James Joyce and the Language of History
Dedalus's Nightmare
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc
Published:10th Aug '95
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." Stephen Dedalus's famous complaint articulates a characteristic modern attitude toward the perceived burden of the past. As Robert Spoo shows in this study, Joyce's creative achievement, from the time of his sojourn in Rome in 1906-07 to the completion of Ulysses in 1922, cannot be understood apart from the ferment of historical thought that dominated the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tracing James Joyce's historiographic art to its formative contexts, Spoo reveals a modernist author passionately engaged with the problem of history, forging a new language that both dramatizes and redefines that problem.
All the more welcome ... is the emphasis on form in Robert Spoo's James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus' nightmare. * Times Literary Supplement *
As its subtitle suggests, this study is not just an analysis of historical energies in Joyce; it is also a radical rehabiliation of Stephen Dedalus as the figure whose intellectual concerns anchor the formalistic battles of Ulysses ... artfully controlled, painstaking and consistently erudite. * Times Literary Supplement *
clever, interesting, lucid, engagingly modest book ... It offers us a Joyce intently preoccupied with history as ideological construction, with the orthodoxies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historiography. Perhaps the most impressive features of Spoo's book are the erudition and precision with which it supplies the relevant contexts ... an engrossing book. * Andrew Gibson, James Joyce Broadsheet, Number 47, June 1997 *
ISBN: 9780195087499
Dimensions: 238mm x 157mm x 22mm
Weight: 426g
208 pages