Professor Bowen's book is more than a simple collection of musical allusions; it is an engaging discussion of how Joyce uses music to expand and orchestrate his major themes. The introductions to the separate sections, on each of Joyce's works, express a new and cohesive critical theory and reevaluate the major thematic patterns in the works. The introductory material proceeds to analyze the general workings of music in each particular book. The specific musical references follow, accompanied by their sources and an examination of the role each plays in the work. While the author considers the early works with equal care, the bulk of this volume explores the musical resonances of Ulysses, especially as they affect the style, structure, characterization, and themes. Like motifs in Wagnerian opera, some allusions introduce and later remind us of characters--bits of Molly's songs for instance constantly intrude her impending adultery on Bloom's consciousness. Other motifs are linked to concerns such as Stephen's Oedipal guilt over his mother's death, which in turn connects to his preoccupation with Shakespeare, the creator, the father, and the cuckold. Music helps create the bond which briefly joins Stephen and Bloom, and music augments the entire grand theme of consubstantiality. Professor Bowen's style is simple and clear, allowing Joycean artifice to speak for itself. The volume includes a bibliography.

Professor Bowen's book is more than a simple collection of musical allusions; it is an engaging discussion of how Joyce uses music to expand and orchestrate his major themes. The introductions to the separate sections, on each of Joyce's works, express a new and cohesive critical theory and reevaluate the major thematic patterns in the works. The introductory material proceeds to analyze the general workings of music in each particular book. The specific musical references follow, accompanied by their sources and an examination of the role each plays in the work. While the author considers the early works with equal care, the bulk of this volume explores the musical resonances of Ulysses, especially as they affect the style, structure, characterization, and themes. Like motifs in Wagnerian opera, some allusions introduce and later remind us of characters—bits of Molly's songs for instance constantly intrude her impending adultery on Bloom's consciousness. Other motifs are linked to concerns such as Stephen's Oedipal guilt over his mother's death, which in turn connects to his preoccupation with Shakespeare, the creator, the father, and the cuckold. Music helps create the bond which briefly joins Stephen and Bloom, and music augments the entire grand theme of consubstantiality. Professor Bowen's style is simple and clear, allowing Joycean artifice to speak for itself. The volume includes a bibliography.

Timothy Martin documents Joyce's exposure to Wagner's operas, and defines a pervasive Wagnerian presence in his work.

James Joyce used music and musical allusion in ways that no other writer has attempted. Ulysses alone contains more than 800 song references, many as dependent upon music as lyrics. In these retrospective essays, Zack Bowen, the leading expert on Joyce and music, describes this bond between music and Joyce's fiction, explaining how musical allusions inform both individual passages and the theme or structure of entire works.

W. B. Yeats was Romantic and Modernist, mystical dreamer and leader of the Irish Literary Revival, Nobel prizewinner, dramatist and, above all, poet. He began writing with the intention of putting his 'very self' into his poems. T. S. Eliot, one of many who proclaimed the Irishman's greatness, described him as 'one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them'. For anyone interested in the literature of the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century, Yeats's work is essential. This volume gathers the full range of his published poetry, from the hauntingly beautiful early lyrics (by which he is still fondly remembered) to the magnificent later poems which put beyond question his status as major poet of modern times. Paradoxical, proud and passionate, Yeats speaks today as eloquently as ever.

Music and Sound in the Life and Literature of James Joyce: Joyces Noyces offers a fresh perspective on the Irish writer James Joyce’s much-noted obsession with music. This book provides an overview of a century-old critical tradition focused on Joyce and music, as well as six in-depth case studies which revisit material from the writer’s career in the light of new and emerging theories. Considering both Irish cultural history and the European art music tradition, the book combines approaches from cultural musicology, critical theory, sound studies and Irish studies. Chapters explore Joyce’s use of repetition, his response to literary Wagnerism, the role and status of music in the aesthetic and political debates of the fin de siècle, music and cultural nationalism, ubiquitous urban sound and ‘shanty aesthetics’. Gerry Smyth revitalizes Joyce’s work in relation to the ‘noisy’ world in which the author wrote (and his audience read) his work.