Best-loved Joyce E-Book

James Joyce

• Herausgeber: The O'Brien Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

A beautiful and accessible collection of quotes and short extracts taken from the major works of James Joyce: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, with additional quotes from Joyce's poetry & letters. Best-loved Joyce is a collection of the writer's wit and wisdom on truth, love, family, art, literature, music, living, religion, mortality, history, politics, and Ireland. Grand-nephew Bob Joyce's introduction focuses on the life, works and the man.  

Leseprobe

JAMES JOYCE (1882–1941) is regarded as one of the most influential and important authors of the twentieth century. He was born into a middle-class Catholic family in 1882, in Rathgar, a fashionable suburb of Dublin. Joyce’s early years were happy, and he was educated at Clongowes, Belvedere and University College Dublin, until his father’s financial troubles led to the family’s decline.

After graduating, Joyce went to Paris, though was recalled to Dublin in April 1903 due to the illness and subsequent death of his mother. Back in Ireland, he met Nora Barnacle, the Galway woman who was to become his wife and a major inspiration for his most famous work, Ulysses (1922).

In 1904 Joyce and Barnacle emigrated to continental Europe. During World War One, Joyce and Barnacle, and their two children, Giorgio and Lucia, moved to Zurich where Joyce began Ulysses. He returned to Paris for two decades, and his reputation as an avant-garde writer grew. He finished and published Ulysses, and later wrote Finnegans Wake.

In 1940, Joyce returned to Switzerland, where he and his family had been given asylum during World War Two. Due to complications after a stomach operation, he was to die there, at the age of fifty-nine, on 13 January 1941. He is buried in Fluntern cemetery, Zurich.

Joyce’s works include the short story collection Dubliners (1914); novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939); two poetry collections Chamber Music (1907) and Pomes Penyeach (1927); and one play, Exiles (1918).

Dublin-based writer, JAMIE O’CONNELL teaches in University College Dublin and works for publishers Gill Books. His short fiction has been published in a number of journals, featured on RTÉ Radio, and he has read at many festivals and universities in Ireland, China, Spain and the USA. His work has been short-listed for the Maeve Binchy Award and the Sky Arts Future’s Fund, and long-listed for BBC Radio 4 Opening Lines Short Story Competition. He is an editor of The Dublin Illustrated Edition of Ulysses (The O’Brien Press, 2014).

contents

INTRODUCTION BY BOB JOYCE

TRUTH

LOVE AND ROMANCE

FAMILY AND DOMESTIC LIFE

ART, LITERATURE AND MUSIC

LIVING

DESIRE AND SEX

RELIGION AND SIN

HISTORY, POLITICS AND IRELAND

MORTALITY AND TIME

DESIGNER’S NOTE

INTRODUCTION

by Bob Joyce, grand-nephew of James Joyce

James Joyce departed Dublin for Trieste on the night of the 11 September 1912. He was never to return to the city he immortalised, the city of his birth. Before leaving, he asked his brother Charles (Charlie), my grandfather, to write to their other brother Stanislaus, telling him about his failed attempts to have Dubliners published. He appended the following note to Charlie’s letter, explaining what was about to happen to the printed sheets of Dubliners:

The 1000 copies of Dubliners are to be destroyed by fire in the morning.

Jim

This was the last time that Joyce wrote on Irish soil. He was devastated and bitter due to his treatment by an Irish publisher and printer, so much so that he penned the poem Gas from a Burner on his way back to Trieste. Lines from this poem appear on page 60. It has to be remembered that he had spent three years writing his book of short stories Dubliners and seven years trying to have it published. This included a final failed attempt to have the book published in Dublin by the Dublin publishing company Maunsel and Company. Maunsel’s printer, John Falconer, stated that it was only when the book was set and printed that they had discovered what kind of book it was. He considered it objectionable and unworthy of publication. Joyce was in despair, thinking that his writings would never see the light of day. Little did he know at that time that he would succeed, not only in having Dubliners published, but that he would also have three further works published: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. His writings would have a profound impact on English literature.

However, despite his celebrated status, readers find some of his work difficult. Ulysses is undoubtedly one of the most challenging yet rewarding novels ever published. As for Finnegans Wake, a reader once said, ‘it’s a pity that nobody has translated it into English!’

Best-Loved Joyce portrays the writer at his most accessible. Glimpses of the genius of Joyce abound with humour, love, pain and loss. The collection is filled with real gems that will inspire you to read his books. Here you have a wonderful opportunity to experience and enjoy a selection of quotations from Joyce’s works, skilfully put together by Jamie O’Connell and published by The O’Brien Press. I particularly like the way the Best-Loved Joyce quotations are grouped under some of the emotions that Joyce displays in his writings.

You will find quotations from the short stories of Dubliners, the semi-biographical Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his masterpiece Ulysses, and his final novel Finnegans Wake.

In Best-Loved Joyce the artist and designer Emma Byrne draws the reader into James Joyce’s words with her book design and beautifully constructed illustrations of Dublin in Joyce’s time.

Joyce was a conjuror with words and captured the essence of all human life. Best-Loved Joyce will leave you with a sense of his humour and an insight into his Irish, and more specifically, his Dublin wit. He started writing as a poet, which is evident from many of the quotations chosen by Jamie O’Connell.

It is fitting that one of the quotations in the final section deals with life, joy, love and death – They lived and laughed and loved and left, or as Joyce put it in Finnegans Wake, ‘They lived und laughed ant loved end left.’ This is a remarkable sentence, condensing into a nutshell a galaxy of human civilizations.

Joyce asked the question: ‘Is there one who understands me?’ and stated: ‘The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.’

You are not expected to comply with his demand. Just let Joyce charm and disarm you!