The sheer mass of allusion to popular literature in the writings of James Joyce is daunting. Using theories developed by Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, R. B. Kershner analyzes how Joyce made use of popular literature in such early works as Stephen Hero, Dubliners, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and Exiles. Kershner also examines Joyce's use of rhetoric, the relationship between narrator and protagonist, and the interplay of voices, whether personal, literary, or subliterary, in Joyce's writing. In pointing out the prolific allusions in Joyce to newspapers, children's books, popular novels, and even pornography, Kershner shows how each of these contributes to the structures of consciousness of Joyce's various characters, all of whom write and rewrite themselves in terms of the texts they read in their youth. He also investigates the intertextual role of many popular books to which Joyce alludes in his writings and letters, or which he owned -- some well known, others now obscure. Kershner presents Joyce as a writer with a high degrees of social consciousness, whose writings highlight the conflicting ideologies of the Irish bourgeoisie. In exploring the social dimension of Joyce's writing, he calls upon such important contemporary thinkers as Jameston, Althusser, Barthes, and Lacan in addition to Bakhtin. Joyce's literary response to his historical situation was not polemical, Kershner argues, but, in Bakhtin's terms, dialogical: his writings represent an unremitting dialogue with the discordant but powerful voices of his day, many inaudible to us now. Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature places Joyce within the social and intellectual context of his time. Through stylistic, social, and ideological analysis, Kersner gives us a fuller grasp of the the complexity of Joyce's earlier writings.

Illuminates James Joyce's relationship to his literary predecessors in new and important ways

The object of this study, first published in 1980, is to dispel the view that James Joyce had no political views. Although not a political novelist like D. H. Lawrence or Joseph Conrad, political issues and discussions are central to Joyce’s major novels. This title links that political content with Joyce’s own views, and examines the evolution of those views and attitudes. A number of unusual and fascinating sources for Joyce’s thought are uncovered. Joyce’s Politics is thus a thorough review of a neglected aspect of Joyce and his writings, and will be of interest to students of literature.

DIVDiscusses Ulysses arguing that through the operation of memory, it mimics the working of the human mind and achieves its status as one of the most intellectual achievements of the 20th century./div

Margot Norris' The Value of James Joyce explores the writings of James Joyce from his early poetry and short stories to his final avant-garde work, Finnegans Wake. His works include some of the most difficult and challenging texts in the English literary canon without diminishing his impressive popularity beyond the scope of academia. A democratic impulse may be counted as an important feature of this paradox: that Joyce's stylistic and linguistic experiments never lose their focus on a world of characters whose everyday activities comprise the stories of life in Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, even as some of the most famous texts are given structures derived from Ancient Greek literature. The Value of James Joyce examines not only the significance of the ostensibly ordinary but the function of natural and urban spaces, classical and popular culture, and the moods, voice, and language that give Joyce's works their widespread appeal.

This study explores the relations of T.S. Eliot and James Joyce with certain antecedents, such as Dante, Flaubert and Baudelaire; with contemporaries including Pound and Yeats; and with their readers, in order to illuminate the authors' historic mutual venture in English literature.

The essays gathered in Joyce in Progress are the fruit of the First Annual Graduate Conference in Joyce Studies held at the Università Roma Tre in February 2008, and organized by the Italian James Joyce Foundation. They are a testament to the enduring fascination of Joyce's writings and the ongoing liveliness of debate about the writer and his works and contexts. There is a wide array of genuine research on show here, which looks at Joyce from a variety of angles, focusing on his deeply complex autobiographical fiction through genetic studies, post-colonial studies, eco-criticism and intertextual and multi-modal approaches. This volume offers ground-breaking multi-disciplinary readings and usefully connects Joyce’s work with that of contemporary writers, rivals, followers, and successors.

Eleven essays that open tantalizing questions about Joyce and history

Ulysses as a touchstone for generating provacative ideas for innovation in teaching.

A Companion to James Joyce offers a unique composite overview and analysis of Joyce's writing, his global image, and his growing impact on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literatures. Brings together 25 newly-commissioned essays by some of the top scholars in the field Explores Joyce's distinctive cultural place in Irish, British and European modernism and the growing impact of his work elsewhere in the world A comprehensive and timely Companion to current debates and possible areas of future development in Joyce studies Offers new critical readings of several of Joyce's works, including Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses