Preface

Summary

When T. S. Eliot titled his early anthology “Introducing James Joyce,” he started an ongoing process: Ulysses has been reintroduced now to four or five generations. One measure of “landmark” status for a literary work, after all, is its continued capacity to be rediscovered, and Ulysses meets that test again and again. Its dimensions seem indeed to have grown with the history of literary criticism in the current century, to each of whose major phases it has responded remarkably well. To the neoclassical standards of high modernism, which continued in the formal intelligence of the New Criticism in the 1950s, it offered its Homeric structure and elaborate schematic imagination; to the post-structuralists of the 1960s and 1970s, it presented a language animated by experimental and convention-dismaying energies; to the new historical critics of the 1980s, it has revealed founding contexts in political and cultural history, here the shifting backgrounds of turn-of-the-century Ireland and the Europe of the Great War of 1914–18. Reading Joyce's book can be like reliving the literary and intellectual history of the twentieth century, the course of which it has helped to direct perhaps no less effectively than any other single work.

If the proponents of these several methodologies have engaged sometimes in the gang-warfare of successive literary generations, I am less troubled by their oppositional premises.