James Joyce and sexuality

This highly original study explores Joyce's interest in sexual questions, and shows that, far from remaining aloof from the intellectual and social concerns of his time, Joyce was intimately engaged with them. Individual chapters consider Joyce's extensive reading on the question of marriage and its impact on his work, his responses to the new sexual ideology as expounded in the writings of Freud and Havelock Ellis, his concern with feminist issues such as sexual division and difference, and the degree to which the major works can only be understood as responses to readings of other texts. The author propounds a new account of Joyce's work as modern in its sexual ideas and in its literary form, and suggests how that stylistic modernity itself may be seen to arise in part as a response to the difficulties of dealing with sex.