Joseph Brooker's synthesis lucidly summarizes more than seventy years of Joyce criticism. This is the first broad study of how James Joyce's work was received in the Anglophone world, accessibly written for both academic and lay readers. Brooker shows how the reading of Joyce's work has moved through different critical paradigms, periods, and places, and how Joyce's writing has given generations of readers a way to discuss the major issues of the modern world.
A new collection of thirteen mesmerizing stories by American master Joyce Carol Oates, including the 2017 Pushcart Prize–winning “Undocumented Alien” The diverse stories of Beautiful Days, Joyce Carol Oates explore the most secret, intimate, and unacknowledged interior lives of characters not unlike ourselves, who assert their independence in acts of bold and often irrevocable defiance. “Fleuve Bleu” exemplifies the rich sensuousness of Oates’s prose as lovers married to other persons vow to establish, in their intimacy, a ruthlessly honest, truth-telling authenticity missing elsewhere in their complicated lives, with unexpected results. In “Big Burnt,” set on lushly rendered Lake George, in the Adirondacks, a cunningly manipulative university professor exploits a too-trusting woman in a way she could never have anticipated. In a more experimental but no less intimate mode, “Les beaux jours” examines the ambiguities of an intensely erotic, exploitative relationship between a “master” artist and his adoring young female model. And the tragic “Undocumented Alien” depicts a young African student enrolled in an American university who is suddenly stripped of his student visa and forced to undergo a terrifying test of courage. In these stories, as elsewhere in her fiction, Joyce Carol Oates exhibits her fascination with the social, psychological, and moral boundaries that govern our behavior—until the hour when they do not.
One of the greatest short stories in world literature. »He single-handedly killed the 19th century.« T. S. Eliot »James Joyce revolutionized 20th-century literature.« Time Magazine After a visitation from the dead - through something as concrete as someone singing a particular Irish song - Gabriel Conroy is struck by the profound realization of how superficially he has always loved his wife, Gretta. The image of the falling snow around them, deepening into a cosmic metaphor for life and death as the story progresses, has been called the most beautiful snowfall in literary history. 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].
“Joyce’s Book of the Dark gives us such a blend of exciting intelligence and impressive erudition that it will surely become established as one of the most fascinating and readable Finnegans Wake studies now available.”—Margot Norris, James Joyce Literary Supplement
The books that comprise the 'Casebooks in Criticism' series offer edited in-depth readings and critical notes and studies on the most important classic novels. This volume explores Joyce's 'Ulysses'.
The sheer mass of allusion to popular literature in the writings of James Joyce is daunting. Using theories developed by Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, R. B. Kershner analyzes how Joyce made use of popular literature in such early works as Stephen Hero, Dubliners, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and Exiles. Kershner also examines Joyce's use of rhetoric, the relationship between narrator and protagonist, and the interplay of voices, whether personal, literary, or subliterary, in Joyce's writing. In pointing out the prolific allusions in Joyce to newspapers, children's books, popular novels, and even pornography, Kershner shows how each of these contributes to the structures of consciousness of Joyce's various characters, all of whom write and rewrite themselves in terms of the texts they read in their youth. He also investigates the intertextual role of many popular books to which Joyce alludes in his writings and letters, or which he owned -- some well known, others now obscure. Kershner presents Joyce as a writer with a high degrees of social consciousness, whose writings highlight the conflicting ideologies of the Irish bourgeoisie. In exploring the social dimension of Joyce's writing, he calls upon such important contemporary thinkers as Jameston, Althusser, Barthes, and Lacan in addition to Bakhtin. Joyce's literary response to his historical situation was not polemical, Kershner argues, but, in Bakhtin's terms, dialogical: his writings represent an unremitting dialogue with the discordant but powerful voices of his day, many inaudible to us now. Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature places Joyce within the social and intellectual context of his time. Through stylistic, social, and ideological analysis, Kersner gives us a fuller grasp of the the complexity of Joyce's earlier writings.
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.
DIVDiscusses Ulysses arguing that through the operation of memory, it mimics the working of the human mind and achieves its status as one of the most intellectual achievements of the 20th century./div
This portrait-in-the-round of the greatest master of literature of the twentieth century, James Joyce, is the work of many pioneering critics whose familiarity with the man and whose insights into his art make their words uniquely knowledgeable, fresh, and compelling. "James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism" has proved particularly revealing to the general reader, indispensable to the Joyce scholar, and a rich source book to the student of the development of contemporary literature. It makes available the remarkable essay of T. S. Eliot, the intimate portraits of Jolas and Budgen, the first appearance of Hugh Kenner's Joyce study, the evocative Dublin panorama of Vivian Mercier. Here they are with bias, bite, wit, spontaneity, and integrity -- seventeen critics from Joseph Campbell to Edmund Wilson -- a one-volume library of critical acumen that probes the work of a great artist. -- From publisher's description.
