Renascent Joyce
Edited by Daniel Ferrer, Sam Slote, and André Topia
Foreword by Sebastian D. G. Knowles, Series EditorPaper: $19.95
- Series: The Florida James Joyce Series
"A volume of contributions that are consistently, unfailingly illuminating examples of extensive scholarship and fine criticism."--Morris Beja, Ohio State University
Revival, reinvention, and regeneration: the concept of renascence pervades Joyce’s work through the inescapable presence of his literary forebears. By persistently reexamining tradition, reinterpreting his literary heritage in light of the present, and translating and re-translating from one system of signs to another, Joyce exhibits the spirit of the greatest of Renaissance writers and artists.
In fact, his writing derives some of its most important characteristics from Renaissance authors, as this collection of essays shows. Though critical work has often focused on Joyce's relationship to medieval thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Dante, Renascent Joyce examines Joyce's connection to the Renaissance in such figures as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Bruno.
Joyce's own writing can itself be viewed through the rubric of renascence with the tools of genetic criticism and the many insights afforded by the translation process. Several essays in this volume examine this broader idea, investigating the rebirth and reinterpretation of Joyce's texts. Topics include literary historiography, Joyce's early twentieth-century French cultural contexts, and the French translation of Ulysses. Attentive to the current state of Joyce studies, the writers of these extensively researched essays investigate the Renaissance spirit in Joyce to offer a volume at once historically informed and innovative.
Daniel Ferrer is director of research at the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes in Paris. He is currently editing The "Finnegans Wake" Notebooks at Buffalo. Sam Slote is associate professor in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin. He most recent book is Joyce's Nietzschean Ethics. André Topia was professor emeritus of English literature at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. His coedited books include "Scribble" 2, Joyce et Flaubert and "Dubliners": rituels d’écriture.
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"A solid addition to the canon of Joycean criticism."
--CHOICE
“Provides a compelling new way to examine and understand Joyce’s literary innovation, a revolutionary spirit that not only reignites the past in the early twentieth century, but whose subsequent rebirths productively engage our present and thus highlight Joyce’s continued significance.”
--English Literature in Transition
A short collection of essays that as much fills us in on the Renaissance, and Joyce’s connection to it, as it gives rebirth to the questions central to the period, concerning the future, and our contemporaneity with it.
--Irish Studies Review
Is an attempt to shine new light on the complex field of prefixes and suffixes.
--James Joyce Quarterly
Renascent Joyce does a good job of defending and maintaining the theme of renascence while acknowledging its metaphoric nature.
--Journal of Modern Literature
The editors of this elegant, slim volume in the Florida James Joyce Series are nothing if not ambitious.
--James Joyce Quarterly