James Joyce And Sexuality

A highly original exploration of Joyce's engagement with sexual questions.

In James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity, Katherine Mullin offers a richly detailed account of Joyce's lifelong battle against censorship. Through prodigious archival research, Mullin shows Joyce responding to Edwardian ideologies of social purity by accentuating the 'contentious' or 'offensive' elements in his work. Ulysses, A Portrait and Dubliners each meticulously subvert purity discourse. This important and highly original book will change the way Joyce is read and offers crucial insights into the sexual politics of Modernism.

This second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Joyce contains several revised essays, reflecting increasing emphasis on Joyce's politics, a fresh sense of the importance of his engagement with Ireland, and the changes wrought by gender studies on criticism of his work. This Companion gathers an international team of leading scholars who shed light on Joyce's work and life. The contributions are informative, stimulating and full of rich and accessible insights which will provoke thought and discussion in and out of the classroom. The Companion's reading lists and extended bibliography offer readers the necessary tools for further informed exploration of Joyce studies. This volume is designed primarily as a students' reference work (although it is organised so that it can also be read from cover to cover), and will deepen and extend the enjoyment and understanding of Joyce for the new reader.

This collection charts the vital contextual backgrounds to James Joyce's life and writing. The essays collectively show how Joyce was rooted in his times, how he is both a product and a critic of his multiple contexts, and how important he remains to the world of literature, criticism and culture.

Sheds new light on James Joyce's use of sexual motifs as cultural raw material for Ulysses and other works Joyce/Foucault: Sexual Confessions examines instances of sexual confession in works of James Joyce, with a special emphasis on Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Using Michel Foucault's historical analysis of Western sexuality as its theoretical underpinning, the book foregrounds the role of the Jesuit order in the spread of a confessional force, and finds this influence inscribed into Joyce's major texts. Wolfgang Streit goes on to argue that the tension between the texts' erotic passages and Joyce's criticism of even his own sexual writing energizes Joyce's narratives-and enables Joyce to develop the radical skepticism of power revealed in his work. Wolfgang Streit is Lecturer, Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich.

James Joyce and the Difference of Language offers an alternative look at Joyce's writing by placing his language at the intersection of various critical perspectives: linguistics, philosophy, feminism, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism and intertextuality. Combining close textual analysis and theoretically informed readings, an international team of leading scholars explores how Joyce's experiments with language repeatedly challenge our ways of reading. Topics covered include reading Joyce through translations; the role of Dante's literary linguistics in Finnegans Wake; and the place of gender in Joyce's modernism. Two further essays illustrate aspects of Joyce's cultural politics in Ulysses and the ethics of desire in Finnegans Wake. Informed by debates in Joyce scholarship, literary studies and critical theory, and addressing the full range of his writing, this volume comprehensively examines the critical diversity of Joyce's linguistic practices. It is essential reading for all scholars of Joyce and modernism.

The first sustained analysis of the place of homoeroticism in Joyce's cultural politics

Through the twentieth century, from colonial Ireland to the United States, and from Franco's Spain to late Soviet Russia, to include sexuality in a novel signaled social progressiveness and artistic innovation, but also transgression. Certain novelists--such as James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Luis Martín-Santos, and Viktor Erofeev--radicalized the content of the novel by incorporating sexual thoughts, situations, and fantasies and thus portraying repressed areas of social, cultural, political, and mental life. In The Artistic Censoring of Sexuality: Fantasy and Judgment in the Twentieth-Century Novel, Susan Mooney extensively examines four modernist and postmodernist novels that prompted in their day harsh external censorship because of their sexual content--Ulysses, Lolita, Time of Silence, and Russian Beauty. She shows how motifs of censorship, with all its restrictions, pressures, rules, judgments, and forms of negation, became artistically embedded in the novels' plots, characters, settings, tropes, and themes. These novels contest censorship's status quo and critically explore its processes and power. This study reveals the impact of censorship on literary creation, particularly in relation to the twentieth century's growing interest in sexuality and its discourses.

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,0, University of Osnabr ck, course: James Joyce, Ulysses, language: English, abstract: The topic of sexuality is an essential one in James Joyce's Ulysses. This novel is full of sexual hints and passages that contain sexual action. The omnipresence of sexuality leads the reader through the novel as a central theme: most of the actions centre on Marion (Molly) Bloom's four- -clock date with Hugh Boylan. This date gives Leopold Bloom's day a certain structure as there are a lot references towards this time: "Funny my watch stopped at half past four" (U 353) and "He's coming in the afternoon" (U 89) are only two passages, which refer towards Molly's date with Boylan and therefore her affair with another man. Since its publication Ulysses affected great controversies due to its obscene passages, so the book was rated as scandalous and became an object of censorship. This paper is going to examine the obscenity of Ulysses and by doing so concentrate on the character of Leopold Bloom. It will be analysed in what degree the novel can be classified as 'obscene' and, furthermore, how the topic of sexuality is presented. Afterwards, these results will be brought into a wider context, concerning the topic of sexuality as a mental process in Ulysses.