Abstract
This chapter focuses on Joyce’s occasional journalism for the Trieste daily newspaper Il Piccolo della Sera, arguing that Joyce is rehearsing some of the themes he would later recast into his fiction, mostly in a more humorous and sometimes in a more caustic key: namely, his interest (and the Irish Revival’s interest) in the West of Ireland, in the Irish islands in general, and the Aran Islands in particular. While arguing for the singularity and topicality of these pieces, a note of caution will be sounded against attributing excessive importance to them—and yet, at the same time, by the end of the article the “islands” that are Joyce’s individual works of fiction are seen, on closer inspection, to be interconnected, minutely and intricately, and to show such similar connections between Ireland and the European literary tradition.
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Notes
- 1.
Derek Gladwin, “Joyce the Travel Writer: Space, Place and the Environment in James Joyce’s Nonfiction,” in Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce, ed. Robert Joseph Brazeau and Derek Gladwin (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014), 176.
- 2.
Quoted in entry for 6 April 1907 in Stanislaus Joyce, Triestine Book of Days, an unpublished diary. A copy of this document is held at the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa.
- 3.
George Moore , Hail and Farewell, ed. Richard Cave, (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1976), 75.
- 4.
Gladwin, “Joyce the Travel Writer”, 187.
- 5.
Stephen Royle, “From marginality to resurgence: the case of the Irish Islands”, Shima 2.2. (2008), 45.
- 6.
Michael MacDonagh, “Life in Achill and Aran,” Westminster Review 134.2 (1890), 165–71 (166).
- 7.
W. B. Yeats , The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright, rev. edn (London: J. M. Dent, 1994), 62.
- 8.
W. B. Yeats , Autobiographies, ed. William H. O’Donnell et al. (New York: Scribner, 1999), 63–64.
- 9.
Yeats, Poems, 182.
- 10.
Yeats , Poems, 294.
- 11.
Seamus Heaney , Preoccupations (London: Faber & Faber, 1980), 135.
- 12.
Heaney , Preoccupations, 135.
- 13.
Heaney , “A Tale of Two Islands: Reflections on the Irish Literary Revival,” in P.J. Drury, ed. Irish Studies I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 9–10.
- 14.
Stanislaus Joyce , Book of Days, 5 May, 1907.
- 15.
Stanislaus Joyce , Book of Days, 28 April, 1907.
- 16.
Stanislaus Joyce , Book of Days, 28 April, 1907.
- 17.
Oliver J Burke , The South Isles of Aran (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1887), 2.
- 18.
For an exhaustive guide to literary treatments of the island of O’Brazil, see Barbara Freitag, Hy Brasil: The Metamorphosis of an Island: From Cartographic Error to Celtic Elysium (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2013).
- 19.
Oliver J Burke , The South Isles of Aran (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1887), 62–3.
- 20.
Griffin cited in Burke , The South Isles, 64.
- 21.
Burke , The South Isles, 20.
- 22.
Joyce’s interest in O’Brazil and in Saint Brendan would later resurface in Finnegans Wake, where he would also compare Brendan with Christopher Columbus, as he also does in “Scribbledehobble” [VI.A.301]).
- 23.
Burke , The South Isles, 23.
- 24.
Very Rev. John Canon O’Hanlon, Lives of the Irish Saints Compiled from Manuscript and other Sources, With the Commemorations and Festivals of Holy Persons noted in Calendars, Martyrologies, and Various Works, Domestic or Foreign, relating to The Ancient Church History of Ireland, vol. 1 (Dublin: James Duffy and Sons, 1887), 222–3.
- 25.
Sarah Atkinson, Saint Fursey’s Life and Visions and other essays (Dublin: M.H. Gill & Son, Ltd., 1907), 280.
- 26.
Palgrave, quoted in Atkinson, Saint Fursey’s Life, 241.
- 27.
Palgrave, quoted in Atkinson, Saint Fursey’s Life, 263.
- 28.
Atkinson, Saint Fursey’s Life, 224.
- 29.
For more on this subject, see John McCourt, “Joyce’s Well of the Saints,” Joyce Studies Annual (2007), 109–133.
- 30.
Burke , The South Isles, 97.
- 31.
Marjorie Howes, “‘Goodbye Ireland I’m going to Gort’: Geography, Scale, and Narrating the Nation,” in Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 68.
- 32.
Weston St. John Joyce, The Neighbourhood of Dublin, its Topography, Antiquities and Historical Associations. With an introduction by P.W. Joyce (Dublin: M.H. Gill & Son, 1921 [1912]), 244.
- 33.
St. John Joyce, The Neighbourhood of Dublin, 244.
- 34.
St. John Joyce, The Neighbourhood of Dublin, 245.
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McCourt, J. (2018). Into the West: Joyce on Aran. In: Ebury, K., Fraser, J. (eds) Joyce’s Non-Fiction Writings. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72242-9_7
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