This set reissues 8 books on James Joyce originally published between 1966 and 1991. The volumes examine many of Joyce’s most respected works, including Finnegans Wake, Dubliners and Ulysses. As well as providing an in-depth analyses of Joyce’s work, this collection also looks at James Joyce in the context of the Modernist movement as a whole. This set will be of particular interest to students of literature.

First published in 1986. Dubliners was James Joyce’s first major publication. Setting it at the turn of the century, Joyce claims to hold up a ‘nicely polished looking-glass’ to the native Irishman. In Backgrounds for Joyce’s Dubliners, the author examines the national, mythic, religious and legendary details, which Joyce builds up to capture a many-sided performance and timelessness in Irish life. Acknowledging the serious work done on Dubliners as a whole, in this study Professor Torchiana draws upon a wide range of published and unpublished sources to provide a scholarly and satisfying framework for Joyce’s world of the ‘inept and the lower middle class’. He combines an understanding of Joyce’s subtleties with a long-standing personal knowledge of Dublin. This title will make fascinating reading for scholars and students of Joyce’s writing as well as for those interested in early twentieth century Irish social history.

This title, first published in 1990, offers a feminist and psychoanalytic reassessment of the Joycean canon in the wake of Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva. The author centres her discussion of Ulysses, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist, Finnegans Wake, and Exiles around questions of desire and language and the politics of sexual difference. Suzette Henke’s radical "re-vision" of Joyce’s work is a striking example of the crucial role feminist theory can play in contemporary evaluation of canonical texts. As such it will be welcomed by feminists and students of literature alike.

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.

This collection, first published in 1982, brings together thirteen writers from a wide variety of critical traditions to take a fresh look at Joyce and his crucial position not only in English literature but in modern literature as a whole. Comparative views of his work include reflections on his relations to Shakespeare, Blake, MacDiarmid, and the Anglo-Irish revival. Essays, story and poems all combine to celebrate the major constituents of Joyce’s work – his imagination and comedy, his exuberant use of language, his relation to the history of his country and his age, and his passionate commitment to ‘a more veritably human tradition’. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

Tracing the developing modernist aesthetic in the thought and writings of James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf, Deborah Parsons considers the cultural, social and personal influences upon the three writers. Exploring the connections between their theories, Parsons pays particular attention to their work on: forms of realism characters and consciousness gender and the novel time and history. An understanding of these three thinkers is fundamental to a grasp on modernism, making this an indispensable guide for students of modernist thought. It is also essential reading for those who wish to understand debates about the genre of the novel or the nature of literary expression, which were given a new impetus by the pioneering figures of Joyce, Richardson and Woolf.

`Is there one who understands me?' So wrote James Joyce towards the end of his final work, Finnegans Wake. The question continues to be asked about the author who claimed that he had put so many enigmas into Ulysses that it would `keep the professors busy for centuries' arguing over what he meant. For Joyce this was a way of ensuring his immortality, but it could also be claimed that the professors have served to distance Joyce from his audience, turning his writings into museum pieces, pored over and admired, but rarely touched. In this remarkable book, steeped in the learning gained from a lifetime's reading, David Pierce blends word, life and image to bring the works of one of the great modern writers within the reach of every reader. With a sharp eye for detail and an evident delight in the cadences of Joyce's work, Pierce proves a perfect companion, always careful and courteous, pausing to point out what might otherwise be missed. Like the best of critics, his suggestive readings constantly encourage the reader back to Joyce's own words. Beginning with Dubliners and closing with Finnegans Wake, Reading Joyce is full of insights that are original and illuminating, and Pierce succeeds in presenting Joyce as an author both more straightforward and infinitely more complex than we had perhaps imagined. T. S. Eliot wrote of Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses, that it is `a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape'. With David Pierce as a guide, the debt we owe to Joyce becomes clearer, and the need to flee is greatly reduced.

The 3 volumes in this set, originally published between 1963 and 1980 include the first biography of Wyndham Lewis (1882 - 1957) by the award winning biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, and 2 volumes edited by personal friends of Wyndham Lewis which give a unique insight into the man, his output and his concern with the conflict between the artist-intellectual and the rest of society. Lewis is arguably one of the major intellectual figures of the 20th Century. Equally talented as a writer and painter, Lewis was innovative and controversial and well-known as the driving force behind Vorticism, the avant-garde movement that flourished in London before the First World War. A versatile painter, Lewis’ literary output was prodigous and he mastered a variety of genres – novels, poetry, philosophy, sociology, travel writing, literary and art critic. A leading revolutionary in British painting and a writer of creative genius, Wyndham Lewis also knew personally Augustus John, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, who called Lewis ‘the most fascinating personality of our time’.