Joyce's Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism, and Memory

Luke Gibbons, a prominent Irish scholar and Joycean, here offers the first study to make a full and strong argument that Joyce's Irishness is intrinsic to his modernism. It was common in the first generations of Joycean criticism to attribute Joyce's modernism to European exile, and to portray Ireland as a romantic backwater, the source of the nets from which Joyce was trying to escape. Gibbons argues, by contrast, that the pressures of late colonial Ireland, a country at once inside and outside the world system, provided the ferment that gave rise to Joyce's most distinctive literary experiments. Crucially, Gibbons holds that Ireland features not just as "subject matter" or "content," but as "form." Gibbons further argues that Joyce's major achievement was to pioneer an idiom in which narrative is freighted with voices from both inside and outside a culture. Joyce's use of free indirect discourse opens inner life to other voices and shadowy presences produced by a late colonial culture at odds with its own identity. In this sense, Gibbons shows, Joyce's language is haunted by ghosts, by voices testifying to forces--technology, empire, urbanization--off the page. This book is sure to become a landmark study of this enduring and widely read novelist, and advances our understanding of the connections between modernism and the nation.