This study explores James Joyce's struggle to come to terms with the aesthetic outlooks current at the beginning of the century by examining his portrayal of their dangers and attractions in his two most fully realized characters, Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Leopold Bloom in Ulysses.

Thornton takes a fresh look at important psychological and cultural issues in this novel, arguing that although it may be a classic text of literary modernism, it is a fundamentally antimodernist work. This comprehensive and thoughtful book provides readers with a new cultural critique and intellectual history of 'Portrait', which promises to become one of the major discussions of the novel.

Jaurretche (English, U. of California-Los Angeles) traces the development of the Irish writer's mystical aesthetic through his novels to its supreme culmination and negation in Finnegan's Wake. She also shows how the search to surmount all human categories and sensations in order to encounter the divine, arose and developed in the Middle Ages, and was transmitted into modernism during and just before Joyce's time. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This volume investigates a broad range of structural connections between PThis volume investigates a broad range of structural connections between Pío Baroja's early fiction and the novels of his contemporaries in England and Ireland, with prominence given to Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster and James Joyce. Starting from the premise that Spain has been neglected in studies which assess the evolution of the European novel at the turn of the twentieth century, and challenging the insular concept of the 'Generation of 1898', the author reassesses the relationship between Baroja and English literature. Particular emphasis is given to renderings of consciousness, the role and identity of the artist, European landscapes, and questions of form, genre and representation in the novels under scrutiny. The book produces new readings of Baroja in the context of early twentieth-century English fiction.

The Aesthetics of Human Environments is a companion volume to Carlson’s and Berleant’s The Aesthetics of Natural Environments. Whereas the earlier collection focused on the aesthetic appreciation of nature, The Aesthetics of Human Environments investigates philosophical and aesthetics issues that arise from our engagement with human environments ranging from rural landscapes to urban cityscapes. Our experience of public spaces such as shopping centers, theme parks, and gardens as well as the impact of our personal living spaces on the routine activities of our everyday life are discussed in terms of their aesthetic value and the nature of our aesthetic appreciation. This volume will appeal to any reader concerned about the aesthetic quality of the world in which we live.

When Oscar Wilde said he had "seen wallpaper which must lead a boy brought up under its influence to a life of crime," his joke played on an idea that has often been taken quite seriously--both in Wilde's day and in our own. In Fateful Beauty, Douglas Mao recovers the lost intellectual, social, and literary history of the belief that the beauty--or ugliness--of the environment in which one is raised influences or even determines one's fate. Weaving together readings in literature, psychology, biology, philosophy, education, child-rearing advice, and interior design, he shows how this idea abetted a dramatic rise in attention to environment in many discourses and in many practices affecting the lives of the young between the late nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth. Through original and detailed analyses of Wilde, Walter Pater, James Joyce, Theodore Dreiser, Rebecca West, and W. H. Auden, Mao shows that English-language writing of the period was informed in crucial but previously unrecognized ways by the possibility that beautiful environments might produce better people. He also reveals how these writers shared concerns about environment, evolution, determinism, freedom, and beauty with scientists and social theorists such as Herbert Spencer, Hermann von Helmholtz, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, and W.H.R. Rivers. In so doing, Mao challenges conventional views of the roles of beauty and the aesthetic in art and life during this time.