Joyce and Company is a comparative study which encourages a way of thinking about Joyce not as an isolated figure but as someone who is best understood in the company of others whether from the past, the present or, indeed, the imagined future. Throughout, Pierce places Joyce and his time in dialogue with other figures or different historical periods or languages other than English. In this way, Joyce is seen anew in relation to other writers and contexts.
The book is organised in four parts: Joyce and History, Joyce and Language, Joyce and the City, and Joyce and the Contemporary World. Pierce emphasises Joyce's position as both an Irish and a European writer and shows Joyce's continuing relevance to the twenty-first century, not least in his commitment to language, culture and a discourse on freedom.
Joyce and Company is a comparative study which encourages a way of thinking about Joyce not as an isolated figure but as someone who is best understood in the company of others whether from the past, the present or, indeed, the imagined future. Throughout, Pierce places Joyce and his time in dialogue with other figures or different historical periods or languages other than English. In this way, Joyce is seen anew in relation to other writers and contexts.
The book is organised in four parts: Joyce and History, Joyce and Language, Joyce and the City, and Joyce and the Contemporary World. Pierce emphasises Joyce's position as both an Irish and a European writer and shows Joyce's continuing relevance to the twenty-first century, not least in his commitment to language, culture and a discourse on freedom.
Industry Reviews
'David Pierce's Joyce and Company is a collection of interlocking essays which also reprints several of the author's previous publications on Joyce. The essays are accomplished, informed and wide-ranging and especially adept at teasing out intertextual connections between Joyce and other writers.
The first chapter interweaves Joyce and Laurence Sterne through an exploration of their mutual interest in touch and transgression. Two chapters on Joyce and the city illuminatingly explore the affinities between his work and that of Alexander Doblin and Virginia Woolf. Like Doblin, it is concluded, Joyce is concerned with the symmetries and patterns that define the modern metropolis, while, like Woolf, he focuses on the city's margins and its submerged population of outsider figures.
The final chapters of this judicious and balanced study provide space for even more expansive considerations, including the political valence of Joyce's work after the fall of the Berlin wall and its influence on a diverse range of contemporary Irish writers such as Thomas Kinsella, Aidan Matthews and Jamie O'Neill.' - Anne Fogarty, The Year's Work in English Studies 2008