In his pursuit of the unknown in Joyce’s works, Edmund Epstein has made new discoveries of Joyce through an astonishing range of refer­ences and documentation, from Hebrew to Classical and modern European thought. This book will be of immediate and invaluable significance not only to Joyce scholars but to students and readers of modern literature in general. The pattern Epstein sees in Joyce’s works is the conflict of genera­tions, the recurring pattern of human nature which Joyce sought to discover and describe. Mr. Epstein follows Joyce’s working of the process through A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to its climax in Ulysses, and constantly refers to Finnegans Wake for corroboration and perspective. Valuable in itself for its new reading of Joyce, Epstein’s work offers new interpretations of themes and symbols which have heretofore puzzled Joyce scholars.

In his pursuit of the unknown in Joyce's works, Edmund Epstein has made new discoveries of Joyce through an astonishing range of refer­ences and documentation, from Hebrew to Classical and modern European thought. This book will be of immediate and invaluable significance not only to Joyce scholars but to students and readers of modern literature in general. The pattern Epstein sees in Joyce's works is the conflict of genera­tions, the recurring pattern of human nature which Joyce sought to discover and describe. Mr. Epstein follows Joyce's working of the process through A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to its climax in Ulysses, and constantly refers to Finnegans Wake for corroboration and perspective. Valuable in itself for its new reading of Joyce, Epstein's work offers new interpretations of themes and symbols which have heretofore puzzled Joyce scholars.

«Hiromi Yoshida's innovative approach to 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' demonstrates how Joyce's Stephen Dedalus reaches a heightened state of creativity through his gradual integration of feminine elements into his psyche. This illuminating and stunning analysis presents a valuable contribution to psychoanalytic feminist theory as well as to Joyce studies.» (Nancy Bombaci, Assistant Professor of Writing and Literature, Mitchell College, New London, Connecticut).

Focusing on James Joyce, this volume includes a study of the Eumaeus chapter of Ulysses by John Raleigh; an essay by Margaret Church on the women in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; a study by James Carens of the motif of hands in the Portrait; a study by J. B. Lyons of diseases in Dubliners; and other essays on the work and thought of James Joyce.

"This study provides the first comprehensive historical account of Joyce's writings 1898-1915 in the context both of the distinct phases and shifting currents of British-Irish history during the period, and the sometimes rather different phases important in the works"--From jacket.

"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.