James Joyce
A Biography
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Long-awaited and comprehensive biography of the great Irish author James Joyce
James Joyce was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, but he was not immediately recognised as such; rather he lived in exile in the cosmopolitan Europe of the 1920s in a bid to escape the suffocating atmosphere and parochial prejudices of his native Dublin. His unstinting dedication to authorship picks him out as a writer in the romantic tradition. He battled poverty and financial dependency for much of his adult life, as well as near-blindness from 1917 and the grief of his daughter Lucia's mental illness. He suffered too the slings and arrows of uncomprehending critics especially for his influential Ulysses, which was banned in both Britain and America.
Drawing on considerable new material that has only recently become available, Gordon Bowker's biography attempts to get beyond the exterior life to explore the inner landscape of an extraordinary writer who continues to influence and fascinate, well over a century after his birth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
I guess the man's a genius, but what a dirty mind he has," Nora Barnacle said after reading Ulysses. For "dirty," substitute Joyce's view of the human condition as comedy: Rabelaisian, rather than divine. Bowker's splendid, insightful, and witty biography illuminates the connection between Joyce's erotic imagination and humane spirit, offering a clear-eyed celebration of his perverse comic genius. Joyce was an apostate Catholic who still considered himself a Jesuit, a permanent "exile who never left Dublin," and an extreme egotist. Drawing on material published since the 1982 revision of Richard Ellman's classic Joyce biography, including biographies of Nora herself and their troubled daughter, Lucia, Bowker (Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry) explores Joyce's inner landscape, most of it shaped by Dublin and his Jesuit education. Bowker captures the human comedy that surrounded Joyce, describing Ezra Pound, whose review of Dubliners in 1913 launched Joyce's career, as "Literature's own fairy godmother." As Joyce's reputation grew, he retreated into a circle of friends and family and the increasingly interior world of his writing. His last years were increasingly darkened by illness and concern for his family. Joyce thought his daughter Lucia's strangeness was untapped genius similar to his own and fought to keep her out of the hands of doctors and clinics egocentric in the extreme, but far from heartless. Photos.
