James Joyce and Absolute Music (Historicizing Modernism)

Drawing on draft manuscripts and other archival material, James Joyce and Absolute Music, explores Joyce's deep engagement with musical structure, and his participation in the growing modernist discourse surrounding 19th-century musical forms. Michelle Witen examines Joyce's claim of having structured the “Sirens” episode of his masterpiece, Ulysses, as a fuga per canonem, and his changing musical project from his early works, such as Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Informed by a deep understanding of music theory and history, the book goes on to consider the “pure music” of Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake. Demonstrating the importance of music to Joyce, this ground-breaking study reveals new depths to this enduring body of work.

Michelle Witen (DPhil, Oxford) is a Junior Professor at the Europa-Universität Flensburg, Germany, specializing in British and Irish literatures of the 19th and 20th centuries. She is the author of James Joyce and Absolute Music (Bloomsbury 2018) and co-editor of a forthcoming special issue of the James Joyce Quarterly.

Matthew Feldman is Emeritus Professor in the Modern History of Ideas, Professional Fellow at the University of York, UK.

Erik Tonning is Professor of English at NLA University College, Norway, and Professor II of British Literature and Culture at the University of Bergen, Norway. He is co-editor of the Modernist Archives series and the Historicizing Modernism series, both published by Bloomsbury. He is the author of Samuel Beckett's Abstract Drama and Modernism and Christianity, as well as the editor of a number of volumes on modernism.