Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing

I may not be the Jesus Christ I once fondly imagined myself, but I think I must have a talent for journalism' James Joyce's non-fictional writings address diverse issues: aesthetics, the functions of the press, censorship, Irish cultural history, England's literature and empire. This collection includes newspaper articles, reviews, lectures, and propagandizing essays that are consciously public, direct, and communicative. It covers forty years of Joyce's life and maps important changes in his opinions about politics, especially Irish politics, about the relationship of literature to history, and about writers who remained important to him such as Mangan, Blake, Defoe, Ibsen, Wilde, and Shaw. These pieces also clarify and illuminate the transformations in Joyce's fiction, from Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to the first drafts of Ulysses. Gathering together more than fifty essays, several of which have never been available in an English edition, this volume is the most complete and the most helpfully annotated collection.