Joyce's Ghosts

Ireland, Modernism, and Memory

By: Luke Gibbons

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Hardcover | 13 November 2015 | Edition Number 1

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Hardcover
288 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
2.38 x 1.62 x 0.25

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Luke Gibbons, a prominent Irish scholar and Joycean, here offers the first study to make a full and strong argument that Joyce's Irishness is intrinsic to his modernism. It was common in the first generations of Joycean criticism to attribute Joyce's modernism to European exile, and to portray Ireland as a romantic backwater, the source of the nets from which Joyce was trying to escape. Gibbons argues, by contrast, that the pressures of late colonial Ireland, a country at once inside and outside the world system, provided the ferment that gave rise to Joyce's most distinctive literary experiments. Crucially, Gibbons holds that Ireland features not just as subject matter" or content," but as form." Gibbons further argues that Joyce's major achievement was to pioneer an idiom in which narrative is freighted with voices from both inside and outside a culture. Joyce's use of free indirect discourse opens inner life to other voices and shadowy presences produced by a late colonial culture at odds with its own identity. In this sense, Gibbons shows, Joyce's language is haunted by ghosts, by voices testifying to forcestechnology, empire, urbanizationoff the page. This book is sure to become a landmark study of this enduring and widely read novelist, and advances our understanding of the connections between modernism and the nation.

Industry Reviews

"Joyce's Ghosts is extraordinary: original, exceptionally well researched, significant, and beautifully written. Gibbons has succeeded in meshing an attentiveness to history, especially the history of Ireland, with an equally astute awareness of textual details and the formal structures that pattern them. His work is nothing short of brilliant."--Vicki Mahaffey, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"Gibbons is admirably sure-footed in traversing the linguistic byways of Irish modernism. Joyce's Ghosts conveys the knowledge and insight of a native informant with a lively wit that is sure to appeal to every persuasion and rank of Joyceans."--Maria DiBattista, Princeton University
"Gibbons has an extraordinary eye for clusters of association, the kind of details which cumulatively imprint themselves on to readers' unconscious minds. . . . Joyce's Ghosts is . . . a deeply original work which does not have a quotable, one-line 'argument' or 'claim.' It is part of a refreshing new wave of literary criticism that is written in clear, hospitable prose, driven by genuine passion, more concerned with illuminating readers than with winning them over."-- "Irish Times"

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