James Joyce A Literary Reference

Veteran Joyce scholar and author A. Nicholas Fargnoli traces both the odyssey of Joyce's roaming life and the creative evolution of his work in this copiously illustrated, information-packed biographic reference. James Joyce was born in 1882 in Dublin, Ireland, a country that still only begrudgingly recognizes his artistic brilliance. Although for more than half his life he lived in Europe in self-exile, his canon-breaking works never ceased to revolve around the city of his birth—no matter how uncensored his portraits, how ambitious his literary experiments, or outre his linguistic games. As a writer, Joyce had mastered the English language in his early books, Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, celebrated it in the notoriously banned Ulysses, and, some claim, finally tried to explode it in Finnegans Wake. Despite a rootless life spent sometimes in near-poverty, Joyce retained his inherent Irishness and absorbed everything from the foreign environments around him. An in-depth portrait of this truly amazing artist is covered here in an engaging array of excerpts from letters, reminiscences, book reviews, court papers, and manuscripts.