Joyce Anthologized in Post-Ulysses England

“Joyce Anthologized in Post-Ulysses England” dismantles the predominant assumption that Joyce was largely rejected by the British intelligentsia and literary circles of the inter-war period. Drawing on recent scholarship on modernist networks of promotion, the chapter outlines the dissemination of Joyce’s work through anthologies, publisher’s series, bookshops, the BBC and political weeklies. It ends by offering a close reading of Joyce’s piece “From a Banned Writer to a Banned Singer” published in London’s widely read political weekly The New Statesman and Nation in February 1932.

Introduction

The introduction offers a brief outline of the key issues in Joyce scholarship. It analyses the methodological framework of the book. It draws largely on the methodological models of New Modernist Studies scholarship, which advocates a return to the historical contingencies of the literary marketplace and to the ways modernist literature was formed against specific socio-economic modes of production and circulation. The book argues that the issues of influence and publicity interventions are crucial and that the examination of modernist networks of promotion and their publication outlets including magazines should not be segregated from the wider study of the public sphere.

The Making of a London Author

“The Making of a London Author” will expand further on Joyce’s interactions with Cambridge-based institutions such as C. K. Ogden’s Orthological Institute and London-based ones, including the publisher Faber and Faber and Eliot’s work there. Scholarship has largely overlooked Eliot’s ambitious plans for the international availability of Joyce’s work through London: the promotion of the Anna Livia Plurabelle record, the Anna Livia Plurabelle and Haveth Childers Everywhere pamphlets, and the contract for the long-pending Finnegans Wake. The chapter will delineate Joyce’s close collaborations with Ogden and Eliot to promote his work through divergent media alongside Herbert Hughes’ presentation of the Anna Livia Plurabelle record in London’s Daily Telegraph newspaper. The impact of such strategies on other publishing outlets including the Times newspaper will also be assessed.

The Geohistory of Two Cities in Finnegans Wake

“The Geohistory of Two Cities in Finnegans Wake” examines Joyce’s interest in contemporary London-set writings, taking as a case study H. M. Tomlinson’s book London River (1921). Through textual comparisons, it analyzes how the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” section of Finnegans Wake, which captures textually Dublin’s river, the Liffey is inflected by Tomlinson’s writings about the Thames. The last part of the chapter aims to pin down the geo-historical concerns about London and Dublin prevalent in Joyce’s work by investigating the textual presence of London in Finnegans Wake through a plethora of portmanteau words. Such references culminate in the formation of the word “Londub” produced by Joyce for the monumental finale of the book in November 1938. Thus, Clayton’s insightful formation “Londublin” to discuss the negotiations of power and textual interaction between London and Dublin in Ulysses will be pitched against Joyce’s “Londub” to explore how Finnegans Wake describes a dialogue and a correspondence between the two cities in equal terms.

Conclusions

The conclusions will evaluate the new evidence that the preceding chapters offered about Joyce’s work and personal geographical trajectory through London by employing a materialist historical analysis of his texts and contexts in relation to the capital city’s modernist networks and its publishing industry in early twentieth century. London will emerge as a key cultural and publishing vector for the composition and dissemination of Joyce’s work.

Joyce and the British Avant-Garde

“James Joyce and the British Avant-Garde” focuses on Joyce’s interaction with Cambridge’s intellectual milieu, where new experiments in literature were forcefully debated in the magazine Experiment (1928–31), founded and run by William Empson and Jacob Bronowski. I will outline the publication background and analyse the “Museyroom” extract from Work in Progress which was published in Experiment in 1931. The significance that Joyce attributed to this publication can be gauged by his strong interest in “helping” (Letters I 302) Stuart Gilbert to write an exegetical essay, titled “A Footnote to Work in Progress”, to be published alongside the extract from Work In Progress. The publications in Experiment have been neglected by Joyce scholarship thus far. Nonetheless, such publications are significant because they foreground the intense interest of the emerging British avant-garde in Joyce’s cultural practices and theoretical concerns. Equally overlooked is the publication of a section from “Proteus” in The European Caravan anthology (1931). This was the first Anglo-phone anthology to present post-WWI experimental literature from France, Italy, Great Britain, and Ireland. Bronowski sub-edited the section on Britain and Ireland with the help of Thomas McGreevy and Samuel Beckett.

“Londublin”

‘“Londublin”: The Linguistic and Spatial Politics of “Oxen of the Sun”’ investigates the ways the episode of Ulysses “Oxen of the Sun” negotiates London into Dublin’s public sphere. In 1995, Jay Clayton coined the term “Londublin” to refer to the ways Joyce delved into Dickens’ representations of the “first” city of the empire to write about Dublin, which in 1905 Joyce had provocatively described as the second city of the British Empire, assigning thus a central role to Dublin. The compound word “Londublin” suggests a textual subversion of the concept of London as the “capital city of the world” as Dickens had described it. Clayton’s incisive promulgation of the concept of “Londublin” at the centre of a critical cultural history about the first and second cities in Joyce’s poetic geography has been key for my approach. While Clayton focuses on Joyce’s conversations with Dickens in Ulysses, though, chapter two explores how in “Oxen of the Sun” Joyce handles canonical representations of London by a variety of writers while paying particular attention to Thomas Carlyle’s writings.

The London Connection

“The London Connection” draws on the “Book of Days” (1906–1909), Stanislaus Joyce’s unpublished diary from the time he lived together with Joyce in Trieste. This little-studied diary offers valuable evidence of Joyce’s aspirations and strategies to publish and promote Dubliners through London’s literary industry including his plan to move to the city in 1908 and study for an MA degree at the University of London. My close readings of Joyce’s works aim to highlight the historical conditions against which Joyce shaped his stance towards Dublin’s history and culture and its geopolitical entanglement with London, the centre of the British Empire: the ways London is evoked in an epiphany he wrote in Cockney idiom (1900), in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in Ulysses.