James Joyce revisited

About this book

A towering presence in modern literature, James Joyce continues to exert an enormous influence over the writers who have come after him. Generally accepted as the most experimental and daring writer of the twentieth century, Joyce's innovations in the form and content of the novel have not been superseded. If Ulysses is the most influential novel of the twentieth century, Finnegans Wake continues to be the most challenging work in prose fiction in the English language. In James Joyce Revisited, Richard F. Peterson goes back to the classroom in search of those aspects of Joyce's work that make him most accessible and interesting to students. After the early chapters follow his career from the lyrical impulses of Chamber Music and the scrupulously crafted stories of Dubliners, the later chapters track Joyce through his greatest achievements: Ulysses, his mock-epic of modern life, and Finnegans Wake, his inquiry into the night world and dream language of human existence. There is a full discussion of all the major as well as the minor works and a final chapter that conducts its own inquiry into the gigantic presence of Joyce in modern literature and criticism. This book brings up to date biographical and critical materials, and the secondary bibliography has been expanded, as has the discussion of Stephen Hero. Peterson approaches even the most challenging and complex of Joyce's works with the view that they are readable and that his fiction invites rather than discourages the reader. This volume offers a reliable and reasonably comprehensive starting place for the reader who is coming to Joyce studies early in his or her career, as well as being a helpful source of bibliographical material for the more experienced scholar.