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This chapter examines James Joyce's romance with the temporality of the epiphany—that “sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself” (Stephen Hero). Yet, if epiphanic concentration seems the antidote to the depletions of the everyday, the manuscript epiphanies of 1900–3 disclose a dire entailment: an extinction of fiction itself (the syntax of plot) as characters sink into the moment. Joyce experiments with severing epiphany from narrative altogether—an experiment that manifests itself in that sensation of prose without progression that is the signature of his fiction. Even the concise, almost lyrical narratives in Dubliners have the feel of a prolonged epiphany, stopping short of the turn, the revelation, we expect from even the most self-aware or self-ironizing fictions. So, too, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man pivots upon an anti-epiphanic epiphany, as it submerges authorial presence into temporality of linguistic rhythms. As this chapter shows, the epitome of this poetic can be found in the “Nausicaa” chapter of Ulysses, in which Joyce's style indirect libre, the formal face of impersonality, reveals itself to be not just a narrative technique but further a style of modern life adapted to the new rhythms of secular modernity and its everyday epiphanies.

This chapter describes the body of James Joyce's work. Joyce' wrote Chamber Music as a protest against himself. One of the fundamental aesthetic principles ofDubliners is that the limits of a character's world-view are defined by the limits of their language. The real distinction between Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man lies at the level of narrative style. Exiles presents his only excursion into drama and remained relatively neglected until its 1970 London revival. With Ulysses, Joyce realised his aesthetic ambition of composing a great epic statement about modern European civilisation. Finnegans Wake makes considerable use of the symbols of marriage, burial, religion and the family, it is a mistake simply to map Joyce's narrative onto Vico's tripartite structure. A significant strand of Wakecriticism concerns itself with the creative and compositional process that brought the text into being.

This chapter tackles the question of colonialism by exploring the connection between James Joyce and Mulk Raj Anand. It examines the complex correspondences that link Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1918) to Anand's Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936). The chapter argues that the works of Joyce and Anand are a complex textual exchange that highlights the geographical specificity of their colonial critiques. A reading of Anand's works reveals that his modernism links back to Joyce's work, situated within a broader postcolonial geography. This modernist narrative helps Anand craft a cosmopolitan Indian modernism rooted in matters of caste, poverty, national identity, and colonial status in India. The chapter concludes by discussing how both writers revise the tradition of the bildungsroman, using narrative experimentation to challenge the political model of the exemplary, representative man within the geographical spaces of colonial modernity.

This chapter provides a guide to landmark episodes in James Joyce criticism and key examples of the different ways in which his work is currently being read. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, some critics identified a stylistic advance beyond both Edwardian and naturalistic fiction. Arnold Bennett's review provides praise and condemnation of Ulysses. Stuart Gilbert takes pains to highlight Joyce's classical literary heritage. The years between the end of World War Two and the explosion of critical interest in Joyce's work caused by the emergence of modern literary and cultural ‘theory’ saw the debate over his achievement and legacy steadily intensify. Joyce's work has a long and involved relationship with psychoanalytic criticism. Joyce's ‘general awareness of Irish politics’ expressed itself in a number of lasting commitments. There has been a problem with Joyce's belief in the cultural redemptiveness of the artwork.

This chapter considers the connection between militarism and athleticism by tracing the rise of school sports as a training ground for soldiering in both colonial and anti-colonial contexts. The so-called garrison games of British public-school origin and the native Irish sports of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) alike impressed on young practitioners distinct political perspectives and cultural values. Joyce's references to football, hurling, boxing, and other sports point to the politics of masculine and national identity at stake in the process of militarization.

This chapter examines the concept of exile or outsideness in the works of James Joyce and Walter Benjamin. It explains that exile or the concept of the outside, like many writerly constructs, presents itself in the unresolvable fluctuations of aporia, and serves as an inspiration and a heuristic device. Joyce illustrated this outsideness in his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Benjamin in his essay “The Task of the Translator”, where there are interfaces, interlinguistic interstices, and interlinear gaps.

This chapter explores how James Joyce’s Bildungsroman disrupts the recapitulatory plot by fusing the ostensibly primitive body to the ostensibly advanced linguistic faculties of its budding poet-protagonist, Stephen Dedalus. This fusion results in repeated reversionary digressions from the progressive movement toward artistic self-realization: the very words that Stephen seeks for his art bring him instead into the realm of the sexual and procreative body. These atavistic reversions allow Joyce’s to ironize and supply an alternative to his protagonist’s desire to separate the body from aesthetic experience and artistic maturity.

This chapter considers the impact of militarism in late nineteenth-century reading and education. Specifically, it considers several indoctrinating intertexts referenced in Joyce's fiction, including popular boys’ story-papers and school textbooks, and how these intertexts shaped the masculine identity and political formation of adolescent males in the militarized conditions of colonial Ireland.

Coastlines shape all of Joyce’s books, which are all immersed in water. Images of liquidity and fluidity are central to Joyce’s practice, while the physical and historical geography of Ireland in his works is connected together by the construction of watery links. This geography extends to the mental coordinates of the characters themselves, many of whom are linked to other places by the sea and its commerce, joins that become visible on Dublin’s quays and foreshores. This chapter situates Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by the coastal curve from Howth head to Kingstown, an arc in which much of Joyce’s writing is set, Dublin an aqua city that had, by the beginning of the twentieth century, dwindled in significance to Britain’s oceanic empire.

“The London Connection” draws on the “Book of Days” (1906–1909), Stanislaus Joyce’s unpublished diary from the time he lived together with Joyce in Trieste. This little-studied diary offers valuable evidence of Joyce’s aspirations and strategies to publish and promote Dubliners through London’s literary industry including his plan to move to the city in 1908 and study for an MA degree at the University of London. My close readings of Joyce’s works aim to highlight the historical conditions against which Joyce shaped his stance towards Dublin’s history and culture and its geopolitical entanglement with London, the centre of the British Empire: the ways London is evoked in an epiphany he wrote in Cockney idiom (1900), in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in Ulysses.

This chapter investigates the connection between soldiers and prostitutes in 1900s Dublin and its particular effects on public health, residential space, and social control. Concentrating on streetwalkers, brothels, and their soldier clientele, in A Portrait, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, along with more tacit forms of prostitution in the residential spaces of Dubliners, the chapter looks at the interrelation of the military and sexual economies in the Dublin red-light district known as Monto. As it was a boon to military recruiting, authorities did little to curb the night-time trade until the spread of syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases presented a risk to troop safety and imperial security. Joyce's fiction leads us to think of soldier and sex worker as figures of surveillance and control both subject to the militarizing power of the state.

This chapter examines James Joyce's long-term strategy with regard to home. From age twenty-two to fifty-eight Joyce lived in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy, Switzerland, and France, while all his creative attention remained focused on Ireland, and specifically on Dublin. Though he spoke the languages of his adopted homes, Joyce did not integrate in those countries, or write about them, or tie his destiny to them. In times of political upheaval he fled, though never toward home. What mattered was belonging, and not belonging, to Ireland. This chapter considers how the young Joyce developed these conflicting needs, and what part the consequent tension played in his special achievement as a writer. Drawing on Gordon Bowker's biography of Joyce, it explores the connection between the author's life and work. It also analyzes Joyce's habit of forcing himself into the limelight while simultaneously inviting exclusion, which is evident in his novels such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Finally, it discusses Joyce's 1915 play Exiles, which marks a turning point in his development.

This chapter focalizes the coincidental circumstance that Rainer Maria Rilke and James Joyce were living in Paris at the same time in 1902/03. Rilke later uses his Paris experiences as a model for his character Malte Laurids Brigge in the 1910 modernist novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge– a novel that eerily mirrors Joyce’s own beginnings as a writer—but also to develop the poetical innovation of the “Dinggedicht,” his “Thing Poetry,” of the two volumes of Neue Gedichte and Neue Gedichte anderer Teil. It is in Rilke’s novel and poems maybe even more than in Joyce’s own works, I argue, that Joyce’s theory of the epiphany, worked out in his notebooks in 1902/03 and incorporated into Stephen Hero in early 1904, finds its quintessential expression in modern(ist) literature.

This chapter posits the novels of James Joyce as paradigmatic of how blasphemy works in, and as, literary modernism. Modeled on the mystery of the Eucharist, Joyce’s art typifies modernism’s profane exercises in literary transubstantiation. At the same time, his fictions provide a case study in how the rhetoric of blasphemy can be deployed against the repressive mechanisms of sacred and secular power, including Catholic orthodoxy as well as the ideologies of both British imperialism and Irish nationalism. A careful attention to Joyce’s blasphemies thus elucidates the author’s complex negotiations of church and state, flesh and word, textuality and the body.

This chapter considers the treatment of primitivism and a radical incommensurability portrayed by Joyce in Portrait of the Artist and Stephen Hero as a means of reflecting on the legacy of Irish late modernist aesthetics and the ways its interrogations of modernist subjectivity and cosmopolitanism are themselves seeded by Joyce in anticipation of the modernist interventions of both the Blasket writers and Samuel Beckett. The chapter proposes that a reconsideration of Joyce’s relationship to postcoloniality and to the generation of Irish writers that follow him opens a series of new possibilities for modernist studies especially as it grapples with the spaces and concerns of so-called global modernism.

The introduction offers an overview of legal issues pertaining to James Joyce's life and work. It reviews the previous criticism on this topic and summarizes/previews the contents of the volume. These synopses become the basis of Goldman's argument that research in legal history offers new insight into the implications of narrative developments in Joyce's Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. These writings include scenes inflected by laws governing, for example, alcohol, public space, marital infidelity, and tenancy. Joyce's work can be seen as critiquing these and other legal regimes. Goldman argues that reading Joyce alongside the law supports and enriches current strategies in Joyce and modernist scholarship.