Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: The novel in Europe 1600–1900
- 1 Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616): Don Quixote: romance and picaresque
- 2 Daniel Defoe (1660–1731): Journalism, myth and verisimilitude
- 3 Samuel Richardson (1689–1761): The epistolary novel
- 4 Henry Fielding (1707–1754): The comic epic in prose
- 5 Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778): The novel of sensibility
- 6 Laurence Sterne (1713–1768): The fiction of sentiment
- 7 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832): The German Bildungsroman
- 8 Walter Scott (1771–1832): The historical novel
- 9 Stendhal (1783–1842): Romantic irony
- 10 Mary Shelley (1797–1851): The Gothic novel
- 11 Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850): ‘Realism’ and authority
- 12 Charles Dickens (1812–1870): Englishman and European
- 13 George Eliot (1819–1880): Reality and sympathy
- 14 Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880): Realism and aestheticism
- 15 Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881): ‘Fantastic realism’
- 16 Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910): Art and truth
- 17 Émile Zola (1840–1902): Naturalism
- 18 Henry James (1843–1916): Henry James's Europe
- 19 Marcel Proust (1871–1922): A modernist novel of time
- 20 Thomas Mann (1875–1955): Modernism and ideas
- 21 James Joyce (1882–1941): Modernism and language
- 22 Virginia Woolf (1882–1941): Re-forming the novel
- 23 Samuel Beckett (1906–1989): Language, narrative, authority
- 24 Milan Kundera (1929–): The idea of the novel
- Conclusion: The European novel after 1900
- Further reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
21 - James Joyce (1882–1941): Modernism and language
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: The novel in Europe 1600–1900
- 1 Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616): Don Quixote: romance and picaresque
- 2 Daniel Defoe (1660–1731): Journalism, myth and verisimilitude
- 3 Samuel Richardson (1689–1761): The epistolary novel
- 4 Henry Fielding (1707–1754): The comic epic in prose
- 5 Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778): The novel of sensibility
- 6 Laurence Sterne (1713–1768): The fiction of sentiment
- 7 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832): The German Bildungsroman
- 8 Walter Scott (1771–1832): The historical novel
- 9 Stendhal (1783–1842): Romantic irony
- 10 Mary Shelley (1797–1851): The Gothic novel
- 11 Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850): ‘Realism’ and authority
- 12 Charles Dickens (1812–1870): Englishman and European
- 13 George Eliot (1819–1880): Reality and sympathy
- 14 Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880): Realism and aestheticism
- 15 Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881): ‘Fantastic realism’
- 16 Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910): Art and truth
- 17 Émile Zola (1840–1902): Naturalism
- 18 Henry James (1843–1916): Henry James's Europe
- 19 Marcel Proust (1871–1922): A modernist novel of time
- 20 Thomas Mann (1875–1955): Modernism and ideas
- 21 James Joyce (1882–1941): Modernism and language
- 22 Virginia Woolf (1882–1941): Re-forming the novel
- 23 Samuel Beckett (1906–1989): Language, narrative, authority
- 24 Milan Kundera (1929–): The idea of the novel
- Conclusion: The European novel after 1900
- Further reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Summary
James Joyce published four major prose works – Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916 US, 1917 GB), of which a partial early draft, Stephen Hero (1904–7), was published in 1944, Ulysses (1922), Finnegans Wake (1939) – and a play, Exiles (1918). All represent Ireland with scrupulous attention to historical and local detail, and yet none stems directly, or exclusively, from the British literary canon. What Stephen Dedalus admires in A Portrait is European. He thinks, as he walks to the university, about Gerhart Hauptmann, John Henry Newman, Guido Cavalcanti, Henrik Ibsen, Ben Jonson, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. As Anthony Burgess remarks: ‘Add Blake, Bruno, Vico, and you have very nearly the entire Joyce library.’ He is a young man deeply interested in ideas, particularly aesthetic ones, and by the end of the novel he is thinking thoughts that would not be approved of by the Catholic church of his time, or the benighted Irish under its influence. In a post-Wildean way, ‘The young men in the college regarded art as a continental vice.’ Indeed, sex haunts the aesthete too, however idealistic he seems to be, and they were partly right about Stephen, for his most visionary experience in Portrait (of the girl he sees on the seashore) only narrowly transcends a sexual response.
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- The Cambridge Companion to European Novelists , pp. 361 - 377Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012