Joyce, “Penelope” and the Body is a collection of twelve essays about “Penelope”, the famous final episode of Joyce’s Ulysses in relation to contemporary literary, cultural, philosophical and psychoanalytical theories of the body. As such it offers an unusually close look at that episode itself and it also becomes the very first book on Joyce that takes the idea of the body as its announced central theme. The contributors represented here come from England, Ireland, Europe and North America and they include some of the best established critics of Joyce alongside newcomers to academic publication. The essays include an encouraging diversity of approaches but they have in common a marked intellectual ambition, a surprisingly fresh and innovative approach and above all a devoted fascination for Joyce’s text. Taken together they offer much new potential for the reading of Joyce and Modernism and a range of possibilities for understanding the body and its representation through language and in culture that have resonances across the cultural sphere.

A Companion to James Joyce offers a unique composite overview and analysis of Joyce's writing, his global image, and his growing impact on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literatures. Brings together 25 newly-commissioned essays by some of the top scholars in the field Explores Joyce's distinctive cultural place in Irish, British and European modernism and the growing impact of his work elsewhere in the world A comprehensive and timely Companion to current debates and possible areas of future development in Joyce studies Offers new critical readings of several of Joyce's works, including Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses

Molly Bloom's famous soliloquy from James Joyce's Ulysses is a languorous internal monologue, in which the passionate wife of Leopold Bloom meditates on love and life. While Bloom sleeps beside her (head to toe), Molly recalls her many infidelities, including the energetic sexual encounter enjoyed that very afternoon. Though difficult to read straight from the page, Marcella Riordan's beautiful reading of this passage brings out all the wit and passion of one of the finest passages of writing in modern literature.

Few books in the English language seem to demand a companion more insistently than James Joyce's Ulysses, a work that at once entices and terrifies readers with its interwoven promises of pleasure, scandal, difficulty and mastery. This volume offers fourteen concise and accessible essays by accomplished scholars that explore this masterpiece of world literature. Several essays examine specific aspects of Ulysses, ranging from its plot and characters to the questions it raises about the strangeness of the world and the density of human cultures. Others address how Joyce created this novel, why it became famous and how it continues to shape both popular and literary culture. Like any good companion, this volume invites the reader to engage in an ongoing conversation about the novel and its lasting ability to entice, rankle, absorb, and enthrall.

A highly original exploration of Joyce's engagement with sexual questions.

Recipient of the 2015 PEN New England Award for Nonfiction “The arrival of a significant young nonfiction writer . . . A measured yet bravura performance.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times James Joyce’s big blue book, Ulysses, ushered in the modernist era and changed the novel for all time. But the genius of Ulysses was also its danger: it omitted absolutely nothing. Joyce, along with some of the most important publishers and writers of his era, had to fight for years to win the freedom to publish it. The Most Dangerous Book tells the remarkable story surrounding Ulysses, from the first stirrings of Joyce’s inspiration in 1904 to the book’s landmark federal obscenity trial in 1933. Written for ardent Joyceans as well as novices who want to get to the heart of the greatest novel of the twentieth century, The Most Dangerous Book is a gripping examination of how the world came to say Yes to Ulysses.