Informed by a writer's view of how a writer works, this perceptive study illuminates the careers of two major figures of twentieth-century literature, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. Sultan engages in a unique form of historical criticism, blending a literary history of Modernism with a richly intimate knowledge of three key works--"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," The Waste Land, and Ulysses--and confronting questions of literary theory implicit in the modernist period. In doing so, he examines the antecedents of Modernism, focusing on three major influences--Flaubert,...

The enigma of James Joyce's "Ulysses" remains, and the difficulty is far more fundamental than the considerable amount of material written about the novel would suggest. From its publication, books and articles have been written discussing its stylistic singularities, its patterns of allusion, and its various complexes of symbolic meaning. There exists, however, no general agreement about that which would ordinarily be regarded as an antecedent, even a primary, consideration: what happens in the book. It clearly has a protagonist, yet there has been no generally accepted account of what he...