Abstract
This chapter offers a brief history of Joyce’s non-fiction writings—the periods, places, and occasions of their production and dissemination—before offering a critical history of their use in Joyce studies to date. Through this history, this chapter sketches an outline of the critical and theoretical questions the rest of the collection addresses in detail, while suggesting a range of possibilities and problems for any future use of the term “non-fiction.” Fictionality and non-fictionality are shown to be unstable, ideological impositions that this volume seeks to resist.
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Notes
- 1.
Virginia Woolf, “Jane Austen ,” The Common Reader (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), 135.
- 2.
James Joyce, “Chapter One,” A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in The Egoist 3.1 (1914), 50–53. This can be accessed online at: http://library.brown.edu/pdfs/1303822817125004.pdf.
- 3.
Ezra Pound , ed., Des Imagistes: An Anthology, first published in Glebe 1.5 (1914). This can be accessed online at: http://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/cgi-bin/bluemtn?a=d&d=bmtnaat191402-02.2.1&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-------.
- 4.
Rebecca West , “The Strange Case of James Joyce,” The Strange Necessity (London: Virago, 1987), 15.
- 5.
Marc C. Conner , ed., The Poetry of James Joyce Reconsidered (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012). See in particular: “The Poetry of James Joyce Reconsidered,” 1–32.
- 6.
Phillip Herring, “Djuna Barnes Remembers James Joyce,” JJQ 30.1 (1992), 113.
- 7.
Djuna Barnes , “James Joyce: A Portrait of the Man Who Is, at Present, One of the More Significant Figures in Literature,” Vanity Fair, 18 (April 1922), 65, 104. Reprinted in Djuna Barnes’s Interviews, ed. Alyce Barry (Washington, D.C.: Sun & Moon Press, 1985), pp. 288–96. “Vagaries Malicieux” appeared in Double Dealer, III (May 1922), 249–60 and was re printed as Vagaries Malicieux (New York: F. Hallman, 1974).
- 8.
Letter of October 30, 1935 from Djuna Barnes to Emily Coleman. Cf. JJII, 457.
- 9.
Daniela Caselli, “Black Capes and Red Herrings,” Improper Modernism: Djuna Barnes Bewildering Corpus (London: Routledge, 2016),
- 10.
Diane Warren, Djuna Barnes’ Consuming Fictions (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), 2013. Warren highlights and summarises the work of Nancy Levine, Barbara Green, Margaret Bockting, Nancy Bombaci, and Justin Edwards.
- 11.
Djuna Barnes , New York, ed. Ayce Barry (New York: Virago, 1990); Djuna Barnes, Vivid and Repulsive as the Truth: The Early Works of Djuna Barnes, edited by Katharine Maller (New York: Dover, 2016).
- 12.
“Jane Austen ,” The Common Reader, 136.
- 13.
For a theoretical and historical survey of this binary, see Terry Eagleton “The Nature of Fiction”, The Event of Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 106–166. See also, more recently, Manuel García-Carpintero “To Tell What Happened as Invention: Literature and Philosophy on Learning from Fiction” and Derek Matravers “What Difference (If Any) Is there Between Reading as Fiction and Reading as Non-fiction?” in Literary Studies and the Philosophy of Literature: New Interdisciplinary Directions edited by Andrea Selleri and Philip Gaydon (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2016), 123–148 and 167–184.
- 14.
OCPW, 100–101.
- 15.
OCPW, xiv.
- 16.
Letter to Stanislaus Joyce, 28 December 1904, James Joyce, SL, 48.
- 17.
See, for example, SL, 50–54, for Joyce’s attempts to have his stories published by the Irish Homestead and other Dublin publications. Barry ends an account of Joyce being “sacked by Longworth” with the portentous “Joyce never reviewed a book again” (OCPW, xvii). Yet, evidently, this had less to do with hurt pride than the anecdote would suggest.
- 18.
OCPW, xiv.
- 19.
See John McCourt, The Years of Bloom, 121.
- 20.
Our account leans at various points on the historical framework Brooker provides in his in-depth account of the phases of Joycean criticism: Joseph Brooker, Joyce’s Critics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). For his discussion of Leavis’s antipathy towards Joyce, see particularly “The Dream of the West: Writing in Transit,” 52–97.
- 21.
Hugh Kenner , “The Pedagogue as Critic,” 43.
- 22.
John Crowe Ransom, The World’s Body (New York: C. Scribner & Sons, 1938), 329.
- 23.
Ellsworth Mason, “James Joyce’s Shrill Note. The Piccolo della Sera Articles,” Twentieth Century Literature 2.3 (1956), 119.
- 24.
James Joyce, James Joyce in Padua edited, translated , and introduced by Louis Berrone (New York: Random House, 1977).
- 25.
Stanislaus Joyce, The Dublin Diary, ed. George Harris Healey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962). This edition is available to view at: https://archive.org/details/dublindiary00joyc.
The “complete” diaries would later be published as Stanislaus Joyce, The Complete Dublin Diary, ed. George Harris Healey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971).
- 26.
Joseph Brooker, Joyce’s Critics, 95.
- 27.
Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain, eds., The Workshop of Daedalus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), xi.
- 28.
Scholes and Kain, The Workshop of Daedalus, xi–xii.
- 29.
Brooker, Joyce’s Critics, 91.
- 30.
T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order and Myth,” The Dial LXXV.3 (1923), 480–484.
- 31.
Andrew Gibson, The Strong Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 92.
- 32.
For one way to reclaim elements of Mason’s position, see Fraser in this volume.
- 33.
Dominic Manganiello, Joyce’s Politics (London: Routledge, 1980); Emer Nolan, Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1995); Andrew Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). See also: James Fairhall, James Joyce and the Question of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Robert Spoo, James Joyce and the Language of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Trevor Williams, Reading Joyce Politically (Florida: University Press of Florida, 1997).
- 34.
Jolanta W. Wawrzycka and Marlena G. Corcoran, eds., Gender in Joyce (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997).
- 35.
Vincent J. Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Marilyn Reizbaum, James Joyce’s Judaic Other (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
- 36.
Katherine Mullin, James Joyce, Sexuality, and Social Purity, 1900–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Joseph Valente, Quare Joyce (Ann Arbor: the University of Michigan Press, 1998).
- 37.
For example, Maria Tymoczko, The Irish “Ulysses” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), Michael Patrick Gillespie, ed., James Joyce and the Fabrication of an Irish Identity (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), and Michael Tratner, Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
- 38.
Richard Ellmann, “The Politics of Joyce,” New Yorker, June 9, 1977. Search carried out: 28 July, 2017.
- 39.
We are aware that this is a subjective judgement on our part, but point readers towards scholarly reviewers who concur. See, for example, Jeremy Noel-Tod’s review of Volume 5, entitled “The Letters of T S Eliot, Volume 5: 1930–3, review: ‘a deadening epic of polite notes’: The prospect of reading TS Eliot’s every last letter is boring beyond tears”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/11272809/The-Letters-of-TS-Eliot-Volume-5-1930-3.html. More moderate reviewers, such as Paul Batchelor, described the “great mass of business correspondence” that swells volume 3 of Eliot’s letters: “Eliot had dozens of correspondents but few confidants, and apart from some candid letters to his brother, and one moving expression of love and gratitude to his mother, we hear frustratingly little from the private man. Not that he would have minded: ‘I don’t like reading other people’s private correspondence in print, and I do not want other people to read mine.’ In a sense, this volume honours that wish, since it consists for the most part of correspondence in which Eliot cultivated his public mask. The mask is yet to slip.” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jul/13/ts-eliot-letters-volume-3-review.
- 40.
René Wellek, “The Criticism of T. S. Eliot,” The Sewanee Review 64.3 (1956) [398–443].
- 41.
T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1920); T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward (London: Penguin, 1953).
- 42.
Elizabeth Bishop, Poems, Prose, and Letters, ed. Lloyd Schwartz and Robert Giroux (New York: Library of America, 2008).
- 43.
Robert Frost, Collected Poems, Prose & Plays, ed. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1995).
- 44.
Gertrude Stein, Writings 1903–1932, Vol.1 and Writings 1932–1946, Vol. 2, ed. Catherine Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998).
- 45.
Virginia Woolf, A Writers Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1953); this work has become a favourite of creative writing courses.
- 46.
Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols., ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (London: Penguin, 1977–1984).
- 47.
Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader I & II, ed. and intro. Andrew McNeillie (London: Vintage, 2003); Selected Essays, ed. and intro. David Bradshaw (Oxford: OUP, 2009); Selected Letters, ed. Hermione Lee (London: Vintage, 2008); A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, ed. and intro. Anna Snaith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); The London Scene, ed. Hermione Lee (London: Daunt Books, 2013).
- 48.
Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Vintage, 1997), 149.
- 49.
Woolf, 15 Aug 1924, The Diary of Virginia Woolf II, 310.
- 50.
James Horton, “Free Indirect Style in Joyce’s Book Reviews,” James Joyce Quarterly 51.2–3 (2014), 395–417.
- 51.
Derek Gladwin, “Joyce the Travel Writer: Space, Place and the Environment in James Joyce’s Nonfiction,” Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014), 176–194.
- 52.
Maebh Long, Assembling Flann O’Brien (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
- 53.
“Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him”: T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” The Dial LXXV.5 (1923), 483.
- 54.
Jacques Derrida , Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 221.
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Ebury, K., Fraser, J.A. (2018). Introduction. In: Ebury, K., Fraser, J. (eds) Joyce’s Non-Fiction Writings. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72242-9_1
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