"Original and significant. This book shows us how Conrad and Joyce manipulate representations of imperialist belief in the sacred to indict Western culture for its racist colonization. This striking reading of modernism emphasizes Conrad's and Joyce's use of chaos in general and pilgrimage in particular in terms of mapmaking, racial denigration, and strategies of power. Szczeszak-Brewer makes spectacular connections between sacred language, nation building, and literary representation."--Georgia Johnston, author of The Formation of Twentieth-Century Queer Autobiography Though they were born a generation apart, Joseph Conrad and James Joyce shared similar life experiences and similar literary preoccupations. Both left their home countries at a relatively young age and remained lifelong expatriates. Empire and Pilgrimage in Conrad and Joyce offers a fresh look at these two modernist writers, revealing how their rejection of organized religion and the colonial presence in their native countries allowed them to destabilize traditional notions of power, colonialism, and individual freedom in their texts. Throughout, Agata Szczeszak-Brewer ably demonstrates the ways in which these authors grapple with the same issues--the grand narrative, paralysis, hegemonic practices, the individual's pilgrimage toward unencumbered self-definition--within the rigid bounds of imperial ideologies and myths. The result is an engaging and enlightening investigation of the writings of Conrad and Joyce and of the larger literary movement to which they belonged.

This book provides a comprehensive, up-to-date history of the commentary written about the life and works of Joseph Conrad.

An introduction to the fascinating world of Joyce’s manuscripts This book shows how the creative process of modernist writer James Joyce can be reconstructed from his manuscripts. Daniel Ferrer offers a practical demonstration of the theory of genetic criticism, the study of the manuscript and textual development of a literary text. Using a concrete approach focused on the materiality of Joyce’s writing process, Ferrer demonstrates how to recover the process of invention and its internal dynamics. Using specific, detailed examples, Ferrer analyzes the part played by chance in Joyce’s creative process, the spatial dimension of writing, the genesis of the “Sirens” episode, and the transition from Ulysses to Finnegans Wake. The book includes a study of Joyce’s mysterious Finnegans Wake notebooks, examining their strange form of intertextuality in light of Joyce’s earlier forms of note-taking. Moving beyond the single author perspective, Ferrer contrasts Joyce’s notes alluding to Virginia Woolf’s criticism of Ulysses with Woolf’s own notes on the novel’s first episodes. Throughout this book, Ferrer describes the logic of the creative process as seen in the record left by Joyce in notebooks, drafts, typescripts, proofs, correspondence, early printed versions, and other available documents. Each change detected reveals a movement from one state to another, a new direction, challenging readers to understand the reasons for each movement and to appreciate the wealth of information to be found in Joyce’s manuscripts. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sam Slote

In this book, the first to explore the role of disability in the writings of James Joyce, contributors approach the subject both on a figurative level, as a symbol or metaphor in Joyce’s work, and also as a physical reality for many of Joyce’s characters. Contributors examine the varying ways in which Joyce’s texts represent disability and the environmental conditions of his time that stigmatized, isolated, and othered individuals with disabilities. The collection demonstrates the centrality of the body and embodiment in Joyce’s writings, from Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Essays address Joyce’s engagement with paralysis, masculinity, childhood violence, trauma, disorderly eating, blindness, nineteenth-century theories of degeneration, and the concept of “madness.” Together, the essays offer examples of Joyce’s interest in the complexities of human existence and in challenging assumptions about bodily and mental norms. Complete with an introduction that summarizes key disability studies concepts and the current state of research on the subject in Joyce studies, this volume is a valuable resource for disability scholars interested in modernist literature and an ideal starting point for any Joycean new to the study of disability. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles Contributors: Rafael Hernandez | Boriana Alexandrova | Casey Lawrence | Giovanna Vincenti | Jeremy Colangelo | Jennifer Marchisotto | Marion Quirici | John Morey | Kathleen Morrissey | Maren T. Linett 

This book addresses James Joyce’s borderlessness and the ways his work crosses or unsettles boundaries of all kinds. The essays in this volume position borderlessness as a major key to understanding Joycean poiesis, opening new doors and new engagements with his work. Contributors begin by exploring the circulation of Joyce’s writing in Latin America via a transcontinental network of writers and translators, including José Lezama Lima, José Salas Subirat, Leopoldo Marechal, Edmundo Desnoës, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Augusto Monterroso. Essays then consider Joyce through the lens of the sciences, presenting theoretical interventions on posthumanist parasitology in Ulysses; on Giordano Bruno’s coincidence of opposites in Finnegans Wake; and on algorithmic agency in the Wake. Cutting-edge cognitive narratology is applied to the “Penelope” episode. Next, the volume features innovative essays on Joyce in relation to early animated film and comics, engaging with animated film in the “Circe” episode, Joyce’s points of contact with George Herriman’s cartoon strip Krazy Kat, and structural affinities between open-world gaming and Finnegans Wake. The final essays focus on abiding human concerns, offering new research on Joyce’s creative use of “spicy books”; a Lacanian consideration of “The Dead” alongside Katherine Mansfield’s “The Stranger” and Haruki Murakami’s “Kino”; and a meditation on Joyce’s uncertainties about the boundary between life and death. For Joyce, borders are problems—but ones that provided precious fodder for his art. And as this volume demonstrates, they encourage brilliant reflections on his work, from new scholars to leading luminaries in the field. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

This book sheds light on how the text and physical design of James Joyce’s two most challenging works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, reflect changes that transformed Europe between World War I and II.

A forgotten historical figure and his influence on the writing of James Joyce In this book, Neil Davison argues that Albert Altman (1853‒1903), a Dublin-based businessman and Irish nationalist, influenced James Joyce’s creation of the character of Leopold Bloom, as well as Ulysses’s broader themes surrounding race, nationalism, and empire. Using extensive archival research, Davison reveals parallels between the lives of Altman and Bloom, including how the experience of double marginalization—which Altman felt as both a Jew in Ireland and an Irishman in the British Empire—is a major idea explored in Joyce’s work. Altman, a successful salt and coal merchant, was involved in municipal politics over issues of Home Rule and labor, and frequently appeared in the press over the two decades of Joyce’s youth. His prominence, Davison shows, made him a familiar name in the Home Rule circles with which Joyce and his father most identified. The book concludes by tracing the influence of Altman’s career on the Dubliners story “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” as well as throughout the whole of Ulysses. Through Altman’s biography, Davison recovers a forgotten life story that illuminates Irish and Jewish identity and culture in Joyce’s Dublin. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

“A brilliantly collaged snapshot of the variety and wealth of literary criticism, and Joyce studies, today.”—Tony Thwaites, author of Joycean Temporalities “Celebrates the multiplicity and sheer rampant excess of Joyce’s prodigally polysemous text with seventeen different scholars employing a likewise prodigal range of critical methodologies.”—Patrick O’Neill, author of Impossible Joyce: Finnegans Wakes “Each of the scholars involved is at the top of his and her game. Their commitment and excitement about the task at hand is evident on virtually every page. This book makes the Wake relevant and accessible to a whole new generation of readers.”—Garry Leonard, author of Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce This is the first Finnegans Wake guide to focus exclusively on the multiple meanings and voices in Joyce’s notoriously intricate diction. Rather than leveling the text it illuminates many layers of puns, wordplay, and portmanteaus, celebrating the Wake’s central experimental technique. Renowned Joyce scholars explore the polyvocality of individual chapters using game theory, ecocriticism, psychoanalysis, historicism, myth, philosophy, genetic studies, feminism, and other critical frameworks. They set in motion cross-currents and radiating structures of meaning that permeate the entire text and open up satisfying readings of the Wake for novices and seasoned readers alike. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

"The first comprehensive account of the enormous impact of Joyce on German modernist and postmodern writers. An indispensable book on Joyce's 'German' face."—Gerald Gillespie, Stanford University In August 1919, a production of James Joyce's Exiles was mounted at the Munich Schauspielhaus and quickly fell due to harsh criticism. The reception marked the beginning of a dynamic association between Joyce, German-language writers, and literary critics. It is this relationship that Robert Weninger analyzes in The German Joyce. Opening a new dimension of Joycean scholarship, this book provides the premier study of Joyce's impact on German-language literature and literary criticism in the twentieth century. The opening section follows Joyce's linear intrusion from the 1910s to the 1990s by focusing on such prime moments as the first German translation of Ulysses, Joyce's influence on the Marxist Expressionism debate, and the Nazi blacklisting of Joyce's work. Utilizing this historical reception as a narrative backdrop, Weninger then presents Joyce's horizontal diffusion into German culture. Weninger succeeds in illustrating both German readers' great attraction to Joyce's work as well as Joyce's affinity with some of the great German masters, including Goethe and Rilke. He argues that just as Shakespeare was a model of linguistic exuberance for Germans in the eighteenth century, Joyce became the epitome of poetic inspiration in the twentieth. This volume, through Weninger's critiques and repositions, simultaneously revisits the fraught relationship between influence and intertextuality in literary studies and reassesses their value as tools for contemporary comparative criticism today. Robert K. Weninger, emeritus professor of German and comparative literature at King’s College London, is author or editor of over ten books, including Arno Schmidts Joyce-Rezeption 1957-1970: Ein Beitrag zur Poetik Arno Schmidts, and is a past editor of the Journal of Comparative Critical Studies.

Revival, reinvention, and regeneration: the concept of renascence pervades Joyce’s work through the inescapable presence of his literary forebears. By persistently reexamining tradition, reinterpreting his literary heritage in light of the present, and translating and re-translating from one system of signs to another, Joyce exhibits the spirit of the greatest of Renaissance writers and artists. In fact, his writing derives some of its most important characteristics from Renaissance authors, as this collection of essays shows. Though critical work has often focused on Joyce's relationship to medieval thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Dante, Renascent Joyce examines Joyce's connection to the Renaissance in such figures as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Bruno. Joyce's own writing can itself be viewed through the rubric of renascence with the tools of genetic criticism and the many insights afforded by the translation process. Several essays in this volume examine this broader idea, investigating the rebirth and reinterpretation of Joyce's texts. Topics include literary historiography, Joyce's early twentieth-century French cultural contexts, and the French translation of Ulysses. Attentive to the current state of Joyce studies, the writers of these extensively researched essays investigate the Renaissance spirit in Joyce to offer a volume at once historically informed and innovative.