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This book investigates the life, works and critical reputation of James Joyce. Joyce's peripatetic career and complex reinvention of modern Western culture has made him a subject of enduring fascination and established him as perhaps the greatest and most enigmatic literary figure of the twentieth century. Part I of this book provides a concise narrative of Joyce's life and literary career. Part 2 discusses a critical commentary upon all of Joyce's prose works and explores the style and significance of his poetry and drama. The last part reviews a historical overview of the critical reception of Joyce's work in order to examine how particular styles of reading and modes of critical practice have influenced the understanding of Joyce.

This chapter examines the life stories of journalist–literary figures in the context of childhood history, mental health symptoms, and categories of traumatic experience that today are recognized as “triggers” of psychic conflict. More specifically, it considers the ways that journalists have coped with childhood stress and professional trauma throughout their careers. The chapter first explains the historical limitations of our understanding of trauma's role in the lives of early journalist–literary figures such as Charles Lamb, Walt Whitman, Bret Harte, and William Dean Howells before discussing religion as the early framework for understanding trauma and traumatized emotions. It then explores the link between trauma and the romantic movement, and between trauma and psychological writing, and proceeds with an analysis of psychological themes in the fiction of journalists, such as parental and family loss, abandonment, family breakup, and/or living with psychologically ill and/or alcoholic parents. It also outlines what novel writing could do that journalism did not in terms of conveying the emotional impact of traumatic experience.

For this chapter, we assume two significant configurations — one is represented by the Mask of Camelot while the other accounts for the various understandings, social agreements, and psychological guesses which comprise a figure called John Keats. Because John Keats, in this context, is treated merely as text or as a literary figure, the character can assume a number of different traits, such as the possession of intense sexual passion. Looking, on the other hand, on the Mask of Camelot, we realize that the central male figure in ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ called Porphyro also has this immense inclination to sexual desires. Porphyro serves as a mask that justifies John Keats's sexual frustrations. It is important to note, however, that both these characters are taken as nothing more than something to intentionally attract a reader's attention, regardless of their contrasting traits.

The philosophical Thérèse, eponymous heroine of the novel commonly attributed to the marquis d'Argens, brings to vivid life the joys of materialist doctrine as an incitement to erotic expression. She has accordingly come to function, in modern criticism, as a feminine counterpart to machine-man—his ideal companion in the voluptuous delights to be derived from the practice of a rigorous materialism. Like La Mettrie's creation, she comes into being at the juncture of philosophy and literary figure. Her pleasures, too, appear to serve a proselytic purpose. A success in its day, the novel's cheerful insistence on the naturalness of erotic desire has continued to strike contemporary scholars as both enlightened and forward-looking.

This chapter examines the end of the so-called dangerous text in Russian literature. It evaluates the whether the ten beliefs about the literature–state relationship and the paradigm for the political reading of literary texts in Russia would hold up the closer scrutiny provided by the case studies in this book. The book analyzes the behavior of individual literary figures and suggests that keeping a distance from the state was not the only culturally sanctioned option for them. It also argues that the experiences of dangerous texts in the Soviet period are mostly hidden from the researcher because the primary experience of the text above or below ground comes down to one person reading silently.

This book investigates the impact of trauma and coverage of violence on journalists, the subjects of their coverage, and their audience—including the possibility that journalists who have suffered early life stress (such as unhappy childhoods and distorted family relationships) may gravitate toward high-risk assignments, such as war reporting. It examines the sources and the consequences of traumatic experience in the lives of 150 journalist–literary figures in American and British history dating from the early 1700s to today—from Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift to Charles Dickens and Ernest Hemingway—and the traumatic events in their lives that can be viewed as contributing to their emotional struggles, the vicissitudes of their journalism careers, and their development as artists. It considers the ways that their experiences in journalism may have contributed to these writers' psychological stress and played a role in their mental health history. The book demonstrates how the intersection of journalism and fiction writing offers important insights about trauma's role in literary expression.

This epilogue considers the lessons that might be taken from the lives of journalist–literary figures that would be helpful to psychologists, journalists, and the researchers who study the impact of trauma, stress, and risk-taking experiences on today's journalists and their emotional well-being. It also examines some of the challenges confronting contemporary journalists and writers in the face of various economic, demographic, and technological pressures. In particular, it discusses the ways that digital computing is altering the traditional culture of journalism—for instance, the world of the newsroom and the activities of the professional journalist. It also looks at the implications of a host of other factors that assault our psyches, such as threats of terrorism, video and televised violence, fear of crime, increases in divorce and broken families, and illegal drug use and gang hostilities. Finally, it evaluates the prospects for new treatment options available to journalist–literary figures suffering from mental health disorders and other psychological effects of traumatic experience, including psychotropic drugs that combat depression and anxiety.

This chapter emphasizes the fact that the man of letters performed that role before the end of the century, within a largely non-democratic, liberal context but one characterized by political competition and freedom of speech. It focuses on a series of key roles of the man of letters: poet, journalist, playwright and lecturer. The development of group identity consolidated a repertoire of practices associated with the literary guild, which, at the same time, enabled recognition of writers’ value within the context of bourgeois society. The period between 1834 and 1874 is paramount in re-defining the status of the men of letters in Spain. From embassies to the government and the ministries, in nineteenth-century Spain the man of letters was omnipresent, whether in the administration or in politics, as Zorrilla noted in his autobiography Recuerdos del tiempo viejo.

The sixth and final chapter of Living Cargo concludes with an interrogation of urban regeneration in the city of Bristol, situating the neoliberal city’s alliance with private real estate investors and corporate investors in relation to the concurrent campaigns by black community activists that the city acknowledge its historical involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and that it reorient economic redevelop for the benefit of communities struggling against that historical legacy. The chapter looks at artists Hew Locke and Graham Mortimer Evelyn alongside political protests, street actions, and popular uprisings that raise fundamental questions about state, civic, and institutional responsibility to the past, and laid the groundwork for a transformation of its public cultures.

This chapter describes how Roger Martin du Gard joined the “National Committee of Writers”—which was created by several prominent French literary figures—near the end of 1942. He would later claim to have played no role other than “to learn afterward what had been done in our name.” But he did, in fact, take risks. At the beginning of February of 1944, the Gestapo arrested Oscar von Wertheimer, a Hungarian Jewish author of historical novels, who had taken refuge in Nice. Local Resistance leaders hid his wife and daughter but needed money to get them away. Without hesitation, Roger sold the manuscript of his Confidence africaine to pay for their escape to a convent near Toulouse. And so he was a target. By the end of April, his friends in the Resistance warned him to leave as soon as possible. Since the beginning of the year, his daughter and her husband had urged him to take refuge in Figeac, and now he agreed. After the war, he continued writing Maumort, but he did not make much progress.