The World of the Little Review

This chapter looks at the origins and general intellectual context of the Little Review, the avant-garde New York periodical which serialized Joyce’s Ulysses between 1918 and 1920. The editors were Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, who were joined by Ezra Pound for two years from May 1917. Pound edited the serial Ulysses and was acutely aware of the changing political context in which the journal was being published. In an atmosphere of increasing cultural conservatism brought about by the entry of the US into the First World War, the New York Post Office declared some issues of the Little Review to be non-mailable and suppressed them. The chapter reviews some issues of the Little Review in detail, paying particular attention to the nexus of associations between the serial Ulysses and some of the other texts and preoccupations of the Little Review.

Conclusion

This chapter reviews the key findings of the book as a whole, and argues that literary criticism should learn from bibliography and textual criticism. It looks at Virginia Woolf as a reader of Ulysses, the anxiety of Joycean influence, and the value of the two historic first editions of Joyce’s iconic text.

Paris Departures

This chapter looks at the ways in which Joyce revised the text of Ulysses once the Little Review serialization had been stopped. It argues that there are seven types of Ulyssean revision and looks in detail at the revisions Joyce made to chapters 2 (‘Nestor’), 5 (‘Lotus-Eaters’), 11 (‘Sirens’), and 13 (‘Nausicaa’). The argument about post-serial revision involves looking at specificities of character, place, and time; streams of consciousness; schematic additions; stylistic thickening; sexual suggestiveness; the embellishment of micro-narrative; and the intensification of Hibernicism in speech. These key critical concepts are then applied to close reading of individual moments of revision.

The Serial Style and Beyond

This chapter argues that the specific text of Ulysses as published in the Little Review is of critical interest. It looks at the style and nature of Ulysses as a serial and gives an initial account of the ways in which Joyce changed the serial text for the volume version of February 1922. Digital resources have transformed the possibility of studying textual variation, and an early section in the chapter looks at those transformations and focuses, in particular, on the significance of word counts as a key for understanding how Joyce’s text changed. Dushan Popovich, printer of the Little Review, and the first typographer to face the challenge of typesetting Joyce’s challenging text, is discussed in some detail. Pound disliked Joyce’s candour, and the various revisions which he imposed on the serial text are reviewed here. So too are the various ways in which Joyce subsequently revised his text for publication in volume form.

Trial and Error

This chapter looks at the compositional genesis of Ulysses, its early production history, and the circumstances by which the editors of the Little Review became embroiled in a trial in New York in February 1921. The composition of Joyce’s text is discussed in detail, from the moments of conception through to April 1921, when Joyce realized that the Little Review serialization would not continue, and made arrangements for the publication of his work in volume form with Sylvia Beach’s Parisian bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. The trial of the Little Review editors—on the grounds of the putative obscenity of the last instalment of chapter 13 (‘Nausicaa’)—is also discussed in detail. In particular the chapter looks at the sexual politics of the trial, including the homophobia of John Quinn, the lawyer who gave significant financial support to both Joyce and the Little Review.

Introduction

This introductory chapter introduces the key facts in the publication history of Ulysses, including the key events behind the serialization of the text in the Little Review between 1918 and 1920. It discusses the ways in which errors entered Joyce’s text and looks, briefly, at the editorial rationale and controversy of Hans Walter Gabler’s Critical and Synoptic Edition of Ulysses (1984). This introductory chapter also provides a summary of the study’s four-chapter structure and states the key argument of the book: that the serialization of Ulysses is of critical, contextual, and genetic significance for the interpretation of the work as a whole.