John McCourt

Since the publication of Richard Ellmann s James Joyce in 1959, Joyce has received remarkably little biographical attention. Scholars have chipped away at various aspects of Ellmann s impressive edifice but have failed to construct anything that might stand alongside it. The Years of Bloom is arguably the most important work of Joyce biography since Ellmann. Based on extensive scrutiny of previously unused Italian sources and informed by the author s intimate knowledge of the culture and dialect of Trieste, The Years of Bloom documents a fertile period in Joyce s life. While living in Trieste, Joyce wrote most of the stories in Dubliners, turned Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and began Ulysses. Echoes and influences of Trieste are rife throughout Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Though Trieste had become a sleepy backwater by the time Ellmann visited there in the 1950s, McCourt shows that the city was a teeming imperial port, intensely cosmopolitan and polyglot, during the approximately twelve years Joyce lived there in the waning years of the Habsburg Empire. It was there that Joyce experienced the various cultures of central Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. He met many Jews, who collectively provided much of the material for the character of Leopold Bloom. He encountered continental socialism, Italian Irredentism, Futurism, and various other political and artistic forces whose subtle influences McCourt traces with literary grace and scholarly rigour. The Years of Bloom, a rare landmark in the crowded terrain of Joyce studies, will instantly take its place as a standard work. "

James Joyce in Trieste, 1904-1920

The Years of Bloom

"This book was crying out to be written." The Irish Times "Scandalously readable." Literary Review James Joyce's relationship with his homeland was a complicated and often vexed one. The publication of his masterwork Ulysses - referred to by The Quarterly Review as an "Odyssey of the sewer" - in 1922 was initially met with indifference and hostility within Ireland. This book tells the full story of the reception of Joyce and his best-known book in the country of his birth for the first time; a reception that evolved over the next hundred years, elevating Joyce from a writer reviled to one revered. Part reception study, part social history, this book uses the changing interpretations of Ulysses to explore the concurrent religious, social and political changes sweeping Ireland. From initially being a threat to the status quo, Ulysses became a way to market Ireland abroad and a manifesto for a better, more modern, open and tolerant, multi-ethnic country.

100 Years of Ulysses in Ireland

Consuming Joyce

Associate Professor of English Literature John McCourt

James Joyce's relationship with his homeland was a complicated and often vexed one. The publication of his masterwork Ulysses - referred to by The Quarterly Review as an "Odyssey of the sewer" - in 1922 was initially met with indifference and hostility within Ireland. This book tells the full story of the reception of Joyce and his best-known book in the country of his birth for the first time; a reception that evolved over the next hundred years, elevating Joyce from a writer reviled to one revered. Part reception study, part social history, this book uses the changing interpretations of Ulysses to explore the concurrent religious, social and political changes sweeping Ireland. From initially being a threat to the status quo, Ulysses became a way to market Ireland abroad and a manifesto for a better, more modern, open and tolerant, multi-ethnic country.

At the start of the 21st century, assessments of the last 100 years of literary accomplishment place Joyce, and in particular Ulysses, at the top of the pile. Two recent rankings of 20th century novels have put Ulysses at number one. In autumn 2000, a new film from Natural Nylon (the independent film company set up by Sean Pertwee, Ewan McGregor, Jude Law et al) to be called 'Nora' will be released. Last year the Bloomsday walk in Dublin attracted thousands of participants and for the last 16 years in New York John Malkovich and a host of celebrity actors read the whole of Ulysses during the day and night of 16th June, an event which attracts tens of thousands of New Yorkers. In the style of our Beardsley and Wilde books we propose a beautifully illustrated biography of Joyce featuring Joyce's Dublin.

A Passionate Exile

James Joyce

Since the publication of Richard Ellmann's James Joyce in 1959, Joyce has received remarkably little biographical attention. The Years of Bloom, based on extensive scrutiny of previously unused sources and informed by the author's intimate knowledge of the culture and dialect of Trieste, is possibly the most important work of Joyce biography since Ellmann, re-creating this fertile period in Joyce's life with an extraoridinary richness of detail and depth of understanding. Now available in paperback.

gli anni de Bloom

A collection of new essays covering Joyce's life, times and cultural contexts.

James Joyce in Context

Ruben Borg

Paul Fagan

Recent years have witnessed a series of shifts in the reception of Brian O'Nolan's work, with the publication of collected short stories and dramatic texts and a systematic critical reappraisal of once marginal titles in the author's canon. The vast collections of O'Nolan's correspondence, manuscripts and drafts housed in Illinois, Boston, and Texas, - as well as The Irish Times online digital archive - have given rise to genetic and cultural materialist approaches that seek to explore the borders of authorship and authority in O'Nolan's ever-expanding oeuvre. And while longer-running critical conversations continue to be finessed about the ways in which O'Nolan's texts are shaped by towering twentieth-century figures such as Joyce and Beckett, the increasingly international contexts in which O'Nolan is being read invite us to reconsider his profile as a satirist, a local comedian, a critic of provincial attitudes, a formal innovator and a powerful, inimitable voice in the twentieth-century avant-garde. As the boundaries of his body of work continue to be redrawn, O'Nolan's writing appears to be constantly repositioning itself between local and international perspectives, displaying an uncanny knack for comic doubling and self-contradiction, embracing the innovative spirit of the times, yet unmasking its pretentions.

John McCourt

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