Explores James Joyce's work as a response to developments in British and European history.

Eleven essays that open tantalizing questions about Joyce and history

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." Stephen Dedalus's famous complaint articulates a characteristic modern attitude toward the perceived burden of the past. As Robert Spoo shows in this study, Joyce's creative achievement, from the time of his sojourn in Rome in 1906-07 to the completion of Ulysses in 1922, cannot be understood apart from the ferment of historical thought that dominated the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tracing James Joyce's historiographic art to its formative contexts, Spoo reveals a modernist author passionately engaged with the problem of history, forging a new language that both dramatizes and redefines that problem.

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. Stephen Dedalus's famous complaint articulates a characteristic modern attitude toward the perceived burden of the past. As Robert Spoo shows in this study, Joyce's creative achievement, from the time of his sojourn in Rome in 1906-07 to the completion of Ulysses in 1922, cannot be understood apart from the ferment of historical thought that dominated the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tracing James Joyce's historiographic art to its formative contexts, Spoo reveals a modernist author passionately engaged with the problem of hi.

This second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Joyce contains several revised essays, reflecting increasing emphasis on Joyce's politics, a fresh sense of the importance of his engagement with Ireland, and the changes wrought by gender studies on criticism of his work. This Companion gathers an international team of leading scholars who shed light on Joyce's work and life. The contributions are informative, stimulating and full of rich and accessible insights which will provoke thought and discussion in and out of the classroom. The Companion's reading lists and extended bibliography offer readers the necessary tools for further informed exploration of Joyce studies. This volume is designed primarily as a students' reference work (although it is organised so that it can also be read from cover to cover), and will deepen and extend the enjoyment and understanding of Joyce for the new reader.

There are basic problems, and if we can't solve them we should hold off on theorizing. To begin at the beginning, what was Father Flynn's "great wish" for the boy in "The Sisters"? The uncle thinks he knows, but is he right? Can we be sure? How? And how about the beginning and end of "An Encounter"? How do they fit together? What is the specific import to the boy in "Araby" of the shards of conversation between the salesgirl and the Britishers? Can we (or Eveline) be certain of Frank's motives in her story? If not, what relevance do they have? And how in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man do Stephen's use and understanding of art evolve? In what crucial respects do they fall short of the understanding a careful reader of the novel can attain? What in Ulysses does Buck Mulligan have in mind when he demands "twopence for a pint" (of what!)? And in what ways are Bloom's ruminations about things like "mity cheese" that "digests all but itself" and saltwater fish ("Why is it that [they] are not...") crucial to the novel? There are bigger questions. What roles do all the accidental occurrences play? Do they heighten or diminish causality and probability? What are the functions of allusion and stylistic experimentation? Is/are there any overriding significance/s to the whole? Is there a didactic component in Joyce's writing? If so, is the didactic element a flaw in his art? What is the relationship between art and instruction--in Joyce and in general? Is good didactic art a contradiction in terms? These latter questions are enticing, but to speculate, theorize, deconstruct, or decontextualize Joyce's works with regard to them without a firm understanding, and perhaps even answers to, the vital though sometimes seemingly trivial former questions is to abrogate critical responsibility and relinquish what one of the formative giants of the twentieth century has to say to us. When relevant, the former are almost always answerable, and the mundane answers, often surprising, are frequently crucial not only for answering the latter questions but for fresh insight into both Joyce's world and our own. By mapping routes to the revelations such mundane "facts" yield, The Cracked Lookingglass establishes a firm base for future interpretations of Joyce's stories from Dubliners through Ulysses. It approaches his works as "fictional histories," grounding its "examplary" readings in relationships among the underlying facts of Joyce's created worlds. The study presents both a method of inquiry and, as examples of its fruit, some of the ways in which the apparent undiscoverables of Joyce's fiction disclose new and indisputable insights into his characters and stories, and through them our world. The approach opens avenues of access to the depths of Dubliners; to the assessments of art, religion, and human relationships in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; to the necessitous underpinnings of Joyce's experimentation in Ulysses, the ground and justification of his uses of "psychocasual chance," the "mythical method," and the seemingly gratuitous stylistic experiments that mirror our lives and suggest new directions for them.

Recent developments in literary theory, such as structuralism and deconstruction, have come under attack for neglecting history, while historically-based approaches have been criticized for failing to take account of the problems inherent in their methodological foundations. This collection of essays is unique in that it focuses on the relation between post-structuralism and historical (especially Marxist) literary theory and criticism. The volume includes a deconstructive reading of Marx, essays that relate history to the philosophical and institutional context, and a number of studies of particular texts, literary and non-literary, which pose the question of history and literary theory with particular force.