Preface

Summary

For many decades the ‘classic’ reading of Joyce cast him as the exemplary denationalised high modernist, the ‘great writer’ and revolutionary inventor who soared loftily above his many contexts, picking and choosing where he needed without ever fully engaging. Seen in this way, Joyce's art was conceived by a man largely indifferent to his surroundings and changing times. Many early critics privileged this version of Joyce (following his own promptings as well as those of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Valéry Larbaud and, to a lesser extent, Stanislaus Joyce). Joyce's first biographer, Herbert Gorman, writing very much under Joyce's editorial control, played down the author's Irishness in order to favour of an image of him as an internationalist, who, like ‘Flaubert and Dostoevsky and Proust … belonged to the international world of letters where national boundaries mean nothing at all’. This casting of Joyce at a remove from the changing Irish and European worlds in which he lived persisted and was cemented by the academy in the years following his death up to, at least, the 1970s and came at the partial expense of a thorough exploration of a vast variety of the contexts within which he was writing. They included, to name but a few, almost at random, the Ireland that formed him, the Ireland that formed itself in his absence, the Austro-Hungarian Italian city of Trieste, France and the French avant-garde, as well as the plays, operas and films that he attended, the newspapers, pamphlets and books that he read or leafed through.