This is a collection of Joyce's non-fictional writing, including newspaper articles, reviews, lectures and essays. It covers 40 years of Joyce's life and maps important changes in his political and literary opinions.

James Joyce: A Critical Guide presents a full and comprehensive account of the major writing of the great modernist novelist James Joyce. Ranging right across Joyce's literary corpus from his earliest artistic beginnings to his mature prose masterpieces Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, the book provides detailed textual analysis of each of his major works. It also provides an extended discussion of the biographical, historical, political and social contexts that inform Joyce's writing and a wide-ranging discussion of the multiple strands of Joyce criticism that have established themselves over the last eighty years. The book's combination of sustained close reading of individual texts and critical breadth makes it an ideal companion for both undergraduate students and the wider community of Joyce's readers.

Presents twelve critical essays on the Irish writer and his works.

Albert Wachtel is a professor of creative studies and literature at the Claremont Colleges' Pitzer College and the Claremont Graduate University. He also edited and contributed to Critical Insights: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. His academic honors include three years as National Defense Education Act Fellow, the Creative Arts Institute fellowship, two National Endowment for the Humanities grants, and an appointment as a Danforth Associate. Wachtel is the author of The Cracked Lookingglass: James Joyce and the Nightmare of History (1992) and lie coedited Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives (1986). He has been published in five genres. His essays and stones have appeared in major journals, magazines, and newspapers, including tire Gettysburg Review, the Grain, the James Joyce Quarterly, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Midstream, Moment Magazine, the Southern Review and Spectrum, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Wall Street Journal. Among the essays in this volume: "Showers of Atoms: Joyce's Theories of Literature in Context" by Tara Prescott "Finnegans Wake: Joyce's Find Gift" by Edmund L. Epstein "How to Deconstruct Joyce: Epiphany and the Woman in the Sea in J4 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Alan" by Peter Wagner Book jacket.

James Joyce: A Very Short Introduction highlights one of the most influential writers of the 20th century: James Joyce. He is best known for his complex style, reinvention of language, and depiction of contemporary Ireland. Yet at the time of writing his work faced intense criticism, and his modernist epic Ulysses was banned for over a decade in Britain and America for obscenity. This VSI explores Joyce's major works including Ulysses, Dubliners, and Finnegans Wake. It considers the contemporary significance of Joyce's examination of sexuality and nationalism, and places Joyce's works in the context of his life as well as the historical moment in which they were written.

This reader-friendly introduction makes Joyce asscessible by combining the excitement of reading his words with the excitement of interpreting them.

From Ulysses to Finnegans Wake, James Joyce’s writings rank among the most intimidating works of literature. Unfortunately, many of the books that purport to explain Joyce are equally difficult. The Critical Lives series comes to the rescue with this concise yet deep examination of Joyce’s life and literary accomplishments, an examination that centers on Joyce’s mythical and actual Ireland as the true nucleus of his work. Andrew Gibson argues here that the most important elements in Joyce’s novels are historically material and specific to Ireland—not, as is assumed, broadly modernist. Taking Joyce “local,” Gibson highlights the historical and political traditions within Joyce’s family and upbringing and then makes the case that Ireland must play a primary role in the study of Joyce. The fall of Charles Stewart Parnell, the collapse of political hope after the Irish nationalist upheavals, the early twentieth-century shift by Irish public activists from political to cultural concerns—all are crucial to Joyce’s literary evolution. Even the author’s move to mainland Europe, asserts Gibson, was actually the continuation of a centuries-old Irish legacy of emigration rather than an abandonment of his native land. In the thousands, perhaps millions, of words written about Joyce, Ireland often takes a back seat to his formal experimentalism and the modernist project as a whole. Yet here Gibson challenges this conventional portrait of Joyce, demonstrating that the tightest focus—Joyce as an Irishman—yields the clearest picture.