Includes bibliographical references (p. 163-186) and index.
1. Joyce's Attitudes Toward History: Rome, 1906-7. Nietzsche and the Malady of History. W. E. H. Lecky and Moral History. Guglielmo Ferrero and the New History -- 2. Fabricated Ghosts: A Metahistorical Reading of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Clongowes: The Heads of Great Men in the Books of History. Historical Texts and Textiles. Conjured Ghosts and Contextualist Fabrics. Romantic Aesthetics and Stephen's Double Discourse of History -- 3. Teleology, Monocausality, and Marriage in Ulysses. The Goal of History and Story. Origin and Causation. Marriage as Telos -- 4. "Nestor" and "Proteus": History, Language, Intertextuality. "Nestor": Art Versus History. Jules Laforgue and the Nightmarish Jester of History. "Words alone are certain good": "Proteus" and Language -- 5. "Aeolus," Rhetoric, and History. Giambattista Vico and the Invincible Enthymeme. Historiographic Oratory. Poundian Pellets and Dedalian Parables. "Innuendo of Home Rule": Advertising and History.
6. The Language of Literary History: "Oxen of the Sun," "Circe," and Beyond. Anthologies and the Discourse of Literary History. Styles of History in "Oxen of the Sun" "Oxen" and "Circe": Literature-and-History Versus Drama-and-Life. The Terror of History and the Spectrality of Myth in the "Nostos"
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"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." Stephen Dedalus's famous words articulate the modern complaint concerning the burden of the past. In James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus's Nightmare, Robert Spoo argues that Joyce's creative achievement, from the time of his sojourn in Rome in 1906-07 to the completion of Ulysses in 1922, cannot be understood apart from the ferment of historical thought that dominated the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tracing Joyce's historiographic art to its formative contexts - the discourse of Romanticism, the New History and Nietzschean antihistoricism, doctrines of progress, Irish history and politics, traditions of rhetoric, the ideological language of literary history - Spoo reveals a modernist author passionately engaged with the problem of history, forging a new language that both dramatizes and redefines that problem. Born into a culture oppressed by its history, Joyce was preoccupied by it. Torn between conflicting images of Ireland's past, he was confronted with the challenge of creating a historical conscience. His art became his political protest, and the belief that individual passion and freely expressed works of fiction defy and subvert dominant discourses is the basis of his historiographic art. Both broadly philosophical and alert to the subtleties of Joyce's texts, this study uses a critical approach that draws on the historical and philosophical thought that shaped Joyce and his contemporaries. Spoo provides a rich and evocative context for reading Ulysses as well as other Joycean texts. He shows that for Joyce, as for his fictional alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, there is no waking from the nightmare of history, only the ceaseless reweaving of the texts that make history a nightmare.
Joyce, James,1882-1941-- Knowledge-- History.
Joyce, James,1882-1941-- Knowledge-- Language and languages.
History in literature.
Literature and history-- Europe.
Literature and history-- Ireland-- History-- 20th century.