Abstract
This chapter reads the later work of Joyce in terms of his experiences as an expat in non-native English-speaking communities in Europe for the last 37 years of his life. Recent criticism has argued that the loss of Irish as a language in Ireland in the early part of the twentieth century was an important influence on Joyce’s language in his modernist works. However, this chapter argues that, on the contrary, it may well be that fears about a possible “loss of English” were far more influential for the work he created in the last 30 years of his life. This chapter drew from work done on the Joyce notebooks and manuscripts at the National Library of Ireland and at the University of Buffalo.
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- 1.
Ireland’s Ambassador in London, Daniel Mulhall, writes on the Department of Foreign Affairs website in 2015: “we remember James Joyce’s literary genius and the cultural and political richness of the Ireland of his time”: https://www.dfa.ie/irish-embassy/great-britain/about-us/ambassador/ambassadors-blog-2016/november-2016/james-joyce-early-ireland/
- 2.
See James Joyce: A Shout in the Street broadcast on RTE in December 2017: https://www.rte.ie/player/hk/show/james-joyce-a-shout-in-the-street-30005040/10815989/
- 3.
Alison Flood. The Guardian. “James Joyce had syphilis, new study claims.” June 3 2014.
- 4.
Patricia Boksa. “Maternal infection during pregnancy and schizophrenia.” J Psychiatry Neuroscience. 2008 May; 33(3): 183–185.
- 5.
The notebook covers notes made by Joyce between the end of 1922 and possibly 1931 with transcriptions from Georgio Joyce and Mme. France Raphael, Joyce’s amanuensis, dated up to 1936.
- 6.
“Re-Grafting a Severed Tongue: The Pains (And Politics) of Reviving Irish”, Brendan P. O Hehir, World Literature Today, Vol. 54, No. 2 [Spring, 1980], pp. 213–217.
- 7.
On the theme of loneliness, one must also recall Yeats’s words on Ulysses in describing it as a “great work”. Padraic Colum tells us that Yeats “put Joyce’s [ Ulysses ] before Proust’s [Remembrance of Things Past] because of its ‘lonely intensity’” (222).
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O’Sullivan, M. (2018). Joyce: The Irish Expat and the ‘Loss of English’. In: Irish Expatriatism, Language and Literature. New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95900-9_6
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