Who Killed James Joyce?

Chapter 4 looks at how Joyce incorporated his American reception into Finnegans Wake, with an emphasis on how the Wake represents Joyce’s attitude towards the sudden imperative between the wars to respond to his reception in America. This includes not only the banning, burning, piracy, and trials of his works in Prohibition America, but also a transatlantic print culture which saw his works as they were serialized being published almost exclusively in American-run Little Magazines aimed at American audiences. Moreover, this chapter argues that while the ‘Americanization of Joyce Studies’ didn’t fully take hold until after the Second World War, Joyce was aware of and responded to incipient moves in that direction

The New World Presses

Chapter 2 examines allusions to American popular culture in Joyce’s work. A potentially voluminous subject given the sheer range of references, the chapter narrows it down to areas which show a continued engagement across Joyce’s works. One of the most significant examples of this is blackface minstrelsy. Indeed, Joyce, it would appear, is particularly drawn to a specific kind of American popular culture, one with a strong sense of a connection with a history of colonialism, empire, and race. Within this framework, Joyce appropriates and renegotiates Irish relations to not only blackface minstrels, but also the Mutt and Jeff comic strip, Hollywood movies, Broadway musicals, cowboys and Indians, jazz, flappers, speakeasies, and myriad other markers of American popular culture.

American Wake

This chapter focuses on Joyce and Irish America. It argues that the phenomenon of Irish emigration to the United States, particularly in the post-Famine period, transformed the culture and society of Ireland in ways in which Joyce was responsive in his writings. The chapter begins with an overview of connections between Ireland and America in the post-Famine period. It then moves on to a discussion of Joyce’s concept of that history as it is expressed in his so-called ‘Triestine writings’ (1907–12). Clear and specific allusions to Irish America are rare in Dubliners, A Portrait, and Ulysses, so the discussion jumps to Finnegans Wake and the significance of Irish America to several key features and characters in that work. It concludes with an analysis of Joyce’s correspondence in the mid-1930s with his son Giorgio as the latter pursued a music career in the United States.

Introduction

The introduction outlines the case that Joyce was far more attentive to the history, culture, and politics of the United States than the critical consensus has previously allowed for. It does so by delineating the specific historical factors that made America significant for Irish writers, including Joyce; by summarizing the textual and manuscript evidence for the significance of America in Joyce’s works; by arguing that those works display an increasing level of engagement with the US roughly in line with key points of transition in Irish and American histories; and by signalling that the focus on the interrelation of those histories provides an explanatory category for a synoptic reading of Joyce’s work as a whole. Finally, in presenting an overview of the chapters to follow, it builds on this historically focused rationale to discuss briefly in broader terms the necessary frames and limits of a study on Joyce and America.

Conclusion

Building on the final chapter’s analysis of Joyce’s reception, the conclusion to this study addresses a subject that has been largely implicit throughout: the predominance of American scholarship in Joyce studies. It also addresses the question of why it has taken so long for an ‘industry’ dominated by Americans to produce a study of America’s role in Joyce’s thinking. At the same time, this conclusion also takes the opportunity to state in a more concise and synoptic manner than has previously been possible precisely what Joyce thought of America. The book’s final gesture is to point beyond itself to work remaining to be done on the broad and many-sided subject of Joyce and America.

Real American Writers

Chapter 3 focuses on Joyce’s allusions to American literature. It will look to historicize precisely Joyce’s use of American literature within contemporary perceptions of that writing and the canon; clarifying those perceptions is the aim of the first part of this chapter. Walt Whitman was, the following section argues, an important but ultimately compromised model of a decolonized, national poet for the young Joyce. My argument in the next section, focusing on Bret Harte, emphasizes the point that Harte’s reputation in Ireland in the early twentieth century when Joyce wrote Dubliners was significantly more literary than it is today and that Joyce, like Yeats, was drawn to what appeared as a decolonized literary culture with obvious appeal for Irish writers. Finally, Washington Irving provides another focus for a discussion of allusions to writing marked by colonial histories and revolutions.