This book suggests that James Joyce, like Yeats and his fellow Revivalists, was attracted to the west of Ireland as a place of authenticity and freedom. It shows how his acute historical sensibility is reflected in Dubliners, posing new questions about one of the most enduring collections of short stories ever written. The answers provided are a fusion of history and literary criticism, using close readings that balance techniques of realism and symbolism. The result is an original study that shines new light on Dubliners and Joyce’s later masterpieces.
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Front Matter Front Matter (pp. i-vi) -
Table of Contents Table of Contents (pp. vii-vii) -
Acknowledgements Acknowledgements (pp. viii-ix) -
Abbreviations Abbreviations (pp. x-x) -
Introduction: ‘The journey westward’ Introduction: ‘The journey westward’ (pp. 1-11)Where was James Joyce from? If there is one question that even the most novice of initiates to the study of Irish literature could answer correctly, it is surely this one. Joyce’s burning obsession with the city of his birth has provided Dublin a permanent place in literary history; his loving recreation of its streets, shops, statues, brothels and pubs stands as a valuable historical document as well as a magnificent and enduring artifice. Yet one of the earliest critical mentions of Joyce wishes to connect him not so much with Dublin but with the west.Ireland in Fiction(1916),...
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1 ‘Endless stories about the distillery’: Joyce and Whiskey 1 ‘Endless stories about the distillery’: Joyce and Whiskey (pp. 12-61)Flann O’Brien, the much-loved Irish comic writer, lived uncomfortably in the shadow of James Joyce. An admirer of the great Dubliner’s achievements and one of the first to formally celebrate Bloomsday, O’Brien was also deeply frustrated by his own inability to escape comparison with the author ofUlysses. This anxiety is brought to the surface for comic effect in O’Brien’s late novelThe Dalkey Archive(1964) where his central character, the civil servant Mick O’Shaughnessy, finds Joyce alive and well and working as a barman in the north County Dublin seaside resort of Skerries. Shy of public recognition and adulation,...
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2 ‘Their friends, the French’: Joyce, Jacobitism and the Revival 2 ‘Their friends, the French’: Joyce, Jacobitism and the Revival (pp. 62-121)By the autumn of 1930 Joyce’s artistic reputation was secure,Ulysseshad catapulted him into the first rank of world writers, and his ‘Work in Progress’, which would eventually becomeFinnegans Wakein 1939, had begun to appear – albeit to puzzlement – in an array of literary journals. The portrait painters had started to eye posterity – the most recent to seek a sitting with Joyce was Augustus John, one of the great artistic chroniclers of the Irish Literary Revival. Joyce, as keen to layer his painted image as he was his several books, had mischief in mind. Writing...
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3 ‘He would put in allusions’: The Uses and Abuses of Revivalism 3 ‘He would put in allusions’: The Uses and Abuses of Revivalism (pp. 122-158)Perhaps the most striking and, in a sense, disappointing thing about James Joyce’s Trieste library as it is held today by the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, is its pristine condition.¹ While the bibliophile might enjoy the almost unmarked and near-perfect condition of the collection, the Joycean scholar longs for something messier: scribbles in the margins, turned-down pages, broken spines. But there is almost nothing there for the forensic detective to ponder. Other than the haunting and exciting experience of reading the books that Joyce read, and imagining him lifting those very same volumes down from their shelves over...
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Conclusion: Protestant Power and Plates of Peas Conclusion: Protestant Power and Plates of Peas (pp. 159-161)If Joyce’s weapon was the sharpened pen, England’s was, he wrote, a little blunter: ‘her weapons were, and are, the battering-ram, the club and the noose’.¹ At the opening of the previous chapter I looked at one book held in Joyce’s Trieste library and it seems apt to conclude with another, published in the year Joyce left with Nora for the Continent: Michael Davitt’sThe Fall of Feudalism in Ireland. In his preface to that book Davitt sums up what he feels has been the injurious nature of the relationship between England and Ireland:
Historically put, England’s rule of Ireland,...
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Select Bibliography Select Bibliography (pp. 162-171) -
Index Index (pp. 172-180)