A delightful period piece of Paris in the late 1880's, We'll to the Woods No More (Les lauriers sont coupés) retains its importance as the first use of the monologue intérieur and the inspiration for the stream-of-consciousness technique perfected by James Joyce. Dujardin's charming tale, told with insight and irony, recounts what goes on in the mind of a young man-about-town in love with a Parisian actress. Mallarmé described the poetry of the telling as "the instant seized by the throat." Originally published in France in 1887, the first English translation (by Joyce scholar Stuart Gilbert) was published by New Directions in 1938. In 1957 Leon Edel's perceptive historical essay reintroduced the book as "the rare and beautiful case of a minor work which launched a major movement."

Edouard Dujardin's The Bays are Sere, first published in 1887, was the first novel written entirely in interior monologue or stream of consciousness. For a long time its impact was dormant, until James Joyce read it in 1903 and subsequently revealed its influence upon him. As a result it was republished to great acclaim in 1924, after which Dujardin wrote Interior Monologue, an essay on the origin of this style and how he came to adopt it.

In this book literary interior monologue is considered in relation to extraliterary phenomena, as well as narrative theory. The central question posed by this study is: what makes a particular interior monologue believable, given the unobservable nature of human thought? The discussion revolves around the unobservable counterpart of literary interior monologue, i.e., what is known in psychology as inner speech. Taking various experimental findings and theories from Soviet and American research on inner speech, the author compares them with literary interior monologue and tries to account for similarities and differences. Examples of literary interior monologue are analyzed in comparison with data from the linguistic study of real oral spontaneous discourse (also known as face-to-face communication). In the context of this interdisciplinary framework four examples of literary interior monologue are considered: V.M. Garshin's Four Days (1877), E. Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupés (1887), A Schnitzler's Leutnant Gustl (1900) and V. Larbaud's Amants, heureux amants... (1921). The inclusion of data from psychology and research on face-to-face communication makes a unique contribution not only to narrative theory, but also to the understanding of the relationship between literary and extraliterary communication.

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

This study explores the relations of T.S. Eliot and James Joyce with certain antecedents, such as Dante, Flaubert and Baudelaire; with contemporaries including Pound and Yeats; and with their readers, in order to illuminate the authors' historic mutual venture in English literature.