This collection introduces and examines the overarching ecological consciousness evinced in the writings of James Joyce. Reading Joyce with a keen attention to the manner in which the natural and built environment functions as context, horizon, threat, or site of liberation in Joyce’s writing offers an engaging and fruitful way into the dense, demanding, and usually encyclopedic formation of knowledge that comprises Joyce’s literary legacy. Scholars working within Irish studies draw on a wide variety of critical outlooks, including cultural studies, post-colonial studies, transnational studies, gender studies and, of course, modernist studies; this book will help that community become better acquainted with how ecocriticism elucidates the work of Irish writers, and will encourage further research in this direction. Even writers like Joyce, who are usually regarded as primarily urban, exhibit a strong ecological dimension in their work, and there are many other Irish writers who have produced work that directly engages issues in ecology and environmental studies. Eco-Joyce covers a multitude of disciplines in an attempt to serve as a point of entry into Joyce and ecocriticism, of course, but it will also suggest ways in which Irish studies and modernist studies could gain energy from this relatively new and vital approach --

Joyce preferred to speak Italian at home so it is no surprise to find two Italian scholars lecturing and writing about James Joyce in English. This book contains lectures on Joyce by Umberto Eco and Liberato Santoro-Brienza.

This collection of essays is a critical reexamination of Joyce’s famed book of short stories, Dubliners. Despite the multifaceted critical attention Dubliners has received since its publication more than a century ago, many readers and teachers of the stories still rely on and embrace old, outdated readings that invoke metaphors of paralysis and stagnation to understand the book. Challenging these canonical notions about mobility, paralysis, identity, and gender in Joyce’s work, the ten essays here suggest that Dubliners is full of incredible movement. By embracing this paradigm shift, current and future scholars can open themselves up to the possibility of seeing that movement, maybe even noticing it for the first time, can yield surprisingly fresh twenty-first-century readings.

In this short discussion of the Irish modernist writer, the author establishes a link between the mind of James Joyce and medieval theology. He shows how Joyce's fiction was suffused by his reading of St. Thomas Aquinas, Giordano Bruno and Nicola da Cusa and the book creates a dialogue between the saint, the novelist and the critic.

In drawing together contributions from leading and emerging scholars from across the UK and America, Eco-Modernism offers a diverse range of environmental and ecological interpretations of modernist texts and illustrates that ecocriticism can offer fresh and provocative ways of understanding literary modernism.

(Post)colonial modernity in Ulysses and Accra / Ato Quayson -- Joyce and race in the twenty-first century / Malcolm Sen -- Dubliners and French naturalism / Catherine Flynn -- Joyce and Latin American literature : transperipherality and modernist form / José Luis Venegas -- The multiplication of translation / Sam Slote -- Copyright, freedom, and the fragmented public domain / Robert Spoo -- Ulysses in the world / Sean Latham -- The intertextual condition / Dirk Van Hulle -- The macrogenesis of Ulysses and Finnegans wake / Ronan Crowley -- After the Little review : Joyce in transition / Scarlett Baron -- Popular Joyce, for better or worse / David Earle -- Joyce's nonhuman ecologies / Katherine Ebury -- Medical humanities / Vike Plock -- Joyce's queer possessions / Patrick Mullen -- The wake, ideology and literary institutions / Finn Fordham -- Joyce as a generator of new critical history / Jean-Michel Rabaté.

This collection charts the vital contextual backgrounds to James Joyce's life and writing. The essays collectively show how Joyce was rooted in his times, how he is both a product and a critic of his multiple contexts, and how important he remains to the world of literature, criticism and culture.