"This collection will be a touchstone for those interested in engaging in critical questions about Joyce's nonfiction. It accomplishes its core mission, ... proving that the 'habitual distinction between nonfiction and fiction is distinctly subordinate' ... ." (Julie McCormick Weng, James Joyce Literary Supplement, Vol. 33 (1), 2019)
1. Introduction; Katherine Ebury and James Fraser.
2. Please, Mr. Postman: Joyce’s Expanding Epistolary Novel; Michael Groden.
3. “He chronicled with patience”: Early Joycean Progressions between Non-Fictionality and Fiction; Hans Walter Gabler.
4. Tracing the Curve of an Emotion: Joyce’s Early “Portrait” Essay; Terence Killeen.
5. Is It Joyce We Are Reading?: Nonfiction, Authorship and Digital Humanities; Kevin Barry with Kevin Feeney, Gavin Mendel-Gleason, Bojan Božić.
6. James Joyce as Cultural Critic; Emer Nolan.
7. Into the West: Joyce on Aran; John McCourt.
8. Writing Journalism, Writing Betrayal: The Formation of a Journalistic Voice; James Fraser.
9. Becoming-animal in the Epiphanies: Joyce Between Fiction and Non-Fiction; Katherine Ebury.
10. For Frankness’ Sake’: Confessional Structures in Giacomo Joyce; JT Welsch.
Katherine Ebury is Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her first monograph, Modernism and Cosmology, was published with Palgrave in 2014. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Irish Studies Review, Joyce Studies Annual and Society and Animals. She is currently working on a second book project on literary responses to capital punishment.
James Fraser is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Exeter, UK, and has previously taught at the University of Cambridge and the University of East Anglia. His first monograph, Joyce and Betrayal, was published with Palgrave in 2016. He has published articles on Joyce’s responses to portraiture and Irish discourses of heroism and is at the beginning of a book project on modernism and hospitality. He is a former Managing Editor of Modernism/modernity.
This book presents a fundamental shift in the way we approach, discuss, and evaluate Joyce’s non-fictional writings. Rather than simply proposing or applying new methodologies, it historicises and reconceives the critical assumptions that have shaped scholarly approaches to these works for over half a decade, showing that non-fiction as a categorical distinction, no matter how sensible it appears, crumbles under closer inspection. Bringing into conversation a group of key Joyce scholars, this volume acts not only as a vital reimagining of our critical relationship to Joyce’s non-fiction, but as a contribution to similar debates being carried out across the broad range of modernist studies.