Scholarly accounts of Joyce's early work have traditionally resorted to two historical keys to try to unlock it: a concept of the Dublin and Ireland in which he grew to adulthood as stagnant and backward, and an emphasis on 1904, the year of the supposedly crucial break in which Joyce quit Ireland for continental Europe and could begin his great modernist literary project. But modernist or no, Joyce's works are always about Ireland, and he remained vitally in touch with Irish historical developments throughout his life. This study aims to be the first comprehensive historicisation of Joyce's writings 1898-1915 in relation to the distinct phases and shifting currents of British-Irish history during the period. At the turn of the century, when a concept of `national resurgence' is much in the Irish air, in his earliest essays, Joyce meditates on art as an anti-colonial and emancipatory project that addresses questions of freedom and justice in its own distinctive way. His early essays produce a compelling declaration of a principle of autonomy at a specific historical moment in a colonial culture. However, successive historical events - the crises surrounding the Land Act, the United Irish League and Devolution, the election of 1906, the Third Home Rule Bill crisis - call the emancipatory project ever more sharply into question. Thus `the strong spirit' which Joyce had initially thought might transcend and even conquer the effects of history becomes indissolubly wedded to radical historical scepticism. Through Dubliners, Stephen Hero, the `Triestine Writings' and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Exiles, Joyce responds to his predicament by examining recent Irish history and the place of the intellectual and artist within it in a variety of extremely subtle and complex or, in Joycean terms, `labyrinthine' forms of writing.

“Nearly every major figure of his era,” writes his biographer Adrian Frazier, “worked with Moore, tangled with Moore, took his impression from, or left it on, George Moore.” The Anglo-Irish novelist George Moore (1852–1933) espoused multiple identities. An agent provocateur whether as an art critic, novelist, short fiction writer or memoirist, always probing and provocative, often deliberately controversial, the personality at the core of this book invented himself as he reinvented his contemporary world. Moore’s key role—as observer-participant and as satirist—within many literary and aesthetic movements at the end of the Victorian period and into the twentieth century owed considerably to the structures and manners of collaboration that he embraced. This book throws into relief the multiple ways in which Moore’s work can serve as a counterbalance to established understandings of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century literary aesthetics both through innovative scholarly readings of Moore’s work and through illustrative case studies of Moore’s collaborative practice by making available, for the first time, two manuscript plays he co-authored with Pearl Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes) in 1894. It is this collaborative practice in conjunction with his cosmopolitan outlook that turned Moore into a key player in the fin-de-siècle formation of an international aesthetic community. This book explores the full range of Moore’s collaborations and cultural encounters: from 1870s Paris art exhibitions to turn-of-the-century Dublin and London; from gossip to the culture of the barmaid; from the worship of Balzac to the fraught engagement with Yeats; from music to Celtic cultural translation. Moore’s reputation as a collaborator with the most significant artistic individuals of his time in Britain, Ireland and France in particular, but also in Europe more widely, provides a rich exposition of modes of exchange and influence in the period, and a unique and distinctive perspective on Moore himself.

The Colbeck collection was formed over half a century ago by the Bournemouth bookseller Norman Colbeck. Focusing primarily on British essayists and poets of the nineteenth century from the Romantic Movement through the Edwardian era, the collection features nearly 500 authors and lists over 13,000 works. Entries are alphabetically arranged by author with copious notes on the condition and binding of each copy. Nine appendices provide listings of selected periodicals, series publications, anthologies, yearbooks, and topical works.

Philip Waller explores the literary world in which the modern best-seller first emerged, with writers promoted as stars and celebrities, advertising both products and themselves.