Richard Ellmann's scholarly work is notable for its striking liveliness and clarity and its genuine illumination of the writers and works with which he dealt. His life of James Joyce, published in 1959, received more commendation and critical praise than any previous literary biography.

This set reissues 8 books on James Joyce originally published between 1966 and 1991. The volumes examine many of Joyce’s most respected works, including Finnegans Wake, Dubliners and Ulysses. As well as providing an in-depth analyses of Joyce’s work, this collection also looks at James Joyce in the context of the Modernist movement as a whole. This set will be of particular interest to students of literature.

This is a collection of Joyce's non-fictional writing, including newspaper articles, reviews, lectures and essays. It covers 40 years of Joyce's life and maps important changes in his political and literary opinions.

This collection of essays is a critical reexamination of Joyce’s famed book of short stories, Dubliners. Despite the multifaceted critical attention Dubliners has received since its publication more than a century ago, many readers and teachers of the stories still rely on and embrace old, outdated readings that invoke metaphors of paralysis and stagnation to understand the book. Challenging these canonical notions about mobility, paralysis, identity, and gender in Joyce’s work, the ten essays here suggest that Dubliners is full of incredible movement. By embracing this paradigm shift, current and future scholars can open themselves up to the possibility of seeing that movement, maybe even noticing it for the first time, can yield surprisingly fresh twenty-first-century readings.

For nearly three quarters of a century, the modernist way of reading has been the only way of reading Joyce - useful, yes, and powerful but, like all frameworks, limited. This book takes a leap across those limits into postmodernism, where the pleasures and possibilities of an unsuspected Joyce are yet to be found. Kevin J. H. Dettmar begins by articulating a stylistics of postmodernism drawn from the key texts of Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Read within this framework, Dubliners emerges from behind its modernist facade as the earliest product of Joyce's proto-post-modernist sensibility. Dettmar exposes these stories as tales of mystery, not mastery, despite the modernist earmarks of plentiful symbols, allusions, and epiphanies. Ulysses, too, has been inadequately served by modernist critics. Where they have emphasized the work's ingenious Homeric structure, Dettmar focuses instead upon its seams, those points at which the narrative willfully, joyfully overflows its self-imposed bounds. Finally, he reads A Portrait of the Artist and Finnegans Wake as less playful, less daring texts - the first constrained by the precious, would be poet at its center, the last marking a surprising retreat from the constantly evolving, vertiginous experience of Ulysses.

This book presents a fundamental shift in the way we approach, discuss, and evaluate Joyce’s non-fictional writings. Rather than simply proposing or applying new methodologies, it historicises and reconceives the critical assumptions that have shaped scholarly approaches to these works for over half a century, showing that non-fiction as a categorical distinction, no matter how sensible it appears, crumbles under closer inspection. Bringing into conversation a group of key Joyce scholars, this volume acts not only as a vital reimagining of our critical relationship to Joyce’s non-fiction, but as a contribution to similar debates being carried out across the broad range of modernist studies.

Ellmann's sensitivity to what it meant to be an artist shaped his work from the outset: "The life of an artist ... differs from the lives of other persons in that its events are becoming artistic sources even as they command his present attention. Instead of allowing each day, pushed back by the next, to lapse into imprecise memory, he shapes again the experiences which have shaped him." Richard Ellmann died in 1987. His life and work have touched the lives of many. Some of the essays in this collection commemorate Richard Ellmann and his committment to Twentieth Century literature: most provide a continuing investigation of the Twentieth Century literature to which he devoted his carrer. Contributors include: Alison Armstrong, Daniel Albright, Christopher Butler, Carol Cantrell, Jonathan Culler, Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Andonis Decavelles, Rupin Desai, Susan Dick, Terence Diggory, Terry Eagleton, Rosita Fanto, Charles Feidelson, James Flannery, Charles Huttar, Bruce Johnson, John Kelleher, Brendan Kennelly, Frank Kermode, Declan Kiberd, Peter Kuch, Bruce Johnson, James Laughlin, A. Walton Litz, Dominic Manganiello, Ellsworth Mason, Christie McDonald, Dougald McMillan, Sean O'Mordha, Vivian Mercier, Mary T. Reynolds, William K. Robertson, Joseph Ronsley, S.P. Rosenbaum, Ann Saddlemyer, Sylvan Schendler, Daniel Schneider, Fritz Senn, Jon Stallworthy, Lonnie Weatherby, Thomas Whitaker, and Elaine Yarosky.