James Joyce left Ireland in 1904 in self-imposed exile. Though he never permanently returned to Dublin, he continued to characterize the city in his prose throughout the rest of his life. This volume elucidates the ways Joyce wrote about his homeland with conflicting bitterness and affection—a common ambivalence in expatriate authors, whose time in exile tends to shape their creative approach to the world. Yet this duality has not been explored in Joyce’s work until now. The first book to read Joyce’s writing through the lens of exile studies, James Joyce and the Exilic Imagination challenges the tendency of scholars to stress the writer’s negative view of Ireland. Instead, it showcases the often-overlooked range of emotional attitudes imbuing Joyce’s work and produces a fuller understanding of Joyce’s canon.

'That is my fear. That I stand between her and any moments of life that should be hers...' Set against the backdrop of the Home Rule Crisis of 1912, Exiles is James Joyce's only surviving play. It tells the story of writer Richard Rowan and his common-law wife Bertha, characters drawn from Joyce's own life with Nora Barnacle. After a decade of absence from Dublin, Richard and Bertha have returned home from Rome, still unmarried, with their young son Archie. Richard hopes that he will be greeted as a returning genius and rewarded with a comfortable university position. But this aspiration ends up taking a back seat to the erotic crisis that is unleashed by the couple's return to the place where they first met, and their encounters with two old flames and friends. In this play, Joyce revisits his own agonizing feelings of jealousy that were precipitated by similar trips home to Dublin. In the introduction and notes, Keri Walsh provides a comprehensive look issues of gender, sexuality, and performance as well as considering the nationalist and sectarian contexts of Dublin in 1912, the year of the play's setting.

Prompted by centuries of warfare, political oppression, natural disasters, and economic collapses, exile has had an enormous impact not only on individuals who have undergone transplantation from one culture to another but also on the host societies they have joined and those worlds they have left behind. Written by prominent literary critics, creative authors, and artists, the essays gathered within Exile in Global Literature and Culture: Homes Found and Lost meditate upon the painful journeys—geographic, spiritual, emotional, psychological—brought about due to exilic rupture, loss, and dislocation. Yet exile also fosters potential pleasures and rewards: to extend scholar Martin Tucker’s formulation, wherever the exile might land in flight, he bears with him the sweetness of survival, the triumph of transcendence, the luxury of liminality, and the invitation to innovate and invent in new lands. Indeed, exile embodies both blessing and curse, homes found and lost. Furthermore, this book adheres to (and tests) the premise that exile‘s deepest and innermost currents are manifested through writing and other artistic forms.

What if our notions of the nation as a site of belonging, the home as a safe place, or the mother tongue as a means to fluent comprehension did not apply? What if fluency were a hindrance, whilst our differences and contradictions held the keys to radical new ways of knowing? Taking inspiration from the practice of language learning and translation, this book explores the extraordinary creative possibilities, politics, and ethics of adopting a multilingual approach to reading. Its case study, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), is a text in equal measures exhilarating and exasperating: an unhinged portrait of European modernist debates on transculturalism and globalisation, here considered on the backdrop of current discourses on migration, race, gender, and neurodiversity. This book offers a fresh perspective on the illuminating, if perplexing, work of a beloved European modernist, whilst posing questions far beyond Joyce: on negotiating difference in an increasingly globalised world; on braving the difficulty of relating across languages and cultures; and ultimately on imagining possible futures where multilingual literature can empower us to read, relate, and conceptualise differently.

James Joyce and Classical Modernism contends that the classical world animated Joyce's defiant, innovative creativity and cannot be separated from what is now recognized as his modernist aesthetic. Responding to a long-standing critical paradigm that has viewed the classical world as a means of granting a coherent order, shape, and meaning to Joyce's modernist innovations, Leah Flack explores how and why Joyce's fiction deploys the classical as the language of the new. This study tracks Joyce's sensitive, on-going readings of classical literature from his earliest work at the turn of the twentieth century through to the appearance of Ulysses in 1922, the watershed year of high modernist writing. In these decades, Joyce read ancient and modern literature alongside one another to develop what Flack calls his classical modernist aesthetic, which treats the classical tradition as an ally to modernist innovation. This aesthetic first comes to full fruition in Ulysses, which self-consciously deploys the classical tradition to defend stylistic experimentation as a way to resist static, paralyzing notions of the past. Analysing Joyce's work through his career from his early essays, Flack ends by considering the rich afterlives of Joyce's classical modernist project, with particular attention to contemporary works by Alison Bechdel and Maya Lang.

Exile and the Narrative/Poetic Imagination is a collection of essays examining a variety of narrative and poetic responses to exile. Intended to complement existing scholarship on exile, these essays discuss works from very different parts of the world, some of them relatively rarely studied through the lens of exile, including Armenia, Egypt, Tibet, and Liberia. The book is divided into five parts, each discussing different aspects of this condition such as feelings of loss and loneliness, memories of trauma, and the search for identity.

Once referred to by the New York Times as the “Israeli Faulkner,” A. B. Yehoshua’s fiction invites an assessment of Israel’s Jewish inheritance and the moral and political options that the country currently faces in the Middle East. The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua is an insightful overview of the fiction, nonfiction, and hundreds of critical responses to the work of Israel’s leading novelist. Instead of an exhaustive chronological-biographical account of Yehoshua’s artistic growth, Yael Halevi-Wise calls for a systematic appreciation of the author’s major themes and compositional patterns. Specifically, she argues for reading Yehoshua’s novels as reflections on the “condition of Israel,” constructed multifocally to engage four intersecting levels of signification: psychological, sociological, historical, and historiosophic. Each of the book’s seven chapters employs a different interpretive method to showcase how Yehoshua’s constructions of character psychology, social relations, national history, and historiosophic allusions to traditional Jewish symbols manifest themselves across his novels. The book ends with a playful dialogue in the style of Yehoshua’s masterpiece, Mr. Mani, that interrogates his definition of Jewish identity. Masterfully written, with full control of all the relevant materials, Halevi-Wise’s assessment of Yehoshua will appeal to students and scholars of modern Jewish literature and Jewish studies.

Harry White examines the influence of music in the development of the Irish literary imagination from 1800 to the present day. He identifies music as a preoccupation which originated in the poetry of Thomas Moore early in the nineteenth century. He argues that this preoccupation decisively influenced Moore's attempt to translate the 'meaning' of Irish music into verse, and that it also informed Moore's considerable impact on the development of European musical romanticism, as in the music of Berlioz and Schumann. White then examines how this preoccupation was later recovered by W.B. Yeats, whose poetry is imbued with music as a rival presence to language. In its readings of Yeats, Synge, Shaw and Joyce, the book argues that this striking musical awareness had a profound influence on the Irish literary imagination, to the extent that poetry, fiction and drama could function as correlatives of musical genres. Although Yeats insisted on the synonymous condition of speech and song in his poetry, Synge, Shaw and Joyce explicitly identified opera in particular as a generic prototype for their own work. Synge's formal musical training and early inclinations as a composer, Shaw's perception of himself as the natural successor to Wagner, and Joyce's no less striking absorption of a host of musical techniques in his fiction are advanced in this study as formative (rather than incidental) elements in the development of modern Irish writing. Music and the Irish Literary Imagination also considers Beckett's emancipation from the oppressive condition of words in general (and Joyce in particular) through the agency of music, and argues that the strong presence of Mendelssohn, Chopin and Janácek in the works of Brian Friel is correspondingly essential to Friel's dramatisation of Irish experience in the aftermath of Beckett. The book closes with a reading of Seamus Heaney, in which the poet's own preoccupation with the currency of established literary forms is enlisted to illuminate Heaney's abiding sense of poetry as music.

Saul Steinberg’s inimitable drawings, paintings, and assemblages enriched the New Yorker, gallery and museum shows, and his own books for more than half a century. Although the literary qualities of Steinberg’s work have often been noted in passing, critics and art historians have yet to fathom the specific ways in which Steinberg meant drawing not merely to resemble writing but to be itself a type of literary writing. Jessica R. Feldman's Saul Steinberg’s Literary Journeys, the first book-length critical study of Steinberg’s art and its relation to literature, explores his complex literary roots, particularly his affinities with modernist aesthetics and iconography. The Steinberg who emerges is an artist of far greater depth than has been previously recognized. Feldman begins her study with a consideration of Steinberg as a reader and writer, including a survey of his personal library. She explores the practice of modernist parody as the strongest affinity between Steinberg and the two authors he repeatedly claimed as his "teachers"—Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce. Studying Steinberg’s art in tandem with readings of selected works by Nabokov and Joyce, Feldman explores fascinating bonds between Steinberg and these writers, from their tastes for parody and popular culture to their status as mythmakers, émigrés, and perpetual wanderers. Further, Feldman relates Steinberg’s uniquely literary art to a host of other authors, including Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Defoe. Generously illustrated with the artist’s work and drawing on invaluable archival material from the Saul Steinberg Foundation, this innovative fusion of literary history and art history allows us to see anew Steinberg’s art.