The number of books and articles about Joyce is enormous and ever-increasing; the quantity of secondary material not directly concerned with Joyce but relevant to his work is even greater. None of these publications is without value, but none of them needs be regarded as essential. The bibliographies mentioned below give comprehensive lists, and the chapters of this volume refer to specialized works of particular relevance to their topics. What follows is a highly selective set of suggestions for the interested reader, with an emphasis on works that will provide useful information or critical stimulation (or, in the case of Joyce's own works, editions with the most reliable texts and helpful annotations). The arrangement within sections is chronological.

No successful reformer of the sixteenth century could ignore the needs of the society in which the reform took place, for the educational and welfare needs of people continued after the Reformation. Before regions became Protestant, the Catholic Church had funded schools and charity through its parishes and institutions. Catholic priests and nuns had staffed schools and hospitals and administered welfare. Catholic confraternities of lay and clerical members had engaged in charitable activities. There had been some centralization of welfare in lay and government hands, but to a large extent, schools and hospitals were run by the church and its clergy.

When regions became Protestant, the property and endowment of the Church of Rome and its institutions shifted over to the governments of the cities, regions, or nations that became Protestant, but some of it was lost to private hands in the process. Priests and nuns were asked to leave or to accept no new novices. Money was needed for staffing. Protestant regions needed to rebuild a new infrastructure in education and welfare.

The Protestant reformers set out to establish a permanent institutional base for the Reformation and improve on what had gone before. Just as Luther influenced millions through his writings and established a base for the Reformation through the reform of the University ofWittenberg and the founding of Protestant universities and secondary schools, so John Calvin’s influencewas implemented through the founding of the academy in Geneva that later became the University of Geneva.

At first glance, Joyce's shorter works - his poems and epiphanies, Giacomo Joyce, and Exiles - seem to bear only the most tenuous relationship to the books for which Joyce has become famous. It is only by an exercise of the imagination that the epiphanies and Giacomo Joyce can even be called 'works'; Joyce published neither in its original form, choosing instead to loot them for the more ambitious undertakings that followed, and neither received the painstaking polish that Joyce lavished on his more ambitious productions. Only forty of at least seventy-one epiphanies are extant and their relationship to one another had to be reconstructed from manuscript evidence; the sketches that comprise Giacomo Joyce were similarly composed, arranged, and abandoned, but not destroyed. Chamber Music, although published in 1907, was orphaned when Joyce delegated the final arrangement of the poems to his brother Stanislaus. Pomes Penyeach, as the title suggests, is a modest offering of twelve and a tilly poetic 'fruits'. Only Exiles continued to hold Joyce's interest as an autonomous composition not destined for immediate verbal recycling.

The status of the shorter works as successful, original, or even finished compositions has always been in question; even in more subjective terms, however, they seem to offer few of the rewards of their longer and better known counterparts. First, and most damagingly, they are humourless; what humour may be discerned in them is bitter or ironic, inspired by pained defiance (as in ‘Gas from a Burner’) or jaded cynicism (‘In my time the dunghill was so high’ – E 43). Secondly, they are spare, denuded of the variable styles and elaborate contexts that make Ulysses and Finnegans Wake seem inexhaustible. Finally, they are easily dismissed as immediately derivative of both Joyce’s experiences and his reading.

'I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic', admitted Thomas Macaulay, in the middle of his 1835 Minute on Indian Education;

But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.

With its profound faith in what Macaulay identified without hesitation as Britain’s intrinsic cultural superiority – articulated through a sweeping contempt for other cultures that was in turn founded not on the profession of an immediate and detailed knowledge of the Other (the hallmark of Orientalist thought in the time of Sir William Jones, a mere thirty or forty years earlier) but rather on an exaggerated sense of mediation, generalization, distancing, almost ignorance – the Minute on Indian Education signalled the abrupt end of over a century of British indecisiveness about the East.

The reputation of the eighteenth-century literature of Sensibility1 has never quite recovered from its embarrassing association with displays of unmeasured, extravagant emotion. It was 'excessive'. This was not simply distaste for a fading fashion; these are the terms in which it was criticized by some of its major practitioners, and they offer a key to this highly formulaic, but inherently unstable, kind of writing. Consider three scenes. In the first, a father enters with his dead daughter in his arms:

In the second, a father confronts his disowned daughter, who has fallen from virtue:

Like the thresher poet Stephen Duck a century earlier, John Clare (1793- 1864) has always had a place in the literary histories, if only as a biographical footnote. Clare's confinement in the Northampton Asylum in 1841, and Duck's apparent suicide by drowning in 1756, helped to turn these authors, and many like them, into object lessons on the perils of a literary career for those from humble backgrounds. What the tendency to moralizing anecdote has obscured is that Duck and Clare were just two among more than a thousand poets from economically disadvantaged social backgrounds who wrote and published between 1700 and 1900. It is the purpose of this chapter to consider how Clare's poetry responds to the variety and complexity of a tradition of British labouring-class poetry. The sheer number of poets from labouring-class backgrounds, the common themes and styles evident in their verse, and their self-conscious response and resistance to trends within polite and popular poetry, demonstrate that these authors comprise a parallel tradition in British literature, one to which Clare is a significant and self-aware contributor.

Clare indeed is the crucial hinge between the labouring-class poetry of the eighteenth century and early Romantic period on one hand, and the later Chartist andVictorian working-class poetry on the other. His poetry might be read as both a culmination and a transformation in the tradition, responding to themes and issues from earlier labouring-class verse, but also introducing new topics or significantly altering the discourse devoted to familiar themes. Clare’s writing, for example, embodies a poignant struggle to reconcile the two identities of village labourer and poet.

In the 1815 collection Poetic Trifles, a poem entitled 'What came of firing a Gun' describes the unfortunate victim of a boy's killing spree, a bird knocked out of the sky in the poem's first lines:

Without knowing anything about the author, we might be tempted to attribute this poem to a woman writer on the basis of its similarity to other sympathetic animal poems such as Anna Barbauld's 'The Mouse's Petition', Mary Robinson's 'The Linnet's Petition', and Charlotte Smith's elegy on the death of a pet dormouse. Male writers, of course, also wrote sentimental animal poems – William Cowper’s ‘On a Goldfinch Starved to Death in His Cage’ is one example – but recent feminist criticism has encouraged us to view women writers’ animal petition poems as a distinct genre, and to read these poems as veiled critiques of masculine power structures. Marlon Ross and Mitzi Myers, for example, both read Barbauld’s poem as a political intervention, with the poem’s trapped mouse standing in for disempowered peoples. ‘What came of firing a Gun’ concludes:

It is not surprising that a theologian who argued consistently that preaching was the ordinary means appointed by God for the salvation of the elect understood the delivery of sermons as among his most important duties. During his ministry in Geneva (1536-38, 1541-64), John Calvin preached well over two thousand sermons. From 1549, his most characteristic pattern of preaching was twice on Sunday and every weekday of every other week. His sermons typically lasted for more than an hour, and they were delivered without a manuscript or notes. Toward the end of his life, when poor health prevented his free movement, he even asked to be carried to church in a chair so that he could fulfill his responsibilities in the pulpit. The sheer volume of his preaching endeavors demonstrates their importance to him. Needless to say, it would be impossible within the scope of this essay to summarize the rich content of his many extant sermons. In order to gain a better understanding of Calvin the preacher, however, we first need to examine his theology of preaching, for only when we ascertain the significance of the act of preaching within the economy of faith as Calvin himself understood it will we grasp his own urgent sense of commitment to the preaching task.

Joyce's life spans a period in history in which material conditions, political structures, and intellectual life throughout the world were profoundly shaped by the growth and decline of European empires and the flourishing of various nationalisms, both imperialist and anti-imperialist. When Joyce was born in 1882 the 'scramble for Africa', and the era that one historian has called the 'age of empire', had just begun. When he died in 1941 the world was engulfed in the Second World War, a conflict that would fundamentally alter the balance of global power, and the age of decolonization was under way. A good deal of recent Joyce scholarship has explored Joyce's relation to this historical trajectory. Much of this scholarship is informed by debates in post-colonial studies, the academic field most explicitly committed to examining the complex set of issues we can group under the headings of 'colonialism' and 'nationalism'. Colonialism and nationalism were among the period's most visible and important sources of conflict and change, and were the subjects of much discussion and debate. At the same time, they were so important and pervasive - both as realities and as ideologies - that they became part of contemporary conceptions of 'reality' and 'common sense' and supplied many of the unspoken rules and assumptions of the time. Postcolonial scholars study colonialism and nationalism in their visibility, as the subjects of explicit discussion and struggle, and in their invisibility, as the secret structures that underlie much of Western intellectual and political life. Ireland's double status - as both an agent and a victim of British imperialism - is important to any investigation of how Joyce's works engage with these issues.

To most visitors today, Geneva is a respectable, prosperous, staid city resting at the end of Lake Geneva where the Rhône River pours forth to begin its rush to the sea. The city is Swiss, neutral, and a center for international diplomacy. In the mind it is associated with peace conferences and conventions designed to protect the weak and vulnerable. However, this was not the city in which Calvin ministered. More than just the passing years have moved across the face of Geneva. In Calvin's day the city was smaller, less secure, and decidedly isolated. It was a locale facing the constant threat of armed assault. It was over-crowded and stuffed with refugees. And it was poor. Most surprising of all for most people today to realize is that Geneva was not Swiss. Indeed, Geneva did not enter the Helvetic Confederation until the end of the Napoleonic Wars. For most of the years between its independence in 1535 and its entry into the Swiss state, Geneva did not even share a border with Switzerland. Thus, any real appreciation of Calvin's ministry in Geneva must begin with a realistic understanding of the environment in which he labored. What was his parish like? What was Geneva like?

The early life and career of James Joyce unfolded during a turbulent period in the history of sexuality in the United Kingdom. A cluster of sometimes competing cultural and scientific discourses emerged to catalogue, diagnose, and explain a broad spectrum of human sexual expression. At the same time, a series of explosive events (the Dublin Castle Affair, the Cleveland Street Scandal, the trials of Oscar Wilde, the rise of the New Woman) turned certain less approved elements of that spectrum into matters of mass spectacle and contention. A fundamental if contradictory mutation in the enlightened sexual attitudes of the time occurred in response to these developments. There was an increased awareness of the irrepressible varieties in sexual practices and preferences among individuals and across cultures. But there also arose a closely related desire to limit such variation, manifest in a concerted effort to establish traditional standards of sexual practice as interiorized norms of sexual desire and identity. With its long-standing cultural privilege newly enhanced by its importance to nation and empire building, reproductive heterosexuality became a truly 'compulsory' touchstone in this regard: other erotic modalities were not only treated as deviations from but distorted replicas of this libidinal regime. To take the most salient example, the widely accepted 'inversion' model of homosexuality - the notion of a woman's soul trapped in a man's body or vice versa - referred all same-sex desire not to the bodily sex of its bearer, but to the 'opposite' gender of the mind, thereby framing it as cross-sex desire at a remove.

Well in advance of Calvin's entry into his vocation as a reformer of the church in Geneva and Strasbourg, the sixteenth century had already displayed a remarkable preoccupation with biblical interpretation and, as a consequence, an unprecedented eruption of exegetical publications. Factors contributing to this eruption are not difficult to identify, and Calvin's career and character as a biblical interpreter would recapitulate most of them.

To begin with, the medium of intellectual exchange was forever altered by the dissemination of the printing press throughout Europe. As the costs of printing fell, books ceased to be a luxury item. Coupled to the growth of printing was a rising tide of scholarship that both consumed and produced those books. The humanist cry: Ad fontes - “back to the sources” - fueled scholars' appetites for these same sources as they emerged from the presses. Scholarship itself, along with scholarly standards, kept pace. A mastery of Latin alone was no longer enough to make one a respectable scholar: Greek and Hebrew were also required, and the growing competence of sixteenth-century scholars nourished, in turn, keener critical skills. For example, if these burgeoning sources, editions, and tools reminded scholars and preachers that there were new discoveries to be made in their old Bibles, Erasmus' early textual criticism of the New Testament undermined the magisterium of the Latin Vulgate and warned his readers they could not take even the wording of the Bible for granted, much less its theological content.

'Trieste - Zurich - Paris, 1914-1921'; 'Paris, 1922-1939'. Anyone who has read Joyce will recognize the famous dates and place names which link the writing of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake to a particular context, to circumstances whose importance is not merely anecdotal but, if only to judge from the recurrence of these very names in Joyce's last book, structural. Joyce's exile, recaptured by the three cities which, each in its turn, saw the inception of new developments in the writing of Ulysses, was to end in Paris. Does this make him a 'Parisian'? If we speak of Joyce as a 'Parisian', two images, two contrasting clichés, immediately come to mind: Joyce as part of the Bohemian crowd of the 'Expatriates', the Irish genius adding his own tenor voice to the hoarse chorus of drunken American 'Pilgrims' wandering between Odeonia and the cafés of Montparnasse; or the secretive writer, living only with his family and a small group of devotees, pent up in an ivory tower, completely indifferent to his surroundings, absorbed by the drawn out tour de force of having to finish his universal history before the real apocalypse of the century comes... If both clichés indeed contain an element of truth, I shall try to show first that they correspond to different phases of Joyce's Parisian life, and then, that they misconstrue the very organic relationship he had established with his elected Ithaca. Neither, say, Hemingway's version, nor Arthur Power's, can manage to convey the specific role of Paris for Joyce, who may well be called, as Finnegans Wake coins it, a 'paleoparisien' (FW 151.9) - that is, first of all, an 'arch-parisian'.

The fates of Irish Artists: Wilde, Joyce, aestheticism, and nationalism

Early readers of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) aware of the recent history of Irish writing would probably have heard an echo of Oscar Wilde (1856-1900) in Joyce's title. Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) concerns an artist, the painter Basil Hallward, who produces a portrait of the young Dorian Gray that, like Joyce's work, portrays and reveals the artist himself. Hallward's painting of a young man is 'a portrait of the artist', as Hallward declares in the first chapter of Wilde's book. The Greek names given to the central characters in both works invite the association, which yields a difference: Stephen Dedalus's story of intended escape from Ireland's limitations contrasts with Dorian Gray's self-destruction in England. Dorian murders the artist and kills himself, while Stephen tries to bring himself into being as an artist. Wilde is never mentioned in A Portrait, as he is in Ulysses (1922), perhaps because Joyce was more at ease later in his career about acknowledging his precursor's place in his work. He may also have felt that the similarity of the titles was sufficiently evident to conjure Wilde's book and his life as important contexts for reading A Portrait.