Interesting Snippets on James Joyce

James Joyce was an Irish expatriate author, considered to be one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.

Such his influence on his contemporaries, that even Thomas Mann  - who had won the 1929 Nobel Prize for Literature, was eulogized and praised as the “Peer and Contemporary of writers like James Joyce”!!!

In 1922, James Joyce’s novel Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘‘The Waste Land’’ are both published,defining for many the Modernist literary movement.                                         

Ulysses (1922), Joyce’s modernist masterpiece, was deemed pornographic in the United States, and its publication in America was banned until 1934.

                                                   

Dubliners (1914), a short-story collection by James Joyce. This famous collection of short stories explores revolutionary moments, or epiphanies, within the individual.

The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (1956), is a novel by Joao Guimaraes Rosa. In this novel, considered to be the Brazilian equivalent of James Joyce’s modernist landmark Ulysses, a bandit from the Brazilian hinterlands tells his life story to a stranger.

James Joyce explored the colonialist theme of Robinson Crusoe as early as 1911, but ironically, his comments were not published until 1964. Since then, writers such as Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott, and Edward Said have viewed the novel as an allegory of colonialism.

Interestingly, James Joyce decided to write in English at a time when many Irish writers chose to write in Gaelic instead. Write an essay analyzing his reasons for writing in English, seen by many Irish of the period as the “language of the colonizer.” (Remember Chinua Achebe & Ngugi wa Thiongo’ on the English Language?)

Samuel Beckett's work shows great affinities to James Joyce’s, especially in the use of language!

By the time his last novel, Finnegans Wake, was published in 1939, his influence on Latin American writers was firmly established, leading to the later ‘‘boom’’ of Latin American literature by the likes of Borges and Marquez.

Finnegans Wake (1939), by James Joyce was seventeen years in the making. It happens to be Joyce’s last novel and remains controversial to this day due to its combination of stream-of-consciousness style and literary and linguistic allusions, along with a complete lack of traditional conceptions of plot and character development.

For James Joyce, the year the world was thrown into turmoil was also the beginning of his success as a writer, with the publication of his short-story collection Dubliners—which examines the middle-class Irish people known to himself and his family—and the completion of his first novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), as well as his beginning to work on Ulysses. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is at once a portrayal of the maturation of the artist, a study of the vanity of rebelliousness, and an examination of the self-deception of adolescent ego. It is often considered a study of the author’s early life.

To sum it all up, by far the most popular of Irish authors, Joyce’s portrait appeared on the country’s currency - Until Ireland switched over to the euro! Evidence of the important role the author played in his home country.