Joyce for Beginners

by Carl Flint (Author), David Norris (Author), David Norris (Author), Carl Flint (Author), Richard Appignanesi (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1994

  $3.25

  James Joyce is one of the key innovators of modernism, along with such figures as Picasso, Schoenberg and Stravinsky. However, a myth of Joyce's difficulty has taken root which discourages many readers from approaching his work. This is a great pity, because Joyce's writings are deeply human, enormously comic and make compelling reading. Although Joyce spent much of his life in self-imposed exile, all his writings are obsessively, microscopically focussed on Dublin's fair city. This book provides a beginner's map to the labyrinth of Joyce's visionary Dublin. It takes the reader step by step from the early stories, The Dubliners , and his immensely readable novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , into the sprawling comic universe of Ulysses and finally to the mythic dreamworld of Finnegan's Wake . This book aims to persuade the reader to overcome his or her doubts about tackling the Irish Sphinx.