3 Review(s)

This challenging collection of essays by an international group of scholars aims, through the critical concept of 'context', to put the work of James Joyce in its 'place'. The four sections explore a range of contexts, offering significant perspectives - historical, theoretical, feminist, cultural and linguistic - on Joyce's writing. Essays on the modernist context place Joyce alongside contemporaries, like Woolf, Ford, and Freud, re-evaluating accepted notions of literary relationship and ideology. The context of the 'other' is invoked in essays drawing on recent developments in feminist, post-structuralist, and psychoanalytic literary theory, and taking Joyce's work as a site for provocative investigations into the nature of sexual, national, ethnic and cultural marginality. Some original re-readings of Joyce's relationship to particular writers, critics and cultural traditions draw him into proximity with Homer, Lacan, the comic strip and Irish popular literature. Finally, in essays that examine aspects and evolutions of his distinctive style, Joyce is considered within the parameters of his own oeuvre.