An indispensable resource for scholars and students of James Joyce, Joyce Studies Annual gathers essays by foremost scholars and emerging voices in the field.

An indispensable resource for scholars and students of James Joyce, Joyce Studies Annual gathers essays by foremost scholars and emerging voices in the field.

Recipient of the 2015 PEN New England Award for Nonfiction “The arrival of a significant young nonfiction writer . . . A measured yet bravura performance.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times James Joyce’s big blue book, Ulysses, ushered in the modernist era and changed the novel for all time. But the genius of Ulysses was also its danger: it omitted absolutely nothing. Joyce, along with some of the most important publishers and writers of his era, had to fight for years to win the freedom to publish it. The Most Dangerous Book tells the remarkable story surrounding Ulysses, from the first stirrings of Joyce’s inspiration in 1904 to the book’s landmark federal obscenity trial in 1933. Written for ardent Joyceans as well as novices who want to get to the heart of the greatest novel of the twentieth century, The Most Dangerous Book is a gripping examination of how the world came to say Yes to Ulysses.

An indispensable resource for scholars and students of James Joyce, Joyce Studies Annual gathers essays by foremost scholars and emerging voices in the field.

(Post)colonial modernity in Ulysses and Accra / Ato Quayson -- Joyce and race in the twenty-first century / Malcolm Sen -- Dubliners and French naturalism / Catherine Flynn -- Joyce and Latin American literature : transperipherality and modernist form / José Luis Venegas -- The multiplication of translation / Sam Slote -- Copyright, freedom, and the fragmented public domain / Robert Spoo -- Ulysses in the world / Sean Latham -- The intertextual condition / Dirk Van Hulle -- The macrogenesis of Ulysses and Finnegans wake / Ronan Crowley -- After the Little review : Joyce in transition / Scarlett Baron -- Popular Joyce, for better or worse / David Earle -- Joyce's nonhuman ecologies / Katherine Ebury -- Medical humanities / Vike Plock -- Joyce's queer possessions / Patrick Mullen -- The wake, ideology and literary institutions / Finn Fordham -- Joyce as a generator of new critical history / Jean-Michel Rabaté.

"What if you had never opened the book of your life? Or if that book had been even a little different? Ulysses in Focus takes up these vertiginous questions, raveling out episodes in the writing, critical reception, and editing of Joyce's masterpiece and twining them together with stories from a life spent elucidating it. Joyce himself would have admired the variety that Michael Groden offers us here: fascinating new readings of Ulysses by its foremost genetic critic; behind-the-scenes accounts of editorial contretemps and secret manuscript acquisitions; the sorrow of shelved projects and the thrill of the bibliographic quest. At its core, Ulysses in Focus tells the story of a reader and a book that seem to have been destined for one another. Yet its method is against destiny, seeking to free texts from the published state in which they ossify by restoring to us a sense of their evolution and their contingency. To read Groden is to think differently about reading and being: to suspect that a book, like a life, might be the sum of its untaken roads."--Paul K. Saint-Amour, University of Pennsylvania "This is an engaging, reflective, and highly personal set of essays and recollections by a leading Joyce scholar. It urges us to see ,Ulysses not as a finished monument, but as a mobile piece of writing in constant dialogue with its own processes of composition and avant-textes."--Anne Fogarty, coeditor of Bloomsday 100: Essays onUlysses Michael Groden has been at the forefront of some of the most important developments in James Joyce studies over the past three decades. He was a major figure in and early adopter of genetic scholarship--the method of analyzing a literary work by looking at its development from draft to draft, particularly suited to Joyce's stories and novels. He defended Hans Walter Gabler's Ulysses edition in the "Joyce Wars" and helped introduce the National Library of Ireland's new Joyce manuscripts to the world. Bringing together twelve essays in three areas of Joyce criticism and scholarship, this refreshing book offers various personal adventures from a life lived with Joyce's work. In a manner that is at once modest, rigorous, and accessible, Ulysses in Focus engagingly connects these scholarly developments and contretemps to the author's personal history and provides fascinating new genetic readings of several episodes of Ulysses that advance our understanding of the novel's composition.

This edition offers everything needed by the newcomer to this famous but intimating text: images, maps, footnotes, and introductory essays by eighteen leading Joyceans.