Exiles: A Critical Edition by James Joyce. Gainesville. 2019. University Press of Florida. 9780813064376. Edited by A. Nicholas Fargnoli, and Michael Patrick Gillespie. 372 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Joyce's only extant play, Exiles, is also his least appreciated work. Its form and its content-daunting even to Joyceans-create interpretive issues for readers and theater audiences who expect the deeper pleasures derived from Dubliners or Ulysses. Confronting a host of assumptions, misprisions, and prejudices, A. Nicholas Fargnoli and Michael Patrick Gillespie contend that the play deserves the same serious study as Joyce's fiction and stands on the cutting edge of modern drama. The introduction situates Exiles in the context of Irish history and Joyce's other works. It highlights its often-overlooked complexity and closely examines the creative and domestic forces that contributed to the imaginative ethos from which the play emerged. The text of the play is newly annotated and unregularized, appearing for the first time as Joyce originally intended. This edition concludes with a range of critical responses, including essays on the confessional mode, characterization, and allegory, as well as an interview with Richard Nash, who has both directed and acted in the play.
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominent among these the stream of consciousness technique he perfected. Joyce was born in Dublin, Ireland, on February 2, 1882. He was the oldest of ten children in a family that experienced increasing financial difficulties during his childhood. After attending Clongowes Wood College and Belevedere College (both Jesuit institutions) in Dublin, he entered the Royal University, where he studied languages and philosophy. Upon his graduation, in 1902, Joyce left Ireland for France but returned the following year because his mother was dying. In 1904 he met Nora Barnacle (they fell in love on June 16, ‘Bloomsday’), and in October of that year they went together to Europe, settling in Trieste. In 1909 and again in 1912 Joyce made unsuccessful attempts to publish Dubliners, a collection of fifteen stories that he intended to be ‘a chapter of the moral history of my country focused on Dublin, ‘the centre of paralysis.’ In 1914 Dubliners finally appeared, followed by the semiautobiographical novel A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, a reworking of an earlier manuscript, STEPHEN HERO. During the First World War Joyce and Nora lived in Zurich; in 1920 they moved to Paris, where Ulysses was published in 1922. FINNEGANS WAKE, Joyce’s most radical and complex work, began appearing in installments in 1928 and was published in its entirety in 1939. After the German occupation of Paris, Joyce and Nora (who were married in 1931) moved to Zurich, where he died in January. His complete oeuvre includes three books of poetry, a play, occasional journalism, and his published letters. Though most of his adult life was spent abroad, Joyce's fictional universe does not extend far beyond Dublin, and is populated largely by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there; Ulysses in particular is set with precision in the streets and alleyways of the city. Shortly after the publication of Ulysses he elucidated this preoccupation somewhat, saying, ‘For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.’ Keri Walsh is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Institute of Irish Studies at Fordham University in New York. She is the editor of James Joyce's Dubliners (2016) and The Letters of Sylvia Beach (2010). A. Nicholas Fargnoli lives in Rockville Centre, NY and is dean of the Division of Humanities at Molloy College. He is author and editor of several books and coeditor of Ulysses in Critical Perspective. Michael Patrick Gillespie lives in Miami, FL and is director of the Center for the Humanities in an Urban Environment at Florida International University. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including James Joyce and the Exilic Imagination.
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