Far more people read Joyce than are aware of it. Such was the impact of his literary revolution that few later novelists of importance in any of the world's languages have escaped its aftershock, even when they attempt to avoid Joycean paradigms and procedures. We are indirectly reading Joyce, therefore, in many of our engagements with the past half century's serious fiction - and the same is true of some not-so-serious fiction, too. Even those who read very few novels encounter the effects of Joyce's revolution every week, if not every day, in television and video, film, popular music, and advertising, all of which are marked as modern genres by the use of Joycean techniques of parody and pastiche, self-referentiality, fragmentation of word and image, open-ended narrative, and multiple point of view. And the unprecedented explicitness with which Joyce introduced the trivial details of ordinary life into the realm of art opened up a rich new territory for writers, painters, and film-makers, while at the same time it revealed the fruitful contradictions at the heart of the realist enterprise itself.

Of course, this momentous cultural shift, which can be said to have altered the way we understand and deploy systems of representation, was not achieved single-handedly and at a stroke by James Joyce. His changing understanding of the way language relates to the world, the work of art to its cultural situation, the commonplace and repetitive in life to the remarkable and the unique, was symptomatic of a wider mutation of thought which had begun before he started writing at the very end of the nineteenth century, and had its complicated roots in the social, economic, and political transformations that occurred before and during his lifetime. But in the field of prose literature, this much broader set of movements found its most potent representative in Joyce, and his own contribution helped to determine the particular form it took in this field.

What do we need to know in order to read Ulysses properly? An intimidating question, perhaps, by which to introduce a notoriously intimidating book. But reading of any kind, whether of Ulysses or of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, never takes place in an entirely blank or virgin mind. Other discourses are always implicated. Unlike Goldilocks, however, Ulysses poses the question of prior knowledge with some urgency because it can make us feel so unknowing, and with such devastating speed, and because sometimes a small bit of information available outside the novel, or inside it but hundreds of pages further on, can just as quickly unravel pages of confusion. One of the questions raised by such difficulties is central to literary studies in general: what is inside the literary object? What lies outside it? Can the border lines be drawn with any certainty? My intention is not to proclaim boundaries, nor to choose between right or proper readings and wrong ones, but only to indicate the kinds of knowledge that Ulysses seems to require. My survey is brief, and hardly exhaustive. It is a preface to the major focus of this essay: what is Ulysses 'about', and how can it be read?

It is not easy to do justice to Calvin's writings in a short article. Most of his writings deal with the Bible and the church, which is not surprising. As a reformer, Calvin devoted himself to the church's reformation. In this he let himself be guided by the Bible. The Bible and then the church - that was the right order for Calvin, and that is the order that we will be following in this chapter.

Calvin thought that people needed to have at their disposal a good translation of the Bible and he did everything to make that possible. He also spent much of his energy in explaining the Bible. Most of his writings are a direct fruit of this effort. Other writings can be connected to his devotion to church reformation of which his fight against heresy, sects, and other abuses is also a part. Some of his writings about doctrinal subjects like free will, election, and the Trinity are also significant. However, my decision to focus on the Bible and church means that those subjects will only be mentioned at the end of the article.

CALVIN AS A HUMANISTIC JURIST

Calvin’s earliest writing has nothing to do with theology. On the advice of his father who in 1527 became involved in a conflict with the cathedral chapter of Noyon, Calvin studied law in Paris at the Collège de Montaigu.

Anyone, whether historian or theologian, who writes on John Calvin is likely to venture judgments concerning his place in Christian theology. Over the years the judgments have varied widely. Calvin's admirer Benjamin B. Warfield, for example, argued that the man the Roman Catholic Church judged a heretic actually marked a fresh epoch in the history of the catholic dogma of the Trinity. A less generous opinion, made from another ecclesiastical corner, is that Calvin was at best a mere epigone of Martin Luther, at worst a debaser of pure Reformation doctrine. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was said that Calvin represented a certain “atrophy” or “degeneration” of the idea of Protestantism (Ferdinand Kattenbusch), and in the mid-twentieth century one of the most widely used textbooks of church history in Germany could still present Calvin's theology in the form of six “deviations” from the theology of Luther (Kurt Dietrich Schmidt). Yet another well-known estimate from the last century judged Calvinism a more creative intellectual force in the modern world than Lutheranism but placed Calvin himself, with Luther, on the side of the “old Protestantism,” which only tried to give a new answer to an old medieval question, “What must I do to be saved?” (Ernst Troeltsch).

There are many kinds of modernism - one has only to think of the differences between Picasso and Kandinsky, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, or Joyce and Kafka to appreciate this. The number of books and articles devoted to attempts at defining the term is huge. In what follows I wish to see Joyce's relationship to what is often loosely called the 'modernist movement' in a fairly simple way. First of all I look at his becoming 'modernist' in the most obvious sense - that is, by moving beyond his nineteenth-century predecessors. I then sketch his relationships to others who had diversely managed the same feat, and thus opened up an extraordinary avant-garde market-place of competing styles. Joyce made a contribution to this critical moment so great that he posed an acute problem to his successors: after Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, what types of expression in writing could possibly remain undiscovered?

Modernist artists at the beginning of the century were to a large degree moved to this unprecedented freedom and confidence in stylistic experiment by what they saw as radically new ideas, current in that period, concerning consciousness, time, and the nature of knowledge, which were to be found in the work of Nietzsche, Bergson, Freud, Einstein, Croce, Weber, and others. And these ideas contested in a dramatic manner the beliefs of the older generation.

John Calvin's Institutes have earned him the title of “the preeminent systematician of the Protestant Reformation.” His reputation as an intellectual, however, is often seen apart from the vital spiritual and pastoral context in which he wrote his theology. For Calvin, theological understanding and practical piety, truth, and usefulness are inseparable. Theology first of all deals with knowledge - knowledge of God and of ourselves - but there is no true knowledge where there is no true piety.

Calvin’s concept of piety (Lat. pietas) is rooted in the knowledge of God and includes attitudes and actions that are directed to the adoration and service of God. In addition, his pietas includes a host of related themes, such as filial piety in human relationships, and respect and love for the image of God in human beings. Calvin’s piety is evident in people who recognize through experiential faith that they have been accepted in Christ and engrafted into his body by the grace of God. In this “mystical union,” the Lord claims them as his own in life and in death. They become God’s people and members of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. This relationship restores their joy of fellowship with God; it re-creates their lives.

James Joyce's writing is famously, notoriously difficult, especially his two epic works, Ulysses, sometimes described as the book everyone claims to have read but no one actually has, and Finnegans Wake, whose difficulties have led to innumerable reading groups formed for the sometimes lifelong task of reading and puzzling over the book, a page or two at a time. A famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe exhibits the paradox of Joyce's fame as a writer, coupled with the complexities of his writing: Monroe, wearing a swimsuit, sits in a park absorbed in Ulysses. The contradictory conjunction of movie star with great book in the picture is worth, as they say, at least a thousand words - how could the icon of mass celebrity culture, and a supposed 'dumb blonde' to boot, undertake the reading of the twentieth century's supreme work of high literature? It turns out that Marilyn Monroe did succeed in reading at least parts of the book, and the fact that she wanted to make the effort says as much for the celebrity of Joyce and his novel as it does for the intellectual aspirations of the star. In fact, the paradox of the photograph lies not its seeming encounter between opposite poles of modern culture, but in its proof that James Joyce's rarefied literary works are also themselves artifacts of mass culture. Any reader or student approaching them for the first time has Marilyn Monroe as an inspiration, and as quirky evidence that Joyce's writing, like Joyce the author, is as much a part of mass culture or consumer culture as we all are.

It is only comparatively recently, as a result of realignments in the disciplines of literary studies and history, that the centrality of the theatre in Georgian culture and society has been properly recognized. As the pre-eminent forum of entertainment, art and instruction, the status of which was affirmed by royal authority in the form of patents or licences to perform, and by parliamentary scrutiny in the form of censorship, the stage loomed large in the Georgian cultural landscape, often literally so. The imposing neo-classical edifices of Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres, employing thousands of people, were unmistakable landmarks in Regency London, as indeed were the so-called 'minor' theatres across the Thames such as the Royal Coburg which competed with Covent Garden and Drury Lane in scale and opulence.1 As the memoirs, fiction, and visual art of the period suggest, the experience of theatre meant much more than what was happening on the stage, striking though that was with its spectacular scenery and effects, and the towering presence of star actors. It also entailed the drama of the audience’s self-representation, ranging from the crush of bodies outside the pit door, the display of dandies and prostitutes in the lobbies, to the monarch’s appearances in the royal box. The role of Covent Garden and Drury Lane in metropolitan life was emulated, with varying degrees of success, by many smaller theatres throughout the British isles.

Calvin was born on July 10, 1509, in Picardy in northern France, farm country marked by strong religious and ecclesiastical ties. His birthplace, Noyon, along with Amiens, Beauvais, Laon, and Senlis, belonged to the cathedral cities of this province, rich in tradition, which also possessed important abbeys such as Corbie and Péronne. The Picards made up one of the four recognized “nations” among the students of the University of Paris, and Calvin was proud throughout his life to belong to this elite. Even his character largely matched the “Picardian”: intelligent, logical, sensibly diligent, morally serious, and devoted to freedom and order - as well as overly sensitive, self-confident, and irritable. At the time of his birth, both a religiosity bordering on mysticism and a growing openness to humanist ideas were determining the spiritual climate of the land.

Calvin’s father was a financial administrator of the cathedral chapter of Noyon. His mother, who died early, was a truly humble woman about whom little is known other than her zeal for pilgrimages. Calvin had four brothers and two sisters, most of whom are later found in the reform camp. Calvin admired his somewhat authoritarian father and profited from this aspiring man who tried to raise himself from a humble background to moving in educated circles, even that of the elegant family of de Hangest-Genlis. According to his father’s wishes, John was intended to become a priest. His studies were financed by generous ecclesiastical benefices that soon made it possible for him to enjoy instruction in famous Parisian schools.

As a theologian and pastor, Calvin addressed political ideas and issues more from necessity than from direct inclination or intention. The proper relationship of the church to civil government inevitably became a major concern for each of the reformers. So Calvin was obliged to work out, at least in outline form, the foundational political ideas he perceived to be generated by Holy Scripture. Calvin's chapter “On Civil Government” from the last book of his Institutes of the Christian Religion remains his most explicit statement. But just as important for seeing fully his framework for thinking politically are his earlier pages on issues of church polity, his earlier chapter “On Christian Freedom,” his extensive commentaries on scriptural references to political questions, and, of course, his many tracts and letters.

By exploring these various sources,we can form some coherent answers to the following key political questions: (1) What is the source and justification for civil government among human beings? (2) What is the purpose and proper role of civil government? (3) How ought civil government accomplish its rightful aims? and (4) Under what circumstances, if any, might Christians under government properly disobey or resist that government?

Recoiling from the term 'self-biography' as coined in Isaac D'Israeli's Miscellanies (1796), William Taylor of the Monthly Review was at a loss for more felicitous options: 'it is not very usual in English to employ hybrid words partly Saxon and partly Greek: yet autobiography would have seemed pedantic.' Given the rash of autobiographical writing in various modes that had begun to appear by 1800, however (and more, from William Wordsworth's Prelude to his sister Dorothy's journals, was being privately produced), the need for some such term was becoming pressing. 'Autobiography' and its cognates quickly gained currency in the years that followed, notably in the hands of reviewers who otherwise lacked a taxonomy answerable to what Thomas Carlyle was to call, in 1831, 'these Autobiographical times of ours'.

In early usage the connotation of ‘autobiography’ was often pejorative, as though the genre, though newly named, was not at all new in substance, and simply perpetuated a tradition of more or less mercenary, self-promotional, often ghostwritten ‘memoirs’ and ‘apologies’ that included such notorious works as An Apology for the Conduct of Mrs. Teresia Constantia Phillips (1748–9) and The Memoirs of Mrs. Laetitia Pilkington (1748–54). This was the implication when Robert Montgomery inveighed against ‘the memoir-scribblers, reminiscent-furbishers, &c. – The impudence of these auto-biographists’, or again when Robert Southey deplored (with a witty sting in the tail of his list) a culture in which ‘booksellers, public lecturers, pickpockets, and poets, become autobiographers’.

Like a great play, Dubliners exists as written, and yet also awaits performance. We read the stories, determined to ferret out what they mean, only to end up wondering about ourselves. Paradoxically, the protean quality of these stories - the way they seem to have something to say about everything - makes them appear, to the first time reader, to be about nothing at all. They begin in the middle of something and stop unexpectedly with what may or may not be a new beginning. Or to describe this a different way, the stories read as if someone has made a two-hour film by putting the camera on a tripod and letting it run, and then brought the result directly to the screen, with no editing. Upon first reading, there seem to be no obvious clues to the strategy behind Joyce's selection of a bewildering array of obscure street names, stray thoughts, lost corkscrews, gold coins, lost plumcakes, confiscated adventure books, and forgotten novels of a dead priest. Never before, it seems, has a writer used so much detail to explain so little.

At the same time, there is an undeniable drive in the stories, an urgency many readers feel, but cannot account for: what does Father Flynn wish to confess in ‘The Sisters’? What has happened to make Lily behave so strangely in ‘The Dead’? The stories appear to be taking the reader toward a moral dilemma, or a climax, or a revelation, or at least a conclusion, and then they stop, but without appearing to have ended. I can sympathize with this frustration. When I first read ‘The Sisters’, I was not troubled by its abrupt ending because I thought there was something wrong with my edition, and that the ‘end’ of the story had somehow failed to be printed in my text: ‘So then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think that there was something gone wrong with him....’ (D 10). And then the story is over! It not only ends in the middle of something, it doesn’t even conclude with a full sentence. I was also puzzled that a writer I had been told was a master of the English language had to use the word ‘that’ three times in this strangely uncommunicative sentence.

In the spring of 1552 John Calvin in Geneva received a letter from the Polish reformer John à Lasco, recently appointed superintendent of the new Stranger Church in London. The church had two congregations, a Dutch and a French, and the French had recently been disturbed by controversy when a newcomer criticized an aspect of the church's teaching on the grounds that it diverged from that of the Genevan church. At issue was whether the Virgin Mary should be given the title the Mother of God. Calvin's reply was careful but firm. While not denying the difference of opinion he nevertheless sharply reproved those who had disturbed the church by invoking his name, or as he put it, making “an idol of me, and a Jerusalem of Geneva.” For as he went on, the more critical issue was that of church order, and unity: “If those who have stirred up these strifes among you have taken occasion to do so through the diversity of your ceremonies, they have ill understood in what the unity of Christians consists, and how every member ought to conform himself to the body of the Church in which he lives.”

Samuel Johnson's status as an author is very much bound up with his circle. If it is true that sociability and the study of man as a social animal were key features of the Scottish Enlightenment, it is equally the case that Johnson's reputation depends in significant part on his close friendships with a group almost as famous as himself, and on his depiction as a sociable being in the memoirs of his friends, notably in James Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791). In the seven years after Johnson's death, eleven biographies were published. The struggle over his reputation among his own circle began at once, and the importance of the possession of Johnson's memory seemed at times almost as much part of his value as anything he wrote and spoke in life.

In recent years, some Johnson scholars have questioned whether Boswell’s account is to be trusted, or whether his picture of Johnson as the ‘Hercules of toryism’ is not angled by the perspective of Boswell’s own views. This revisionism no doubt bears a symbiotic relationship to the revaluation of Boswell since 1940: a re-evaluation that has begun to recognize him as an artist rather than an amanuensis, the shaper of a great Life rather than a man who – as Macaulay saw him in the Victorian period – wrote a great book by accident. It is worth noting in respect of Johnson’s politics at least – at present a matter of some controversy in the context of the Life – that Hannah More, Sir John Hawkins, and Mrs Thrale all substantively agree with Boswell regarding his sympathies.

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.