"In clear and simple prose, Mahon explains how to connect this little black box to the Joycean engine. Just pull some gears, it falls into place and works." -Jean-Michel Rabaté, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania
James Joyce's work has been regarded as some of the most obscure, challenging, and difficult writing ever committed to paper; it is also shamelessly funny and endlessly entertaining. Joyce: A Guide for the Perplexed celebrates the daring, humor and playfulness of Joyce's complex work while engaging with and elucidating the most demanding aspects of his writing. The book explores in detail the motifs and radical innovations of style and technique that characterize his major works-Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. By highlighting how Joyce's texts have been read by recent innovations in literary and cultural theory, Joyce: A Guide for the Perplexed offers the reader a Joyce that is contemporary, fresh, and relevant.
PETER MAHON teaches in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of Imagining Joyce and Derrida: Between Finnegans Wake and Glas (U of Toronto P, 2007), Joyce: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2009), Violence, Politics and Textual Interventions in Northern Ireland (Palgrave, 2010) and Posthumanism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury, 2017). He has published essays in journals such as ELH, James Joyce Quarterly, Irish University Review, Partial Answers, as well as in edited volumes. He is currently writing a book on Reason and Unreason, working on a project on posthumanism in James Joyce and Jacques Derrida, and researching digital reading as part of a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.