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

Publisher Description

As a genetic study, this book uncovers the creative DNA of James Joyce's oeuvre by looking at the cultural forces that shaped him and that he in turn shaped in the creation of his books, developing a two-way relationship with history, memory and national identity. Following his development as an author, it revisits and redirects Joyce's attitudes towards the Irish Revival. From Chamber Music, through Ulysses to Finnegans Wake Joyce sought to define a cultural identity that went, in many respects, against the mainstream, but that nonetheless belonged to the wider Revivalist project with which it shared certain characteristics and aspirations. Joyce's historical and genealogical imagination is read through a careful investigation of the cultural materials that went into his work. Based on evidence from his personal library and the extensive archive of reading notes, ideas, sketches and drafts, this book investigates how Joyce used, absorbed and repurposed these materials creatively in his writing; it does so by bringing for the first time the methods of genetic criticism into the domain of cultural memory and the sociology of the text. Thus this books defines “cultural genetics” as an exploration of the textual material that are Joyce's sources interacts with the culture that produced and received them.

This collection charts the vital contextual backgrounds to James Joyce's life and writing. The essays collectively show how Joyce was rooted in his times, how he is both a product and a critic of his multiple contexts, and how important he remains to the world of literature, criticism and culture.

Drawing on draft manuscripts and other archival material, James Joyce and Absolute Music, explores Joyce's deep engagement with musical structure, and his participation in the growing modernist discourse surrounding 19th-century musical forms. Michelle Witen examines Joyce's claim of having structured the “Sirens” episode of his masterpiece, Ulysses, as a fuga per canonem, and his changing musical project from his early works, such as Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Informed by a deep understanding of music theory and history, the book goes on to consider the “pure music” of Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake. Demonstrating the importance of music to Joyce, this ground-breaking study reveals new depths to this enduring body of work.

The New Joyce Studies indicates the variety and energy of research on James Joyce since the year 2000. Essays examine Joyce's works and their reception in the light of a larger set of concerns: a diverse international terrain of scholarly modes and methodologies, an imperilled environment, and crises of racial justice, to name just a few. This is a Joyce studies that dissolves early visions of Joyce as a sui generis genius by reconstructing his indebtedness to specific literary communities. It models ways of integrating masses of compositional and publication details with literary and historical events. It develops hybrid critical approaches from posthuman, medical, and queer methodologies. It analyzes the nature and consequences of its extension from Ireland to mainland Europe, and to Africa and Latin America. Examining issues of copyright law, translation, and the history of literary institutions, this volume seeks to use Joyce's canonical centrality to inform modernist studies more broadly.

Introduces the work of James Joyce, the literary, historical and political contexts in which he wrote and his critical reception up to the present day.

The essays gathered in Joyce in Progress are the fruit of the First Annual Graduate Conference in Joyce Studies held at the Università Roma Tre in February 2008, and organized by the Italian James Joyce Foundation. They are a testament to the enduring fascination of Joyce's writings and the ongoing liveliness of debate about the writer and his works and contexts. There is a wide array of genuine research on show here, which looks at Joyce from a variety of angles, focusing on his deeply complex autobiographical fiction through genetic studies, post-colonial studies, eco-criticism and intertextual and multi-modal approaches. This volume offers ground-breaking multi-disciplinary readings and usefully connects Joyce’s work with that of contemporary writers, rivals, followers, and successors.

This book is both a study of how James Joyce created two of the most iconic characters in literature—Leopold Bloom and Marion Tweedy Bloom—as well as a history of the genesis of Ulysses. From a genetic critical perspective, it explores the conception and evolution of the Blooms as fictional characters in the work's wide range of surviving notes and manuscripts. At the same time, it also chronicles the production of Ulysses from 1917 to its first edition in 1922 and beyond. Based on decades of research, it is an original engagement with the textual archive of Ulysses, including the exciting, recently-discovered manuscripts now in the National Library of Ireland. Luca Crispi excavates the raw material and examines the creative processes Joyce deployed in the construction of the Blooms and so the writing of Ulysses. Framed by a contextual introduction and four bibliographical appendices, the seven main chapters are a critical investigation of the fictional events and memories that constitute the 'lives' of the Blooms. Thereby, it is also a commentary on Joyce's conception of Ulysses more generally. Crispi analyzes how the stories in the published book achieved their final form and discloses previously unexamined versions of them for everyone who enjoys reading Ulysses. This book demonstrates the various ways in which specialist textual work on the genesis of Ulysses directly intersects with other critical and interpretive readings. This volume is a behind-the-scenes guide to the creation of one of the most important books ever written.

Music and Sound in the Life and Literature of James Joyce: Joyces Noyces offers a fresh perspective on the Irish writer James Joyce’s much-noted obsession with music. This book provides an overview of a century-old critical tradition focused on Joyce and music, as well as six in-depth case studies which revisit material from the writer’s career in the light of new and emerging theories. Considering both Irish cultural history and the European art music tradition, the book combines approaches from cultural musicology, critical theory, sound studies and Irish studies. Chapters explore Joyce’s use of repetition, his response to literary Wagnerism, the role and status of music in the aesthetic and political debates of the fin de siècle, music and cultural nationalism, ubiquitous urban sound and ‘shanty aesthetics’. Gerry Smyth revitalizes Joyce’s work in relation to the ‘noisy’ world in which the author wrote (and his audience read) his work.