"No one yet has made Joyce's sponging ways so very, very interesting, or so important. Tony Thwaites takes the notions of promise, debt, mortgage, and signature forward to where no critic has yet gone, and back into the Joyce works to their new illumination. He] demonstrates in lucid and engaging prose how the promise--a deferral founded on a certain notion of both past and future--structures Joyce's works."--Eloise Knowlton, Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan

In arguing that James Joyce's writing is structured everywhere by the peculiar temporalities of the promise--the...