This short book offers three accessible essays. "Joyce's Boarding House "shows how the use of language in "Dubliners " might justify his claim for the book as a chapter in the moral history of Ireland. "Portrait of the Artist as an Undergraduate" considers two very different ways of reading Joyce which together have made "Portrait" an ironically appropriate 'set book'. An essay on "Ulysses" explores the puzzling theological concerns which shaped Joyce's reaction to his mother's death and to his own extraordinary literary creations.

Praise for Sharratt's previous work:
.. an...

W. B. Yeats's short poem 'Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation' may be only a minor work in the Yeats canon, but, in an unusually challenging exercise in literary criticism, it is here taken seriously as posing uncomfortable moral and political questions, not simply in Yeats's Ireland but to any reader of the poem today, as its own questions are placed within a gradually widening context of national developments and global issues.

Praise for Sharratt's previous work:
.. an absolutely important first-rate book -Terry Eagleton
.. I am Honoured by Sharratt's attention - Seamus...

A series of attempted answers to a suitably challenging mock-examination paper probe the curious relations between various literary works and the specific procedures, problems, and dilemmas of the legal process, from the dubious status of evidence in the fiction of magistrate-novelist Henry Fielding, through the deeply suspect work of fictional detectives, to the unreliable processes of trial and confession in Kafka and Camus. Once entangled, readers are invited to complete the examination for themselves, and of themselves.

Re-issued from Bernard Sharratt's Reading Relations (1982).

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In three very different kinds of writing, this short book tackles various facets of the curious problems of time. A reflexive essay probes what it is that we are measuring when we try to consider our familiar time-based cultural activities. A review of a very ambitious but unwritten book investigates how we might radically change the way we spend our working time. And a satirically deconstructive reading of one of Derrida's most influential essays suggests an alternative approach even to our thinking about time.
Ranging from an anticipation of the implications of 3-D printing to a...

Drama and democracy are critically entwined. This book considers some of the interconnections. A posthumous letter to Raymond Williams asks questions about his neglected television plays. The ambivalent politics of popular drama, from melodrama to TV, is analysed. And a highly ambitious and elliptical, but as yet barely imagined, work tries to trace the complex relations between the emergence of both democracy and drama in classical Athens and our ongoing problems in implementing what we might mean by democracy.

Praise for Sharratt's previous work:
.. an absolutely important...

From 'Lit.Crit.' to the digital future...

These various pieces trace a trajectory from a concern with problems of traditional literary criticism, through an often reluctant engagement with a variety of fashionable theoretical approaches and issues, to an initially optimistic involvement in the early development of the contemporary digital landscape. Taken together, they comprise a sketch-map of some of the significant and still unfolding shifts in what it has meant to sustain a belief in the importance of a Humanities education today.

Praise for Sharratt's previous work:
.. an...

The merging of politics and religion today occurs mainly as various fundamentalisms, those of right-wing American Christians, Islamic radicals, or Israeli Zionists.

Back in the 1960s, a different blend was on offer: an attempted fusion of Roman Catholic theology and Marxist political theory, in forms ranging from priests involved in Latin American liberation struggles to small groups of European writers and would-be activists.

These essays stem from that moment and consider such topics as the intersections of church and state, the politics of marriage, metaphysics and metaphor, humour...

Paul arrives in Budapest to give a lecture, but finds himself seeking an elusive woman, and increasingly caught up in some odd connections between football hooliganism, a mafia protection racket, a shooting or two, and the strange work of a dissident sculptor. And all he really wanted to do was get a freebie trip out of the British Council and, finally, eat some Hungarian goulash.

Film-texts are in the format of a film-script, but are not designed for actual film production. They are intended to be read and imagined, and play with a variety of familiar film genres, including romantic...

Dave and Kate arrive in Venice as strangers, for very different reasons, until a sequence of bizarre events bring them uneasily together. But are they confronting blackmail, terrorism, radical politics, or just some silly pranks? And is the whole marvellous city in peril, or is it just a matter of who, crucially, is responsible for the few public toilets and those appalling adverts spoiling the great facades of beautiful Venice?

Film-texts are in the format of a film-script, but are not designed for actual film production. They are intended to be read and imagined, and play with a variety...

Mark arrives in Rome to take down an exhibition of his paintings but they have all been stolen. Is it simple theft or a scam, and why are Christian fundamentalists, a mysterious old hermit, and suddenly a special division of Europol so interested? Above all, will the divine Angelina become more interested in him than in his art...? Film-texts are in the format of a film-script, but are not designed for actual film production. They are intended to be read and imagined, and play with a variety of familiar film genres, including romantic comedy, political thriller, and tourist guide: a kind of...