James Joyce and Catholicism is the first historicist study to explore the religious cultural contexts of Joyce's final masterpiece. Drawing on letters, authorial manuscripts and other archival materials, the book works its way through a number of crucial themes; heresy, anticlericalism, Mariology, and others. Along the way, the book considers Joyce's vexed relationship with the Catholic Church he was brought up in, and the unique forms of Catholicism that blossomed in Ireland at the turn of the last century, and during the first years of the Irish Free State.

To many, James Joyce is simply the greatest novelist of the twentieth century. Scholars have pored over every minutia of his public and private life from utility bills to deeply personal letters in search of new insights into his life and work. Yet, for the most part, they have paid scant attention to the two volumes of poetry he published. The nine contributors to The Poetry of James Joyce Reconsideredconvincingly challenge the critical consensus that Joyce’s poetry is inferior to his prose. They reveal how his poems provide entries into Joyce's most personal and intimate thoughts and ideas. They also demonstrate that Joyce's poetic explorations--of the nature of knowledge, sexual intimacy, the changing quality of love, the relations between writing and music, and the religious dimensions of the human experience--were fundamental to his development as a writer of prose. This exciting new work is sure to spark new interest in Joyce's poetry, and will become an essential and indispensable resource for students and scholars of his life and work.

Presents a biography of Irish author James Joyce along with critical views of his 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.

James Joyce's life was just as complicated as his books; find out more about the man in this short biography about the life and times of James Joyce.

This groundbreaking book explores the role 19th century Irish Catholic authors played in forging the creation of modern Irish literature. As such it offers a unique tour of Ireland’s literary landscape, from early origins during the Catholic political resurgence of the 1820s to the transformative zenith wrought by James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922. Emer Nolan observes that contemporary Irish literature is steeped in the ambitions and internal conflicts of a previously captive Irish Catholic culture that came into its own with the narrative art form. He revisits, with keen insights, the prescient and influential songs, poems, and prose of Thomas Moore. He also points out that Moore’s wildly successful work helped create an audience for authors to come, i.e. John and Michael Banim, William Carleton and the popular novelists Gerald Griffin and Charles Kickham. An innovative aspect of this study is the author’s exploration of the relationship between James Joyce and Irish culture and his nineteenth-century Irish Catholic predecessors and their political and national passions. It is, in effect, a telling look at the future history of Irish fiction.

Neither simple apostate nor obedient Christian, James Joyce developed a uniquely ambivalent attitude toward his Irish Catholic roots--one that became inscribed in his imagination and served as a constant aesthetic focus and symbolic source in his fiction. In this study, Beryl Schlossman traces the theological and liturgical echoes that resonate in Joyce's work, particularly in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and argues that the writer's special brand of Catholicism necessitates a double reading of the fiction. Confronting the Catholic Word with Celtic wit, she suggests, Joyce's world is an interrelated blend of the sacred and the comic, the deeply religious and the obscene, the defiant, the blasphemous. Students, scholars, and readers of Joyce, modern or comparative literature, contemporary criticism, and theology will find this a comprehensive and convincing study that illuminates the themes, poetic language, and central paradox of Joyce's art.

In A Portrait and Ulysses, Joyce carefully disassembles the totality of civil society Dubliners inhabit to reveal the ways in which the church and state circumscribe citizens' imagination. The colonized, however, do possess power to deform cultural directives and to resist the roles in which colonizers cast them, but this power originates within logics which exclude and divide."--Jacket.

This study constitutes the first-ever definitive account of the life and work of Irish modernist poets Thomas MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, and Denis Devlin. Apprenticed to the likes of W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, all three writers worked at the center of modernist letters in England, France, and the United States, but did so from a distinctive perspective. All three writers wrote with a deep commitment to the intellectual life of Catholicism and saw the new movement in the arts as making possible for the first time a rich sacramental expression of the divine beauty in aesthetic form. MacGreevy spent his life trying to voice the Augustinian vision he found in The City of God. Coffey, a student of neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, married scholastic thought and a densely wrought poetics to give form and solution to the alienation of modern life. Devlin contemplated the world with the eyes of Montaigne and the heart of Pascal as he searched for a poetry that could realize the divine presence in the experience of the modern person. Taken together, MacGreevy, Coffey, and Devlin exemplify the modern Catholic intellectual seeking to engage the modern world on its own terms while drawing the age toward fulfillment within the mystery and splendor of the Church. They stand apart from their Irish contemporaries for their religious seriousness and cosmopolitan openness to European modernism. They lay bare the theological potencies of modern art and do so with a sophistication and insight distinctive to themselves. Although MacGreevy, Coffey, and Devlin have received considerable critical attention in the past, this is the first book to study their work comprehensively, from MacGreevy's early poems and essays on Joyce and Eliot to Coffey's essays in the neo-scholastic philosophy of science, and on to Devlin's late poetic attempts to realize Dante's divine vision in a Europe shattered by war and modern doubt.