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Customer Reviews (2)

Can someone explain to me why this is out of print?
Unbelieveable. There is no doubting that James Joyce was one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. His contribution to modern literature is still being felt 60 years after his death. And, yet, his letters, which are as close as we will ever get to knowing what he was thinking while composing his great works, are no longer available in print?

Thank God I purchased this book years ago! Richard Ellmann had done a tremendous job of sorting and compiling Joyce's letters in a way that shows us Joyce's thinking as he put together "Dubliners", "Exiles", "Stephen Hero", "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", "Ulysses", and "Finnegan's Wake". While some (back when the book first came out) questioned the extremely private/sexual communications that Ellmann included, no one doubted the importance of all the other selected letters. This is a remarkable look into the mind of a great writer, and I hope some publisher will pick it up and reprint it. In the meanwhile, try to get a used copy through Amazon.

Quite unique and absolutely fascinating.
This book contains a suite of new letters to Joyce's wife Nora and another to his benefactress Harriet Weaver, which have been abridged or excluded from previous editions. The explicit nature of these love letters makes them unlike anything you have read before. This book delivers the full Joyce - unabridged and uncensored. ... Read more

Book Description
(series copy)These encyclopedic companions are browsable, invaluable individual guides to authors and their works. Useful for students, but written with the general reader in mind, they are clear, concise, accessible, and supply the basic cultural, historical, biographical and critical information so crucial to an appreciation and enjoyment of the primary works. Each is arranged in an A-Z fashion and presents and explains the terms, people, places, and concepts encountered in the literary worlds of James Joyce, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf.As a keen explorer of the mundane material of everyday life, James Joyce ranks high in the canon of modernist writers. He is arguably the most influential writer of the twentieth-century, and may be the most read, studied, and taught of all modern writers. The James Joyce A-Z is the ideal companion to Joyce's life and work. Over 800 concise entries relating to all aspects of Joyce are gathered here in one easy-to-use volume of impressive scope. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

A Context For the Classics
Essential to understanding the writtings of Joyce is understanding the world he lived in. Bear in mind that all of his works were, more or less, either autobiographical, or were about the world he lived in. This compilation of the many details of Joyces life shows us the minutiathat made up books like "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," "Ulysses," and "Finnegans Wake." If properly used, this provides the key to interpreting the dense allusions and motives of his impressive body of work. After perhaps the works of Tindall, Bishop and Campbell, this is the most usefull book you can get to help understand the works of Joyce.

Wide-ranging, well-written browsing material!
Presents, in alphabetical order, brief (one paragraph to about 2 pages)synopses and explanations of people, places, themes, and phrases formseveral of Joyce's works, including his major novels and his poetry. Wonderful as either a tool for decoding Joyce, or as "skimming material." It's a treat to just wander through these pages, seeing explanations for`Finnegan' across from those for "Dubliners," a biography of T.S. Eliot onepage after a description of the fictional "Earwicker."

Includes over 800entries, illustrations, synopses of books and chapters, biographies ofJoyce and his contemporaries, bibliography, a very useful index, as well asthe text of Jude Woolsey's ruling to lift the ban on "Ulysses." The writingis clear, wide-ranging, and complete without bogging the reader down inminutiae. Not as thorough as the encyclopedic "Ulysses Annotated," but veryuseful in disentangling Joyce and his works without great effort! Writtenby a Professor of Theology and English at Molloy College (and vicepresident of the James Joyce Society), and a professor of English atMarquette University.

Tons of fascinating information, plus guide to Ulysses!

Elvis, the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe have received the A to Ztreatment in which every aspect of their lives and works have beenreordered alphabetically, so it was only a matter of time that the maniawould spread to lesser figures in our popular culture, in this case MarkTwain, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

This series of three books,originally published by Facts On File and now updated and reprinted byOxford University Press, combines facts culled from the writers' lives andworks, shakes them up thoroughly, and recasts them into easily locatableentries. The result is an addictive pleasure, a page-turning odyessy foranyone interested in learning more about their favorite writer.

At 304pages, the Joyce volume is the smallest of the trio, but what it lacks insize it more than makes up by offering extensive commentaries on"Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake." Those who have tried toread these modernist (or post-modernist, the argument still rages) classicshave quickly recognized the need for assistance. For "Ulysses,"the Joyce volume reprints Joyce's chart that lists each chapter's timeframe, location, symbols, technics, organs, art and correspondences to theoriginal. Each chapter is given its own entry, which describes the action,Joyce's intentions, and clairifies points of Dublin's history. As one whoattempted "Ulysses" solo, and suffered for his sin, I can speakwith authority that this volume would have saved me a great deal of agony.I only wish they had abandoned their schema and combined the chapterdescriptions into a single, lengthy appendix.

No detail is too small toescape the editors. There are also entries on Gustave Flaubert, aninfluence on Joyce's writing style; Throwaway, the race horse whose victoryin the Ascot Gold Cup figures in "Ulysses," and the Volta Cinema,Dublin's first movie theater, which Joyce helped to open.

In short,this guide can help the Joyce reader move through the complexities of hiswork without feeling like you've earned a Ph.D in comparative literaturewhile you're doing so.

A to Z and then some!
This is an outstanding reference for readers ranging from those havingcasual interest to serious Joyceans. All of Joyce's works are covered insome depth and the material on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake is fantastic. Itincludes chapter outlines and summaries. The book is also very good atproviding concise summaries of people, places and things in or connected toJoyce's work. I wish I had discovered this book much earlier in my academiccareer. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

New Views of "Finnegans Wake"
With "Joyce's Rare View" Richard Beckman has added an important new look into the comic, cosmic, puzzling pages of James Joyce's most difficult yet, ultimately, rewarding text.Through a close reading of various sections of the "Wake," Beckman provides information and insights that are completely fresh, making it an instant classic to be included with the well-known scholarship of the last century.This work is clearly written as well, accessible to lay Wakeans such as I and not restricted to academicians.It offers valuable and welcome guidance through that amazing maze, the wonderful word world of "Finnegans Wake." ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (3)

The GREAT Professor Margot Norris again provides a great, insightful analysis of James Joyce's opus
Professor Margot Norris of Irvine has written several very well received analyses of the works of James JOyce and their place in literary and political history, including Suspicious Readings of Joyce's Dubliners, The Decentered Universe of Finnegan's Wake: A Structuralist Analysis, the ahistoricity of which she later repudiates in another commentary, and the iconoclastically revolutionary commentary Joyce's Web: The Social Unraveling of Modernism (Literary Modernism Series). Another of Prof. Norris's landmark studies for any serious student of literature must be her essential Writing War in the Twentieth Century, which, passing through WWI and Hemingway, concludes with press censorship in the Persian Gulf War or Bush War One, as she examines how and why writers have been unable to effectively deal with the question of war in the modern world, including after the Bomb, and how and why writing strategies have been monopolized for the service of war making.

Pardon that brief introduction of Prof. Norris's remarkable work in order to set a context for her editting this current volume of criticism from various methods and perspectives of James Joyce's Ulysses, including her own feminist approach which notwithstanding retains its balance and perspective and appreciation of Joyce's subtle use of irony and subtexts in creating a subversively liberated literature.

Being an over 250 page volume of such varied yet profund literary criticisms, there is a portal here for nearly everyone to enter and feel comfortably challenged to deeper appreciation and understanding. Then, once safely inside this Joycean smorgasbord, you may browse to find absolutely new perspectives for comprehending more fully the gleaming cut gem which is Ulysses, voted the greatest novel of the twentieth century, a mystery of comprehension which only expands and leads on to hunger for more.

Prof. Norris has done here a great yet economical service for any student of James Joyce, both advanced and initiate, rendering what might seem unconnected and even unintelligible logical and clear and joyful. Ulysses after all has some of the most delicious jokes in all of literature, if we only have the ears to hear. The parodistic style of the later episodes in particular are a scream. Norris and company here open our ears and our minds to appreciate gratefully and happily what we are missing.

If you can get only one commentary on Ulysses kindly consider this one as a welcome opening. I have read several and this one seems to me like a great place to start, and to stay, and to read the slippery mysterious novel a million times more, while holding firmly the strong and wise hand of Prof. Norris, as Dante did Virgil, or more properly Beatrice.

Other contributers of note include Derrida on deconstruction, Devlin from a psychoanalytic perspective, and Patrick McGee on ULysses in the light of Marxist ethics.

Highly recommended and I have already ordered a second reading copy, as my first got caught outside last night with me in a heavy nightfall desert hailstorm, as I could not leave home without it, and it got soaked even inside the safety of my knapsack. Very valuable and welcome friend and helpmate in the rocky road of Ulysses. Get one and awaken.

Very Wide ranging analysis of Joyce's premier work.
It is an extremely detailed critique of ''Ulysses'' on many different levels but it also is a compendium of the various critical methods used in modern literatore as a whole.All contributors are obviously experts in their particular areas. The book itself was in excellent condition and despatched promptly.

Excellent accompaniment
I am still digesting "Ulysses." I read it while walking around Dublin a few years ago. It was marvelous to trace the steps of Leopold and Molly, and to see what they "saw," but the novel remains a distant pleasure to the reader. I must admit it is not the most accessible book ever written, but it gets four stars for its intent ... and that it is better than "Finnegan's Wake." Be warned: This novel is not for the casual reader. This is one of several excellent accompaniments to "Ulysses" and well worth the price and the time to compare against Joyce. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (2)

How the Wake was writ
This book offers exactly what its subtitle declares - "a chapter-by-chapter genetic guide" to 'Finnegans Wake.' Of course, some chapters are grouped together because of their shared genetic history, and there are two essays on the first chapter of Book One - each of which offers different insights into the chapter's compositional history.

I'll admit that I wasn't a huge believer in genetic criticism before reading this book, but it has converted me to a large degree and I now believe wholeheartedly in the usefulness of the approach. At first I was suspicious that the Joyce industry needed a new approach and there are 28,000 notebook pages for FW, so genetic criticism had to be invented. I now realize that many sections of the Wake are so dense and abstruse as to almost require a genetic approach in order to unravel (to some degree) the polyvocality of the text. However, as Jean-Michel Rabate indicates in his essay, genetic criticism does not offer a key to the text as a whole, but like other critical appraoaches, provides a new way of reading the Wake - and thus a new method of investigation into the mysteries of meaning. Of course, due to the entropy of the Wake (and all texts), some ignorance always remains.

Surprisingly, many of the essays seem overly concerned with defending the validity of genetic criticism. Yet, some of the essays display the defects of the approach - they merely recite the genetic history of a certain chapter and look at changes between the different draft stages. I found those essays rote and uninteresting.

However, the best essays offer valuable insights into Joyce's compositional process and how it changes the ways one should "read" the book.For example, Jed Deppmann observes of Joyce's use of sources, if Joyce felt he needed to read all these books in order to write FW, how can the reader expect to read it without exposure to the same books? And the essays do demonstrate the importance of sources to FW and point out several interesting ones that play major and minor roles in the Wake's composition.

In the last essay, Finn Fordham observes that while the Wake may not present a linear narrative, genetic criticism reveals the linear narrative of Joyce's writing. Joyce himself emphasizes the compositional process throughout the published text of the Wake, a book that is truly about itself and how it writes itself.

This last is an important point in regard to genetic criticism, which perhaps overemphasizes the role of the author in Finnegans Wake. Joyce himself regarded the book as writing itself, and while we do not want to ignore Joyce's labor, we also do not want to simplify the author-text dynamic as one of creator-creation. As others have pointed out, what is interesting is not what material from the notebooks ended up in the published text of the Wake, but how the Wake began to work its way into the notebooks.

In any case, this collection of essays provides a wonderful introduction to Wakean genetic criticism. The introduction (to the Wake notebooks, the book's compositional history, and genetic criticism in general) is comprehensive and well-written. As with most essay collections, some essays are better than others, but most of them offer genuine insights into the Wake's genetic history that sheds light on one's reading of the book. Highly recommended.

innovative critique of Finnegan's Wake yields new insights and understandings
In this critical tour de force on modern literature's most distinctive tour de force, 15 leading Joyce scholars (including the two editors) enhance understanding of "Finnegan's Wake" by "genetic criticism [whose] goal might be to show how the published text came into being or to demonstrate how the earlier documents can illuminate the published text, or might be more a matter of studying the writing process itself." "Genetic" implies the psychic origination, the embryonic, cellular-like growth, and the fruition of Joyce's work; which all combined like the strands of DNA as a code bringing it about. The code is not a code as in "secret code," as if the scholars were attempting to--or even could--decipher the book; but rather a biological or physiological code, something like a personality, making for its cogency as a work of art and its polyglot elements. "Finnegan's Wake" has a cogency, but not a coherence; an unpredictable, ultimately unfathomable mix of elements which is not in the end gibberish.

The number of authors who know Joyce and "Finnegan's Wake" inside out try to shed new light on what is going on by moving "away from a strictly textual approach" to consider factors of Joyce's life, including books he read, and also the creative writing process. Joyce worked on the book from 1922 to 1939. Thus the effects of time in this lengthy period are also considered. The insights and commentary of this approach by the authors with a lifetime of scholarship on Joyce are richly rewarding for ones interested in this singular modern author and in the currents and new terrain of modern literature in general.
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Customer Reviews (3)

WHAT CAN HE MEAN?
Though not essential, this certainly is helpful in understanding Joyce, if that is possible. I did find myself referring to it less and less as I read more & more of Joyce. I was going to go back and reread this all the way through, but like many of my intentions..... Definitely worthwhile for a student, useful to the casual reader of Joyce.

"Understanding" Joyce
The book is a clear and compelling guide to Joyce's main works. Tindall's enthusiasm is contagious.

"...Ulysses offers something of value to someone. What part of this is received depends upon the capacity, experience, and taste of the receiver. Homeric similie: as a radio station of great power broadcasts in vain unless a receiver is there with the power on and all the tubes in order; as the power and quality of the receiver are the success of the broadcast; so with Ulysses and the reader."

"For me the significance of the form Joyce made and I all but apprehend is a humane and charitable understanding of mankind that makes me glad to be alive and part of it. Charity, for me, is the radiance of this great whole, this intricate harmony."

Tindall was one of the greats re Joyce
Buy this one, and also seek out his "Reader's Guide to 'Finnegans Wake'". Pretty much essential, I'd say. Well written, informative, and strangely fun. Wish I could've met Tindall! "In risu veritas." ... Read more