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This book argues that many Anglophone modernist and postcolonial authors have often functioned as geographers manquéés, advancing theories of space, culture, and community within the formal structures of literary narrative. Reading a diverse body of work by Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Graham Greene, Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, and Amitav Ghosh alongside writings of geographers and other intellectuals, this book finds a persistent imagining of other orders of geographical and geopolitical space that question or deny the ontological primacy of the territorial nation-state. Many twentieth-century Anglophone writers, the book argues, do far more than dramatize the conflicts of characters and communities within a static frame of geographical and social space; rather, these writers treat geographical space as a primary element of novelistic form. This geographical self-consciousness, or metageography, manifests itself in the novel as a structural tension between two codes of realism: the novelistic, which projects a mimetic space of human characters and invididualize plots, and the cartographic, which understands space as a quantitative, formal abstraction. In negotiating this tension, modernist and postcolonial writers employ a spatial irony as a way to both draw upon the novel's powers of mimetic representation while also critiquing the geopolitical orders of space into which the novel's individual narratives must inevitably fit.

James Joyce's Ulysses, once regarded as obscure and obscene, is now viewed as a masterpiece of world literature. Yet Joyce's final novel, Finnegans Wake, to which he devoted seventeen years, remains virtually unread. Its linguistic novelties, layered allusions, and experimental form can make it seem impenetrable. This book attempts to dissolve the darkness that surrounds the Wake and to display instead its mesmerizing play of light. The book offers an original, appealing interpretation of Joyce's novel while also suggesting an approach to the magnum opus. Focusing throughout on the book's central themes, the book proposes that Finnegans Wake has at its core an age-old philosophical question—“What makes a life worth living?”—that Joyce explores from the perspective of someone who feels that a long life is now at its end. Alert to echoes, the book progresses through the novel, adding texture to his portrait of an aging dreamer who seeks reassurance about the worth of what he has done and who he has been. The novel's complex dream language becomes meaningful when seen as a way for Joyce to investigate issues that are hard to face directly, common though they may be. At times the view is clouded, at times it's the music or sheer comedy that predominates, but one experiences in the retrospective momentum a brilliant clarity unlike anything else in literature. With a startlingly profound compassion and a distinctive brand of humanism, Joyce points us to the things that matter in our lives. His final novel, this book believes, is a call to life itself.

According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. This book challenges this consensus by re-examining the genre's development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and exploring what has until now seemed an anomaly—the frustrated theatrical ambitions of major novelists. Offering new interpretations of the careers of William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin—writers known for mapping ever-narrower interior geographies—this book argues that the genre's inward-looking tendency has been misunderstood. Delving into the critical role of the theater in the origins of the novel of interiority, the book reinterprets the novel as a record of dissatisfaction with inwardness and an injunction to rethink human identity in radically collective and social terms. Exploring neglected texts in order to reread canonical ones, the book shows that the theatrical ambitions of major novelists had crucial formal and ideological effects on their masterworks. The book establishes the theatrical genealogy of some of the signal techniques of narrative interiority by investigating a key stretch of each of these novelistic careers. In the process, it illustrates how the novel is marked by a hunger for palpable collectivity, and argues that the genre's discontents have been a shaping force in its evolution. A groundbreaking rereading of the novel, this book provides new ways to consider the novelistic imagination.

In a speech given in December 1925, Vladimir Nabokov declared that ‘everything in the world plays’, including ‘love, nature, the arts, and domestic puns’. Each of Nabokov's novels contains a scene of games: chess, Scrabble, cards, football, croquet, tennis, and boxing, the play of light and the play of thought, the play of language, of forms, and of ideas, children's games, cruel games of exploitation, and erotic play. This book studies this central theme in Nabokov, and the first work apart from Boyd's critical biography to draw in detail on Nabokov's untranslated early essays and poems, only collected and republished in 1999 to 2000, and on highly restricted archival material in New York and Washington. It argues that play is Nabokov's signature theme, and indeed that Nabokov's novels form one of the most sophisticated treatments of play ever achieved. It traces the idea of art as play back to German aesthetics, and shows how Nabokov's aesthetic outlook was formed by various Russian émigré writers who espoused those aesthetics. It then follows Nabokov's exploration of play as subject and style through his whole oeuvre, outlining the relation of play to other important themes such as faith, make-believe, violence, freedom, order, work, Marxism, desire, childhood, art, and scholarship. As it does so it demonstrates a series of new literary sources, contexts, and parallels for Nabokov's writing, in writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, and Nietzsche, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, and Bely, the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, and Alexander Pope and the humanist tradition of the literary game. As such it provides what is the fullest scholarly-critical reading of Nabokov to date, and defines the ludic aspect of his work that has been such a vital example for and influence on contemporary writers, from Orhan Pamuk, W. G. Sebald, and Georges Perec, to John Updike, Martin Amis, and Tom Stoppard.

Modernist Soundscapes questions how early twentieth-century auditory technologies altered sound perception, and how these developments shaped the modernist novel. As the phonograph, telephone, talkie, and radio created new paths for connectivity and intimacy, modernist writers such as Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf were crafting characters intimately connected by the prosody of voice, music, and the soundscape. As headphones piped nonlocal sounds into a listener’s headspace, Jean Rhys and James Joyce were creating interior monologues that were shaped by cosmopolitan and bohemian sounds. As the phonograph and tape recorder aestheticized noise through mechanical reproduction, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett were deploying onomatopoeia and repetition to aestheticize words and make them sound out. Modernist Soundscapes encourages us to listen to these auditory narratives in order to grasp how the formal and linguistic experiments we have come to associate with modernism are partially a consequence of this historical attentiveness to sound. This heightened awareness of audition coincided with an emerging skepticism toward vision. Indeed, modernist writers turned to sound perception as a way to complicate the dominance of vision—a sensibility rooted in Greek philosophy that equated seeing with knowledge and truth. Without polarizing vision and audition, this book reveals how modernists tend to use auditory perception to connect characters, shifting the subject from a distanced, judgmental observer to a reverberating body, attuned to the moment.

Christianity from its earliest times taught the existence of heaven and hell as places where good and evil deeds in this life were judged, rewarded and punished. In the course of time ideas both of promised bliss and threatened woe went beyond anything than can have a purchase on human experience. Nevertheless, in their most developed form, doctrines of heaven and hell were explorations of moral psychology, as seen in their greatest imaginative expression, Dante's Divine Comedy. The present book explores and comments on ideas about post-mortem existence from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Israel, Greece and Rome, as well as in Christianity and (more briefly) Islam. Having traced the early history, growth, and refinement of these ideas over five millennia, it ends with the discordant voices of spiritualism, liberal theology, Mormonism, Evangelical Christian preachers of Rapture and Armageddon, modern Muslim apocalyptics, and Coptic visions of the Last Days. In a Prologue and an Epilogue the ironic treatment of some of these themes in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce is evoked to set them in a context of modernity.

By taking the principles of manuscript genetics and using them to engage in a comparative study of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, this book re-imagines the links between them. The readings reveal that the most striking similarities between these two lie not in their nationality or style but in their shared fascination with the process of revision. The book's application of genetic theory—the study of a work from manuscript to final form in its various iterations—marks a new phase in this dynamic field of inquiry.

This book presents, in a single collection, chapters in the study of James Joyce. Representing important contributions to scholarship that have helped shape current methods of approaching Joyce's works, the volume reacquaints contemporary readers with the literature that forms the basis of ongoing scholarly inquiries in the field. Offering three chapters each on Joyce's four main works (Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake), the book provides a contextual general introduction, as well as short introductions to each section that describe the chapters that follow and their original contribution to the field.