James Joyce's America

James Joyce's America is the first study to address the nature of Joyce's relation to the United States. It challenges the prevalent views of Joyce as merely indifferent or hostile towards America, and argues that his works show an increasing level of engagement with American history, culture,
and politics that culminates in the abundance of allusions to the US in Finnegans Wake, the very title of which comes from an Irish-American song and signals the importance of America to that work.

The volume focuses on Joyce's concept of America within the framework of an Irish history that his works obsessively return to. It concentrates on Joyce's thematic preoccupation with Ireland and its history and America's relation to Irish post-Famine history. Within that context, it explores first
Joyce's relation to Irish America and how post-Famine Irish history, as Joyce saw it, transformed the country from a nation of invasions and settlements to one spreading out across the globe, ultimately connecting Joyce's response to this historical phenomenon to the diffusive styles of Finnegans
Wake. It then discusses American popular and literary cultures in terms of how they appear in relation to, or as a function of, the British-Irish colonial context in the post-Famine era, and concludes with a consideration of how Joyce represented his American reception in the Wake.


Author: Brian Fox
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 05/07/2019
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.20w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780198814023

Review Citation(s):
Choice 02/01/2020

About the Author

Brian Fox, Senior Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Okayama University

Brian Fox is a senior assistant professor at Okayama University, Japan. His research interests are in all aspects of Anglo-American literary modernism, with a focus on Joyce. Fox was educated at Trinity College Dublin, l'Universite de Paris (7), and University of London (Goldsmiths and Royal Holloway). Before Okayama, he was a Visiting Lecturer at Kyushu University, Japan and is an active member in Japan's lively Joyce scene. He chairs the Kyushu-Chugoku Ulysses Research Seminar. In addition, he has worked as a co-translator on selected works of Kenji Miyazawa.