Narrative Con/Texts in Dubliners


Book Description

Investigates narrative strategies in James Joyce's stories in relation to the changing contextual situations, both in the individual narratives and in the cumulative text, context serving as a portal of entry into the narrative(s). Benstock is the author of "Narrative Con/texts in 'Ulysses'".




Dubliners


Book Description

Dubliners is a collection of picturesque short stories that paint a portrait of life in middle-class Dublin in the early 20th century. Joyce, a Dublin native, was careful to use actual locations and settings in the city, as well as language and slang in use at the time, to make the stories directly relatable to those who lived there. The collection had a rocky publication history, with the stories being initially rejected over eighteen times before being provisionally accepted by a publisher—then later rejected again, multiple times. It took Joyce nine years to finally see his stories in print, but not before seeing a printer burn all but one copy of the proofs. Today Dubliners survives as a rich example of not just literary excellence, but of what everyday life was like for average Dubliners in their day. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.




Narrative Con/Texts in Ulysses


Book Description

An investigation into the narrative in relation to the changing contextual situations, both in "Ulysses" and in other Joyce texts. Other works by this author include "Critical Essays on James Joyce", "Approaches to Ulysses", and "The Seventh of Joyce".




Attachment and Loss in the Works of James Joyce


Book Description

Using John Bowlby's Attachment Theory as a frame of reference, Attachment and Loss in the Works of James Joyce critically analyzes James Joyce's representation of grief. Based on cognitive, emotional and behavioral elements, Attachment Theory allows for new and innovative readings to emerge which differ from those offered by Freudian, Lacanian, and Jungian paradigms. Acknowledging the importance of the Theory of Mind and Reader Response, this book uses the concept of internal working models to elucidate how the childhood experiences with which Joyce has endowed his protagonists ultimately leads to how they respond to loss. The texts of Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses, show how central separation and loss were to Joyce’s work. It provides examples of such experiences in different age groups, under differing circumstances and at different stages in the grief process. Attachment Theory highlights the complexity of human relationships throughout the life cycle, not only how they can affect the grief process but how grief affects them.




Joyce's Love Stories


Book Description

In his comprehensive study of love in James Joyce's writings, DeVault shows that Joyce frequently ties his characters' personal and political pursuits to their ability to affirm both their loved ones and their fellow Dubliners. For Joyce, love for others need not compromise one's personal desires, but rather offers the possibility of a broader social compassion that creates a more progressive body politic.




Gothic Modernisms


Book Description

This is the first full length exploration of the relationship between Gothic fiction and Modernism in fiction and film. The Gothic's fascination with images of the fragmented self is echoed in the Modernist concern with the psyche and the paranoia of the everyday. The contributors explore how the Gothic influences a range of writers including James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, May Sinclair, Elizabeth Bowen and Djuna Barnes.




The Languages of Joyce


Book Description

The papers collected in this volume capture some of the excitement of the 11th International James Joyce Symposium, held in Venice and Trieste, June 1988. ‘The contents of this book are by no means as restrictive as the title might suggest. The contributors explore not only Joyce’s ‘languages’ and modes of communication and meaning, but, as well, concepts of significance and communication in broader contexts. Through Joyce, the writers explore and develop their own approaches and theories about language and languages, about semiotics and understanding. And about psychology, gender, physiology, politics, philosophy, linguistics, science, and culture. About literature in other words.’




Knowing Your Place


Book Description

Knowing Your Place directs groundbreaking attention to the role of rural and urban places in identity construction. Written to redress the longstanding neglect and denigration of the rural, this book argues that the cultural dominance of the city has been reinforced by postmodern theory's near fixation on the urban and the sophisticated. The essays explore rural identity in a number of cultures and situations, and look at issues of contemporary interest. Topics covered include the uses of popular and high culture, the explosion of high technology, the social and economic impact of ecological policy, the role of labor in the global marketplace, museum curatorship, and post-colonial politics. Throughout, the essays address the many ways in which place identity alters and influences the experience of race, class, gender and ethnicity.




Reading Contexts


Book Description




The Strong Spirit


Book Description

Scholarly accounts of Joyce's early work have traditionally resorted to two historical keys to try to unlock it: a concept of the Dublin and Ireland in which he grew to adulthood as stagnant and backward, and an emphasis on 1904, the year of the supposedly crucial break in which Joyce quit Ireland for continental Europe and could begin his great modernist literary project. But modernist or no, Joyce's works are always about Ireland, and he remained vitally in touch with Irish historical developments throughout his life. This study aims to be the first comprehensive historicisation of Joyce's writings 1898-1915 in relation to the distinct phases and shifting currents of British-Irish history during the period. At the turn of the century, when a concept of `national resurgence' is much in the Irish air, in his earliest essays, Joyce meditates on art as an anti-colonial and emancipatory project that addresses questions of freedom and justice in its own distinctive way. His early essays produce a compelling declaration of a principle of autonomy at a specific historical moment in a colonial culture. However, successive historical events - the crises surrounding the Land Act, the United Irish League and Devolution, the election of 1906, the Third Home Rule Bill crisis - call the emancipatory project ever more sharply into question. Thus `the strong spirit' which Joyce had initially thought might transcend and even conquer the effects of history becomes indissolubly wedded to radical historical scepticism. Through Dubliners, Stephen Hero, the `Triestine Writings' and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Exiles, Joyce responds to his predicament by examining recent Irish history and the place of the intellectual and artist within it in a variety of extremely subtle and complex or, in Joycean terms, `labyrinthine' forms of writing.