Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and acknowledgements
- 1 The regional novel: themes for interdisciplinary research
- 2 Regionalism and nationalism: Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott and the definition of Britishness
- 3 The deep romance of Manchester: Gaskell's ‘Mary Barton’
- 4 Geographies of Hardy's Wessex
- 5 Gender and Cornwall: Charles Kingsley to Daphne du Maurier
- 6 James Joyce and mythic realism
- 7 Cookson, Chaplin and Common: three northern writers in 1951
- 8 Emyr Humphreys: regional novelist?
- 9 Scotland and the regional novel
- 10 Mapping the modern city: Alan Sillitoe's Nottingham novels
- Index
6 - James Joyce and mythic realism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and acknowledgements
- 1 The regional novel: themes for interdisciplinary research
- 2 Regionalism and nationalism: Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott and the definition of Britishness
- 3 The deep romance of Manchester: Gaskell's ‘Mary Barton’
- 4 Geographies of Hardy's Wessex
- 5 Gender and Cornwall: Charles Kingsley to Daphne du Maurier
- 6 James Joyce and mythic realism
- 7 Cookson, Chaplin and Common: three northern writers in 1951
- 8 Emyr Humphreys: regional novelist?
- 9 Scotland and the regional novel
- 10 Mapping the modern city: Alan Sillitoe's Nottingham novels
- Index
Summary
Joyce's Ulysses is often treated as a definitive account of the mind of modern Europe in 1922, the year of its publication: but, for that very reason, it is also a recognition that Europe itself was nothing without its colonial holdings. Ulysses is one of the first major literary utterances in the modern period by an artist who spoke for a newly-liberated people. The former provost of Trinity College Dublin, J. P. Mahaffy, clearly sensed Joyce's disruptive power when he lamented that his publications proved beyond doubt that ‘it was a mistake to establish a separate university for the aborigines of the island, for the corner-boys who spit into the Liffey’. That use of the word aborigines captures a central truth about James Joyce: outcast from Ireland, scornful of Britain, and uneasy about the humanism of a Europe to which he could never fully surrender, he became instead a nomad, a world author.
Virtually alone among the great post-colonial writers, he did not head for the imperial city or the lush landscapes of the parent country: for him, there would be no Naipaulean ‘enigma of arrival’, no pained discovery that the culture to which he had been assimilated lacked, after all, a centre. He took this as understood from the start and cut himself adrift from all cosy moorings: it was his strange destiny to be a central figure in world literature, whilst yet being somehow tangential to the cultural life of both Ireland and England.
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- Information
- The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland1800–1990, pp. 136 - 163Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998