"History

is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake".

Stephen Dedalus's famous words articulate the modern
complaint concerning the burden of the past. In James
Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus's Nightmare,
Robert Spoo argues that Joyce's creative achievement,
from the time of his sojourn in Rome in 1906-07 to the
completion of Ulysses in 1922, cannot be understood
apart from the ferment of historical thought that
dominated the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Tracing Joyce's historiographic art to its formative
contexts - the discourse of Romanticism, the New History
and Nietzschean antihistoricism, doctrines of progress,
Irish history and politics, traditions of rhetoric, the
ideological language of literary history - Spoo reveals a
modernist author passionately engaged with the problem
of history, forging a new language that both dramatizes
and redefines that problem. Born into a culture oppressed
by its history, Joyce was preoccupied by it. Torn between
conflicting images of Ireland's past, he was confronted
with the challenge of creating a historical conscience. His
art became his political protest, and the belief that
individual passion and freely expressed works of fiction
defy and subvert dominant discourses is the basis of his
historiographic art. Both broadly philosophical and alert
to the subtleties of Joyce's texts, this study uses a critical
approach that draws on the historical and philosophical
thought that shaped Joyce and his contemporaries. Spoo
provides a rich and evocative context for reading Ulysses
as well as other Joycean texts. He shows that for Joyce, as
for his fictional alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, there is no

waking from the nightmare ofhistory, only the ceaseless

reweaving of the texts that make history a nightmare.
http://books.google.ro/books/about/James_Joyce_and_the_language_of_history.html?
id=ImLlO6OUiuEC&redir_esc=y

What did James Joyce think about history? He boasted that Dublin
could be rebuilt from the pages of his novels, yet Joyce stopped
writing essays and reviews at an age when many authors are just
beginning to express themselves on important extra-literary
topics--and the Joyce that emerges in biographies and memoirs is
notoriously unreliable about history and politics.
In Joyce and the Subject of History, some of the brightest stars in
Joyce criticism tease out the historical implications embedded in
Joyce's oeuvre without conceding too much to the comprehensive
historical claims of the fictions themselves. At a time when much
historical work remains surprisingly under-theorized and much
theoretical work excludes the detail and rigor of serious historical
research, this collection attempts to bridge the gap between
history and theory, to reconceive the field of literary historical
scholarship as a whole. As an added resource, the book concludes
with Robert Spoo's extensive Annotated Bibliography of historical
work on Joyce.
Despite incorporating shared assumptions and common goals,
this collection was not designed to issue in consensus. "Joyce and
history" remains, inevitably, an open subject, and the essays in
this volume give an idea of just how open that subject is.

http://books.google.ro/books?id=dmm6I2PmtMYC&hl=ro&source=gbs_similarbooks

In this first full-length study of race and colonialism in the

works of James Joyce, Vincent J. Cheng argues that Joyce
wrote insistently from the perspective of a colonial
subject of an oppressive empire, and that Joyces
representations of race in its relationship to imperialism
constitute a trenchant and significant political
commentary, not only on British imperialism in Ireland,
but on colonial discourses and imperial ideologies in
general. Exploring the interdisciplinary space afforded by
postcolonial theory, minority discourse, and cultural
studies, and articulating his own cross-cultural
perspective on racial and cultural liminality, Professor
Cheng offers a ground-breaking study of the centurys
most internationally influential fiction writer, and of his
suggestive and powerful representations of the cultural
dynamics of race, power, and empire.
http://books.google.ro/books?id=E_L0pHekEMkC&hl=ro&source=gbs_similarbooks

James Joyces fiction constantly engages with an Ireland

whose present and past is marked by the long struggle to
achieve full independence from Britain. Semicolonial
Joyce is a collection of essays addressing the importance
of Irelands colonial situation in understanding Joyces
work. The volume brings together leading commentators
on the Irish dimension of Joyces writing, such as Vincent J.
Cheng, Seamus Deane, Enda Duffy, Luke Gibbons, David
Lloyd, and Emer Nolan, to present a range of voices
rather than a single position on a topic which has had a

major impact on Joyce criticism in recent years.

Contributors explore Joyces ambivalent and shifting
response to Irish nationalism and reconsider his writing in
the context of the history of Western colonialism. The
essays both draw on and question the achievements of
postcolonial theory, and provide insights into Joyces
resourceful engagement with political issues that remain
highly topical today.
http://books.google.ro/books?id=A5tp8GpLp9oC&hl=ro&source=gbs_similarbooks

James Joyce and Nationalism revises the conventional

understanding of Joyce's relationship to Irish politics.
Examining the aesthics of modernism and political
nationalism, Nolan argues that both formations were
responses to changing conditions of modernity. She deftly
provides alternative conceptions of nationalism to issue
her argument. The book also offers a polemical
introduction to Joyce and the vast field of Joycean studies.
It represents an important, theoretically engaged
intervention into debates about Joyce's politics and the
politics of modernism by an Irish critic, and provides a
high-minded and critical reading of the related fields of
modernism, Irish culture, post-colonialism, and gender
and nationalism.
http://books.google.ro/books?id=O8QscV0z3pwC&hl=ro&source=gbs_similarbooks

How might an IRA bomb and James Joyce's Ulysses have anything
in common? Could this masterpiece of modernism, written at the
violent moment of Ireland's national emergence, actually be the
first postcolonial novel? Exploring the relation of Ulysses to the
colony in which it is set, and to the nation being born as the book
was written, Enda Duffy uncovers a postcolonial modernism and
in so doing traces another unsuspected strain within the one-time
critical monolith. In the years between 1914 and 1921, as Joyce
was composing his text, Ireland became the first colony of the
British Empire to gain its independence in this century after a
violent anticolonial war. Duffy juxtaposes Ulysses with documents
and photographs from the archives of both empire and
insurgency, as well as with recent postcolonial literary texts, to
analyze the political unconscious of subversive strategies, twists
on class and gender, that render patriarchal colonialist culture
unfamiliar.
Ulysses, Duffy argues, is actually a guerrilla text, and here he
shows how Joyce's novel pinpoints colonial regimes of
surveillance, mocks imperial stereotypes of the "native," exposes
nationalism and other chauvinistic ideologies of "imagined
community" as throwbacks to the colonial ethos, and proposes
versions of a postcolonial subject. A significant intervention in the
massive "Joyce industry" founded on the rhetoric and aesthetics of high
modernism, Duffy's insights show us not only Ulysses, but also the origins of
postcolonial textuality, in a startling new way.

http://books.google.ro/books?id=A-Plsi_GA3cC&hl=ro&source=gbs_similarbooks

Uniting Catholic Ireland and Protestant Ireland was a central idea

of the "Irish Revival," a literary and cultural manifestation of Irish
nationalism that began in the 1890s and continued into the early
twentieth century. Yet many of the Revival's Protestant leaders,

including W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and John Synge, failed to

address the profound cultural differences that made uniting the
two Irelands so problematic, while Catholic leaders of the Revival,
particularly the journalist D. P. Moran, turned the movement into a
struggle for greater Catholic power. This book fully explores James
Joyce's complex response to the Irish Revival and his extensive
treatment of the relationship between the "two Irelands" in his
letters, essays, book reviews, and fiction up to Finnegans Wake.
Willard Potts skillfully demonstrates that, despite his pretense of
being an aloof onlooker, Joyce was very much a part of the
Revival. He shows how deeply Joyce was steeped in his whole
Catholic culture and how, regardless of the harsh way he treats
the Catholic characters in his works, he almost always portrays
them as superior to any Protestants with whom they appear. This
research recovers the historical and cultural roots of a writer who
is too often studied in isolation from the Irish world that formed
him.

http://books.google.ro/books?id=Zn-r5DEF_68C&hl=ro&source=gbs_similarbooks

James Joyce began his literary career as an Irishman writing to

protest the deplorable conditions of his native country. Today, he
is an icon in a field known as "Joyce studies." Our Joyce explores
this amazing transformation of a literary reputation, offering a
frank look into how and for whose benefit literary reputations are
constructed. Joseph Kelly looks at five defining moments in Joyce'
reputation. Before 1914, when Joyce was most in control of his
own reputation, he considered himself an Irish writer speaking to
the Dublin middle classes. When T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound began
promoting Joyce in 1914, however, they initiated a cult of genius
that transformed Joyce into a prototype of the "egoist," a writer
talking only to other writers. This view served the purposes of
Morris Ernst in the 1930s, when he defended Ulysses against

obscenity charges by arguing that geniuses were incapable of

obscenity and that they wrote only for elite readers. That view of
Joyce solidified in Richard Ellmann' award-winning 1950s
biography, which portrayed Joyce as a self-centered genius who
cared little for his readers and less for the world at war around
him. The biography, in turn, led to Joyce' canonization by the
academy, where a "Joyce industry" now flourishes within English
departments.