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.

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.

James Joyce and the Difference of Language offers an alternative look at Joyce's writing by placing his language at the intersection of various critical perspectives: linguistics, philosophy, feminism, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism and intertextuality. Combining close textual analysis and theoretically informed readings, an international team of leading scholars explores how Joyce's experiments with language repeatedly challenge our ways of reading. Topics covered include reading Joyce through translations; the role of Dante's literary linguistics in Finnegans Wake; and the place of gender in Joyce's modernism. Two further essays illustrate aspects of Joyce's cultural politics in Ulysses and the ethics of desire in Finnegans Wake. Informed by debates in Joyce scholarship, literary studies and critical theory, and addressing the full range of his writing, this volume comprehensively examines the critical diversity of Joyce's linguistic practices. It is essential reading for all scholars of Joyce and modernism.

Preliminary material /Lucia Boldrini -- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS /Lucia Boldrini -- BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE /Lucia Boldrini -- INTRODUCTION: MIDDAYEVIL JOYCE /Lucia Boldrini -- THE RETURN OF MEDIEVALISM: JAMES JOYCE IN 1923 /Jed Deppman -- “QUELLA VISTA NOVA”: DANTE, MATHEMATICS AND THE ENDING OF ULYSSES /Reed Way Dasenbrock and Ray Mines -- AVERROES' SEARCH: DANTE'S MODERNISM AND JOYCE /Jeremy Tambling -- MILLY'S DREAM, BLOOM'S BODY AND THE MEDIEVAL TECHNIQUE OF INTERLACE /Guillemette Bolens -- JOYCE'S OTHER FATHER: THE CASE FOR CHAUCER /Helen Cooper -- CHARTING THE COURSE OF THE COMMEDIA'S EMBRYO IN A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN /Jennifer Fraser -- THE MEDIEVAL IRONY OF JOYCE'S PORTRAIT /Sam Slote -- LET DANTE BE SILENT: FINNEGANS WAKE AND THE MEDIEVAL THEORY OF POLYSEMY /Lucia Boldrini -- NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS /Lucia Boldrini -- INDEX /Lucia Boldrini.

Considers the development of modernism in the novel in relation to changing attitudes to religion.

This collection brings together leading experts in a number of fields of the humanities to offer a new perspective on the classical tradition. Drawing on reception studies, philology and early modern studies, the essays explore the interaction between literary criticism and the multiple cultural contexts in which texts were produced, discovered, appropriated and translated. The intersection of Realpolitik and textual criticism, poetic and musical aesthetics, and authority and self-fashioning all come under scrutiny. The canonical Latin writers and their subsequent reception form the backbone of the volume, with a focus on the European Renaissance. It thus marks a reconnection between classical and early modern studies and the concomitant rapprochement of philological and cultural historical approaches to texts and other works of art. This book will be of interest to scholars in classics, Renaissance studies, comparative literature, English, Italian and art history.

The Body in the Text highlights the importance of the body in language and narrative and its impact on meaning and signification. Evi Voyiatzaki's insightful work reveals the highly metaphoric and symbolic texture of James Joyce's Ulysses, which, the author contends, resembles the organization of a living organism. The book examines how the living meaning of the word in Joyce's texts has inspired the work of three avant-garde Greek writers: Nikos Gavrlil Pentzikis, Stelios Xefloudas, and Giorgos Cheimonas. A valuable comparison between Joyce's work and modern Greek literature, The Body in the Text's comparative exploration of the body's functions within literary discourse offers new insight into language's metaphoricity and the physiology of writing.

The fourth volume of the collected papers of the ICLA congress “The Many Languages of Comparative Literature” includes articles that study thematic and formal elements of literary texts. Although the question of prioritizing either the level of content or that of form has often provoked controversies, most contributions here treat them as internally connected. While theoretical considerations inform many of the readings, the main interest of most articles can be described as rhetorical (in the widest sense) – given that the ancient discipline of rhetoric did not only include the study of rhetorical figures and tropes such as metaphor, irony, or satire, but also that of topoi, which were originally viewed as the ‘places’ where certain arguments could be found, but later came to represent the arguments or intellectual themes themselves. Another feature shared by most of the articles is the tendency of ‘undeclared thematology’, which not only reflects the persistence of the charge of positivism, but also shows that most scholars prefer to locate themselves within more specific, often interdisciplinary fields of literary study. In this sense, this volume does not only prove the ongoing relevance of traditional fields such as rhetoric and thematology, but provides contributions to currently flourishing research areas, among them literary multilingualism, literature and emotions, and ecocriticism.

Leading Joyce scholar argues that Joyce's work can only be fully understood in the context of his unbelief