James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus's Nightmare

James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus's Nightmare
ISBN-10
0195358600
ISBN-13
9780195358605
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
208
Language
English
Published
1994-09-29
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Author
Robert Spoo

Description

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." Stephen Dedalus's famous complaint articulates a characteristic modern attitude toward the perceived burden of the past. As Robert Spoo shows in this study, Joyce's creative achievement, from the time of his sojourn in Rome in 1906-07 to the completion of Ulysses in 1922, cannot be understood apart from the ferment of historical thought that dominated the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tracing James Joyce's historiographic art to its formative contexts, Spoo reveals a modernist author passionately engaged with the problem of history, forging a new language that both dramatizes and redefines that problem.

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