market Ireland abroad and a manifesto for a better, more modern, open and tolerant, multi-ethnic country.

James Joyce and Classical Modernism contends that the classical world animated Joyce's defiant, innovative creativity and cannot be separated from what is now recognized as his modernist aesthetic. Responding to a long-standing critical paradigm that has viewed the classical world as a means of granting a coherent order, shape, and meaning to Joyce's modernist innovations, Leah Flack explores how and why Joyce's fiction deploys the classical as the language of the new. This study tracks Joyce's sensitive, on-going readings of classical literature from his earliest work at the turn of the twentieth century through to the appearance of Ulysses in 1922, the watershed year of high modernist writing. In these decades, Joyce read ancient and modern literature alongside one another to develop what Flack calls his classical modernist aesthetic, which treats the classical tradition as an ally to modernist innovation. This aesthetic first comes to full fruition in Ulysses, which self-consciously deploys the classical tradition to defend stylistic experimentation as a way to resist static, paralyzing notions of the past. Analysing Joyce's work through his career from his early essays, Flack ends by considering the rich afterlives of Joyce's classical modernist project, with particular attention to contemporary works by Alison Bechdel and Maya Lang.

Arguing that contemporary celebrity authors like Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Eimear McBride and Anna Burns position their work and public personae within a received modernist canon to claim and monetize its cultural capital in the lucrative market for literary fiction, this book also shows how the corporate conditions of marketing and branding have redefined older models of literary influence and innovation. It contributes to a growing body of criticism focused on contemporary literature as a field in which the formal and stylistic experimentation that came to define a canon of early 20th-century modernism has been renewed, contested, and revised. Other critics have celebrated these renewals, variously arguing that contemporary literature picks up on modernism's unfinished aesthetic revolutions in ways that have expanded the imaginative possibilities for fiction and revived questions of literary autonomy in the wake of postmodern nihilism. While this is a compelling thesis, and one that rightly questions an artificial and problematic periodization that still lingers in academic criticism, those approaches generally fail to address the material conditions that structure literary production and the generation of cultural capital, whether in the historical development of modernism or its contemporary permutations. This book addresses this absence by proposing a materialist history of modernism's afterlives.

Paul Muldoon was looking west long before he left Ireland for the United States in 1987, and his Transatlantic departure would prove to be a turning point in his life and work. In America, Muldoon's creative repertoire has extended into song writing, libretti, and literary criticism, while his poetry collections have extended to outlandish proportions, typified in recent years by a level of formal intensity that is unique in modern poetry. To leave Northern Ireland, though, is not necessarily to leave it behind. Muldoon has spoken of his 'sense of belonging to several places at once,' and in the United States he has found another creative gear, new modes of performance facilitated by his Irish émigré status. Focusing on the protean work of his American period, this book explores Muldoon's expansive structural imagination, his investment in Eros and errors, the nimbleness of his allusive practice as both a reader and writer, and the mobility of his Transatlantic position. It raises questions about the Irish poet as a westward voyager, about Irish-American cultural exchange, and how departures for Muldoon seem to be a precondition for return, indeed returns of many different kinds. It also draws on archival research to produce provocative new readings of Muldoon's later works. Exploring the poetic and literary-critical 'long forms' that are now his hallmark, this volume places the most significant works of Muldoon's American period under the microscope, and opens up the intricate formal schemes of a poet Mick Imlah credits as having 'reinvented the possibilities of rhyme for our time.'