James Joyce and the Difference of Language offers an alternative look at Joyce's writing by placing his language at the intersection of various critical perspectives: linguistics, philosophy, feminism, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism and intertextuality. Combining close textual analysis and theoretically informed readings, an international team of leading scholars explores how Joyce's experiments with language repeatedly challenge our ways of reading. Topics covered include reading Joyce through translations; the role of Dante's literary linguistics in Finnegans Wake; and the place of gender in Joyce's modernism. Two further essays illustrate aspects of Joyce's cultural politics in Ulysses and the ethics of desire in Finnegans Wake. Informed by debates in Joyce scholarship, literary studies and critical theory, and addressing the full range of his writing, this volume comprehensively examines the critical diversity of Joyce's linguistic practices. It is essential reading for all scholars of Joyce and modernism.

A critical analysis of how James Joyce used language in his work

First published in 1988, this classic text is established as one of the most important discussions of the language of literature. Re-issued as a result of recent critical interest, this edition includes a new preface by the author.

The Study of Languages is one of James Joyce's first essays and an early indication of his lifelong interest in philology, the focus of this volume of essays. The collection investigates three aspects of Joycean linguistics. The first set of essays studies the language of Joyce's later writings. In the second part, Joyce's own linguistic investigations are retraced. The third part examines the historical context of 'popular philology'. This volume sheds light on the relationship between Joyce's later writings and his reading of studies by linguists such as Richard Paget, Charles Kay Ogden, Ivor Armstrong Richards, Fritz Mauthner, Otto Jespersen, Richard Chenevix Trench and Max Müller. Based on notebook research and textual genetics, these essays show how important the study of languages was to Joyce and how it played a crucial role in the development of his writings as it contributed and gave shape to the languages of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." Stephen Dedalus's famous complaint articulates a characteristic modern attitude toward the perceived burden of the past. As Robert Spoo shows in this study, 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 James Joyce's historiographic art to its formative contexts, Spoo reveals a modernist author passionately engaged with the problem of history, forging a new language that both dramatizes and redefines that problem.

The novel is modernism's most vital and experimental genre. With a chronology and guide to further reading, this 2007 Companion is an accessible and informative overview of the genre.