At risk of life and reputation, the reform journalist W. T. Stead (1849-1912) exposed child vice and white slavery in London and established age 16 for statutory rape. Concluding the 1914 Portrait, Joyce saluted the “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead” and set the path of future works. The exemplary life and devotions of Stead provided James Joyce with a model, a theme, and a purpose. Joyce integrated Steadfacts with his own personal emerging autobiography and interpretation of the ongoing Irish national, international, and even cosmic events. In this book Eckley uses new sources to unravel forgotten languages, motifs, and metaphors and recognizes “obscurity” as a “chrysalis factor” in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to illuminate Stead’s influence on Joyce. This book of Finnegans Wake criticism will open paths for exciting new efforts in studying Joyce.

The Varieties of Joycean Experience is a collection of ten essays that display the wide range and diversity of perspectives and critical approaches that can be drawn upon to enrich our readings of James Joyce’s works. With special attention to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, these essays explore such problems as the difficulties these books pose to categories and summaries and our understanding of Joyce’s composition methods. The book explores Joyce’s ambiguities around death, scatology, and the weather to propose new understandings of these phenomena as key ways into Joyce’s works. The book concludes with an examination of the tricky problem: what makes an interpretation untenable, and why do Joyce’s works inspire far-fetched and even crackpot readings?

The exemplary life and devotions of the reform journalist W. T. Stead (1949-1912) provided James Joyce with a model, a theme, and a purpose. Joyce integrated Steadfacts with his own personal emerging autobiography and interpretation of the ongoing Irish national, international, and even cosmic events.

Another volume in the distinguished annual

This the first monograph to examine Joycean time from a Deleuzian perspective.

This book opens with a crisis of recollection. In the early modern period, real political traumas like civil war and regicide exacerbated what were already perceived ruptures in myths of English descent. William Camden and other scholars had revealed that the facts of history could not justify the Arthurian myths, nor could history itself guarantee any moment of collective origin for the English people. Yet poets and playwrights concerned with the status of the emerging nation state did not respond with new material evidence. Instead, they turned to the literary structures that—through a range of what the author calls mnemonic effects—could generate the experience of a collective past. As Sir Philip Sidney recognized, verse depends upon the repetitions of rhyme and meter; consequently poetry “far exceedeth prose in the knitting up of memory.” These poetic and linguistic forms expose national memory as a construction at potential odds with history, for memory operates like language—through a series of signifiers that acquire new meaning as one rearranges and rereads them. Moving from the tragedy Gorboduc (1561) to Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (1681), Pivetti shows how such “knitting up of memory” created the shared pasts that generate nationhood. His work implies that memory emerges not from what actually occurred, but from the forms that compose it. Or to adapt the words of Paul Ricoeur: “we have nothing better than memory to signify that something has taken place.” The same is true even when that “something” is nationhood.

A surprising number of classic English authors wrote school stories, from Mary Shelley and Maria Edgeworth through Evelyn Waugh and Stephen Spender. Coverage spans two centuries of fiction set in the endowed private schools called Public Schools in England. Famous works such as Tom Brown's Schooldays by Hughes and Stalky & Co. by Kipling are described, along with books of accomplished but lesser-known writers such as Charles Turley, Eden Phillpotts, Talbot Baines Reed, and Desmond Coke. In addition to their pure entertainment value, these novels preserve a wealth of cultural information: class attitudes, sexual development, sports history, consciousness of Empire, role of the Established Church, study of the Classics. Biographical sketches are provided for most of the authors.

Designs completed by polytekton between 1990 and 1997, including drawings, etchings, photographs, architexts, sculptures, ceramic pieces, and architectural projects.