In this book—one of the first ecocritical explorations of Irish literature—Alison Lacivita defies the popular view of James Joyce as a thoroughly urban writer by bringing to light his consistent engagement with nature. Using genetic criticism to investigate Joyce’s source texts, notebooks, and proofs, Lacivita shows how Joyce developed ecological themes in Finnegans Wake over successive drafts. Making apparent a love of growing things and a lively connection with the natural world across his texts, Lacivita’s approach reveals Joyce’s keen attention to the Irish landscape, meteorology, urban planning, Dublin’s ecology, the exploitation of nature, and fertility and reproduction. Alison Lacivita unearths a vital quality of Joyce’s work that has largely gone undetected, decisively aligning ecocriticism with both modernism and Irish studies.

This collection introduces and examines the overarching ecological consciousness evinced in the writings of James Joyce. Reading Joyce with a keen attention to the manner in which the natural and built environment functions as context, horizon, threat, or site of liberation in Joyce’s writing offers an engaging and fruitful way into the dense, demanding, and usually encyclopedic formation of knowledge that comprises Joyce’s literary legacy. Scholars working within Irish studies draw on a wide variety of critical outlooks, including cultural studies, post-colonial studies, transnational studies, gender studies and, of course, modernist studies; this book will help that community become better acquainted with how ecocriticism elucidates the work of Irish writers, and will encourage further research in this direction. Even writers like Joyce, who are usually regarded as primarily urban, exhibit a strong ecological dimension in their work, and there are many other Irish writers who have produced work that directly engages issues in ecology and environmental studies. Eco-Joyce covers a multitude of disciplines in an attempt to serve as a point of entry into Joyce and ecocriticism, of course, but it will also suggest ways in which Irish studies and modernist studies could gain energy from this relatively new and vital approach --

Finnegans Wake - Human and Nonhuman Histories opens new ground by exploring the productive tension between anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric readings of James Joyce's final modernist masterpiece. Drawing on the most up-to-date theories and methodologies (the Anthropocene, new materialism, petroculture studies, the blue humanities, animal studies, ecofeminism, ecomedia), twelve leading Joyce scholars offer valuable new insights into the interwoven historical and planetary dimensions of Finnegans Wake. The volume's focus allows the contributors to read the Wake's nonhuman imaginary in original, often surprising comparative contexts (colonialism, the Irish Revival, the Free State's energy policies, the invention of television) and to spotlight enlightening nonhuman themes in Joyce's circular history (bogs, storms, rivers, bodily fluids, skin, wolves, mourning, DNA, atoms, labour, music). As these chapters show, a century later, Finnegans Wake remains a vibrant and vital text in which to interrogate the limits, exploitations and common plight of human and nonhuman life in the 21st-century.

This innovative analysis shows how James Joyce uses the language of prayer to grapple with profoundly human ideas in Finnegans Wake—the dreamlike masterpiece that critics have called his “book of the night.” Colleen Jaurretche moves beyond what scholars know about how Joyce composed this work to suggest why he wrote and arranged it as he did. Jaurretche provides a sequential reading of the four chapters and corresponding themes of the Wake from the perspective of prayer. She examines image, manifested by the letters of the alphabet and the Book of Kells; magic, which Joyce equates with the workings of language; dreams, which he relates to poetry; and speech, glorified in the Wake for its potential to express emotions and ecstasy. Jaurretche bases her study on important thinkers from antiquity to the present, including Origen of Alexandria, Giambattista Vico, and Giordano Bruno. She demonstrates how these philosophers influenced Joyce’s view that prayer can imbue language with power. This book is an illuminating and much-needed interpretation of a work that abounds with echoes and cadences of sacred language. Jaurretche’s insights will guide readers’ understanding of the style and structure of Finnegans Wake. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

“A brilliantly collaged snapshot of the variety and wealth of literary criticism, and Joyce studies, today.”—Tony Thwaites, author of Joycean Temporalities “Celebrates the multiplicity and sheer rampant excess of Joyce’s prodigally polysemous text with seventeen different scholars employing a likewise prodigal range of critical methodologies.”—Patrick O’Neill, author of Impossible Joyce: Finnegans Wakes “Each of the scholars involved is at the top of his and her game. Their commitment and excitement about the task at hand is evident on virtually every page. This book makes the Wake relevant and accessible to a whole new generation of readers.”—Garry Leonard, author of Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce This is the first Finnegans Wake guide to focus exclusively on the multiple meanings and voices in Joyce’s notoriously intricate diction. Rather than leveling the text it illuminates many layers of puns, wordplay, and portmanteaus, celebrating the Wake’s central experimental technique. Renowned Joyce scholars explore the polyvocality of individual chapters using game theory, ecocriticism, psychoanalysis, historicism, myth, philosophy, genetic studies, feminism, and other critical frameworks. They set in motion cross-currents and radiating structures of meaning that permeate the entire text and open up satisfying readings of the Wake for novices and seasoned readers alike. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

The study establishes the nature and aims of Finnegans Wake as Menippean satire and interprets the Wake in that light. McLuhan examines Joyce's use of language, and in particular his use of ten hundred-lettered words (thunderclaps).

From Gaelic annals and medieval poetry to contemporary Irish literature, A History of Irish Literature and the Environment examines the connections between the Irish environment and Irish literary culture. Themes such as Ireland's island ecology, the ecological history of colonial-era plantation and deforestation, the Great Famine, cultural attitudes towards animals and towards the land, the postcolonial politics of food and energy generation, and the Covid-19 pandemic - this book shows how these factors determine not only a history of the Irish environment but also provide fresh perspectives from which to understand and analyze Irish literature. An international team of contributors provides a comprehensive analysis of Irish literature to show how the literary has always been deeply engaged with environmental questions in Ireland, a crucial new perspective in an age of climate crisis. A History of Irish Literature and the Environment reveals the socio-cultural, racial, and gendered aspects embedded in questions of the Irish environment.

This volume introduces English speakers to genetic criticism, arguably the most important critical movement in France today. In recent years, French literary scholars have been exploring the interpretive possibilities of textual history, turning manuscript study into a recognized form of literary criticism. They have clearly demonstrated that manuscripts can be used for purposes other than establishing an accurate text of a work. Although its raw material is a writer's manuscripts, genetic criticism owes more to structuralist and poststructuralist notions of textuality than to philology and textual criticism. As Genetic Criticism demonstrates, the chief concern is not the "final" text but the reconstruction and analysis of the writing process. Geneticists find endless richness in what they call the "avant-texte": a critical gathering of a writer's notes, sketches, drafts, manuscripts, typescripts, proofs, and correspondence. Together, the essays in this volume reveal how genetic criticism cooperates with such forms of literary study as narratology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, sociocriticism, deconstruction, and gender theory. Genetic Criticism contains translations of eleven essays, general theoretical analyses as well as studies of individual authors such as Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, Zola, Stendhal, Chateaubriand, and Montaigne. Some of the essays are foundational statements, while others deal with such recent topics as noncanonical texts and the potential impact of hypertext on genetic study. A general introduction to the book traces genetic criticism's intellectual history, and separate introductions give precise contexts for each essay.

Contemporary philosophical research interconnects classical domains of philosophy, the arts, literature and social sciences. This collection of essays explores the operational role of experimentation, dissidence and heterogeneity in this process. It offers fundaments for the criticism of monolithical tendencies often put forward under the banner of the ‘Speculative Turn’ or New Realism, by means of exploring the contribution and influence of authors such as J. G. Hamann, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Guy Debord. These philosophers, historically placed within the margins of the philosophical mainstream, were decisive in the emergence of the philosophical thought and practices of Deleuze, Wittgenstein and Bataille, as shown here. The reader will also find re-evaluations of the contributions of Vico, Spinoza or Kant to posterity, next to new readings of authors like Foucault, Hadot, Benjamin and Adorno with regards to their significant experimental and dissident positions.