In this short discussion of the Irish modernist writer, the author establishes a link between the mind of James Joyce and medieval theology. He shows how Joyce's fiction was suffused by his reading of St. Thomas Aquinas, Giordano Bruno and Nicola da Cusa and the book creates a dialogue between the saint, the novelist and the critic.

Preliminary material /Lucia Boldrini -- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS /Lucia Boldrini -- BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE /Lucia Boldrini -- INTRODUCTION: MIDDAYEVIL JOYCE /Lucia Boldrini -- THE RETURN OF MEDIEVALISM: JAMES JOYCE IN 1923 /Jed Deppman -- “QUELLA VISTA NOVA”: DANTE, MATHEMATICS AND THE ENDING OF ULYSSES /Reed Way Dasenbrock and Ray Mines -- AVERROES' SEARCH: DANTE'S MODERNISM AND JOYCE /Jeremy Tambling -- MILLY'S DREAM, BLOOM'S BODY AND THE MEDIEVAL TECHNIQUE OF INTERLACE /Guillemette Bolens -- JOYCE'S OTHER FATHER: THE CASE FOR CHAUCER /Helen Cooper -- CHARTING THE COURSE OF THE COMMEDIA'S EMBRYO IN A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN /Jennifer Fraser -- THE MEDIEVAL IRONY OF JOYCE'S PORTRAIT /Sam Slote -- LET DANTE BE SILENT: FINNEGANS WAKE AND THE MEDIEVAL THEORY OF POLYSEMY /Lucia Boldrini -- NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS /Lucia Boldrini -- INDEX /Lucia Boldrini.

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

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1916] established James Joyce as a leading figure in literary modernism across Europe. The novel is set in the author’s homeland, Ireland, and narrates, in five episodes, the childhood of Stephen Dedalus. The plot is entirely based on Joyce’s own life and serves as a private manifesto, particularly through its sharp declaration of independence from Catholicism. Joyce pioneered a new way of writing novels, abandoning traditional narration for stream of consciousness and introducing his epiphanies—momentary revelations that, in their everydayness, hint at a larger context of life. Upon the recommendation of the American poet Ezra Pound, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was serialized in the magazine The Egoist in 1914/15 before being published as a book the following year. Today, more than a hundred years after its release, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is considered one of the most significant autobiographical texts in world literature. The Modern Library ranked it as the 3rd best English-language novel of the 20th century (with Joyce’s Ulysses as #1). JAMES JOYCE [1882-1941], Irish author, is a key figure in modernist literature with works such as Dubliners [1914], A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1916], and Ulysses [1922].