James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (b. 1882–d. 1941) was a novelist, short story writer, playwright, and poet. He is one of the preeminent writers of the 20th century, regarded as one the greatest innovators of the novel form and a central figure in the modernist literary tradition. That reputation has made him the focus of an extraordinarily large body of scholarship, covering an almost limitless range of topics and contexts, and often placing him at the center of key philosophical debates about the nature of modernity and of literature. Furthermore, due to his close association with some of the most prominent writers in Irish, American, and European literature, and his influence on writers from across the world, his work is read in relation to a wide range of cultural and literary contexts. His writing is intensely focused on the details of Dublin life at the turn of the 20th century, as well as navigating a deeply ambivalent relationship with the Irish Literary Revival of which he was both a fierce critic and a participant. Living in Trieste, Paris, and Zurich for much of his life, he was also in close contact with many Modernist writers, and he was engaged with the tumultuous political and cultural life of Europe. Though he dabbled in socialism as a young man and was, privately, very critical of the rise of fascism, his own political convictions remain somewhat enigmatic and the subject of scholarly debate. Indeed, a characteristic feature of Joyce scholarship has been how amenable his work is to co-option by diverse and often conflicting ideological perspectives. In part, this may be due to the encyclopedically inclusiveness in historical, cultural, and sensory detail of his most famous works. His works were at once a scrupulous account of the city of his birth, faithfully rendering the topographical and human life of Dublin at a particular moment in its history, and one that simultaneously laid claim to the sweep of human history and knowledge, Joyce once claiming that if he could get to the heart of Dublin he could get to the heart of “all the cities of the world.” This article aims to reflect the diversity of approaches to Joyce’s work, as well as disagreements that have defined debate around his work and its significance. The topics covered reflect several major areas of study that have defined critical responses to Joyce.

Farming in Modern Irish Literature

This innovative study analyzes the range of representation of farming in Irish literature in the period since independence/partition in 1922, as Ireland moved from a largely agricultural to a developed urban society. In many different forms, poetry, drama, fiction, and autobiography, writers have made literary capital by looking back at their rural backgrounds, even where those may be a generation back. The first five chapters examine some of the key themes: the impact of inheritance on family, in the patriarchal system where there could only be one male heir; the struggles for survival in the poorest regions of the West of Ireland; the uses of childhood farming memories whether idyllic or traumatic; the representation of communities, challenging the homogeneous idealizing images of the Literary Revival; the impact of modernization on successive generations into the twenty-first century. The final three chapters are devoted to three major writers in whose work farming is central: Patrick Kavanagh, the small farmer who had to find an individual voice to express his own unique experience; John McGahern in whose fiction the life of the farm is always posited as alternative to an arid and rootless urban milieu; Seamus Heaney who re-imagined his farming childhood in so many different modes throughout his career.

SCOTTISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE: FROM HUGH MACDIARMID TO TOM LEONARD, EDWIN MORGAN AND JAMES ROBERTSON

The paper deals with the Scottish literary revival that occurred in the 1920s and 1930s. The leading theoretical and artistic figure of this movement was Hugh MacDiarmid, a Scottish poet whose main preoccupation was the role of Scots and Gaelic in shaping modern Scottish identity. Also called the Lallans revival – the term Lallans (Lowlands) having been used by Robert Burns to refer solely to the notion of language, the movement’s main postulates included the strengthened cultural liaisons between Scots and Gaelic (and not Scots and English as was the case until then). In the preface to his influential anthology of Scottish poetry, The Golden Treasury of Scottish Verse (1941), MacDiarmid bluntly stated that the prime aim of Scottish Literary Renaissance was to recharge Scots as a stage in the breakaway from English so that Scottish Gaelic heritage could properly be recaptured and developed. Relying primarily on MacDiarmid’s theoretical insights, it is our purpose to track, explore and describe the Scottish Literary Renaissance’s contemporary echoes. The paper thus focuses on the comparative analysis of Hugh MacDiarmid’s poetry, on the one hand, and the poetry of its contemporary Scottish creative disciples (Tom Leonard, Edwin Morgan and James Robertson). By comparing and contrasting the selected poems of the aforementioned poets, the main goal of the paper is to emphasize the validity, relevance and actuality of MacDiarmid’s movement for the present moment in Scotland.

J. M. Synge

This is a complete study of the works of the Irish playwright, travel writer, and poet J. M. Synge (1871–1909). A key and controversial figure in the Irish Literary Revival, and specifically in the Abbey Theatre, Synge’s career was short but dynamic. Moving from an early Romanticism, through Decadence, and on to a combative, protesting modernism, the development of Synge’s drama was propelled by his contentious relationship with the Irish politics of his time. This book is a full and timely reappraisal of Synge’s works, exploring both the prose and the drama through an in-depth study of Synge’s archive. Rather than looking at Synge’s work in relation to any distinct subject, this study examines Synge’s aesthetic and philosophical values, and charts the challenges posed to them as the impetus behind his reluctant movement into a more modernist mode of writing. Along the way, the book sheds new and often surprising light on Synge’s interests in occultism, pantheism, socialism, Darwinism, modernization, and even his late satirical engagement with eugenics. One of its key innovations is the use of Synge’s diaries, letters, and notebooks to trace his reading and to map the influences buried in his work, calling for them to be read afresh. Not only does this book reconsider each of Synge’s major works, along with many unfinished or archival pieces, it also explores the contested relationship between Revivalism and modernism, modernism and politics, and modernism and Romanticism.

Britain and Ireland: Decadence beyond London

British decadence has long been identified with London, the home of theaters and publishing houses. Most decadent writers lived and worked in the city, setting many of the great works of British decadence in its streets and squares. Yet decadence, as a literary style and a cultural concept, reached all parts of the United Kingdom, and in the process changed the nature of this literary tradition. Moving from Cornwall and Wales to the north of Ireland and Scotland, this essay charts a British decadence with close ties to the Celtic Revival, one that embraces nature and that looks to a future beyond the autumn of decline. From writers vacationing in the west of Britain, to the Ulster literary revival, to the embrace of natural cycles as an antidote to metropolitan ennui in Scotland, the writing examined here demonstrates the variety of forms that British decadence could take.

Classics and Irish Politics

This chapter provides a contextualized overview of the contents of the book Classics and Irish Politics, 1916–2016. Rather than summarizing each chapter in order of appearance and according to the subsections of the volume, the introduction draws alternative thematic connections across the different chapters. Strands of interpretation include: the different political implications of Irish authors identifying with Greece, Rome, or indeed Carthage; the imperial contexts of neoclassical architecture; pivotal figures such as Patrick Pearse, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Seamus Heaney; the significance of the Irish Literary Revival and the Irish language; classical reception vs. the classical tradition as a theoretical framework; the Classics in Irish education.

Epic Modernism

This chapter explores how James Joyce transvalues epic, the novel, and Ireland in tandem through an encyclopaedic multi-perspectivalism. Writers of the Irish Literary Revival engaged within a variety of genres but they especially privileged drama and poetry as the vehicles for a recrudescence of an authentic Irish identity. As a counter to this, Joyce’s writings implicitly and explicitly make the case that the kind of transvaluation requisite to an Irish Revival could be better accommodated through the genre of the novel, in that only the novel was sufficiently malleable and protean to encompass the heterogeneities that were often suppressed or ignored amongst various discordant factions of the Revival. This chapter shows how in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939) Joyce exults in the heteroglossia afforded by the novel by making it a vehicle for a multitude of concurrent perspectives and for languages that are mixed and multiple.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction presents authoritative essays by thirty-five distinguished scholars of Irish fiction. Collectively, they provide accessible and incisive assessments of the breadth and achievement of Ireland’s modern novelists and short story writers, whose contribution to the evolution and modification of these unique art forms has been far out of proportion to the country’s small size. The volume brings an impressive variety of critical perspectives to bear on the development of modern Irish fiction, situating authors, texts, and genres in their social, intellectual, and literary-historical contexts. The Handbook’s coverage encompasses an expansive range of topics, including the nature and function of the Irish Gothic mode; nineteenth-century Irish women’s fiction and its influence on emergent modernism and cultural nationalism; the diverse modes of irony, fabulism, and social realism that characterize the fiction of the Irish Literary Revival; the fearless aesthetic radicalism of James Joyce; the jolting narratological experiments of Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, and Máirtín Ó Cadhain; the fate of the realist and modernist traditions in the work of Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O’Connor, Seán O’Faoláin, and Mary Lavin, and in that of their ambivalent heirs, Edna O’Brien, John McGahern, and John Banville; the subversive treatment of sexuality and gender in Northern Irish women’s fiction written during and after the Troubles; the often neglected genres of Irish crime fiction, science fiction, and fiction for children; the many-hued novelistic responses to the experiences of famine, revolution, and emigration; and the variety and vibrancy of post-millennial fiction from both parts of Ireland. Readably written and employing a wealth of original research, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction illuminates a distinguished literary tradition that has altered the shape of world literature.

The Materialist-Fabulist Dialectic

This chapter examines the contrasting uses of folktale, fantasy, realism, and satire in the works of James Stephens and Eimar O’Duffy, two key fabulist authors of the Irish Literary Revival. The rendering of ancient mythological material and folk beliefs into modern fiction constitutes a distinct sub-strand of fiction of the Revival era. Running counter to this appeal to ancient forms in many instances was a resort to modes of irony, parody, and social realism to comment upon the disparity between romantic ideals and material realities in pre- and post-independence Ireland. In their most aesthetically successful works, Stephens and O’Duffy draw liberally from each of these trajectories in a manner that changes the fundamental meaning of each by providing a new and different manner of representing politics.