Joyce in Trieste: An Album of Risky Readings (Florida James Joyce)

A celebration of the transformative effects of James Joyce’s time in Trieste

Joyce in Trieste is a record of the transformation in text, meaning, and language that Trieste worked upon James Joyce. This volume begins with three path-breaking essays: Michael Groden’s discussion of the manuscripts acquired by the National Library of Ireland in 2002, Margot Norris’s introduction of the paradigm of “risky reading” to describe the provocative re-contextualizations in history, theory, and culture that reveal something new about Joyce’s work, and Zack Bowen’s celebration of the Platonic and erotic qualities of Joyce’s language.

Each essay opens up to a section that follows the opening lead: essays on manuscript genetics following Groden, a political set of essays following Norris, and a set of essays on language following Bowen. This volume provides a lively and useful summary of recent and future directions of Joyce scholarship and will be of particular interest to Joyce and Irish studies scholars as well as those interested in provocative readings of twentieth-century literature.

Sebastian D. G. Knowles is professor emeritus of English at Ohio State University.

Geert Lernout is professor emeritus at the University of Antwerp. He is general editor of European Joyce Studies and Genetic Joyce Studies.

John McCourt is codirector of the University of Trieste’s Trieste Joyce School. He is the author of The Years of Bloom: Joyce in Trieste, 1904–1920.