James Joyce and the Matter of Paris

James Joyce must be understood as drawing on French nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary innovations to grapple with the challenges of Paris.

Catherine Flynn (Author)

9781108485579, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 September 2019

252 pages, 3 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.8 cm, 0.51 kg

'This book presents evidence of Joyce's development that has the authority of a documentary chronicle. With intellectual and critical intelligence of exceptional discernment, Catherine Flynn has given us a field-altering account of Joyce's literary career and its establishing circumstances.  James Joyce and the Matter of Paris will be indispensable for Joyce studies as well as for scholars of modernism.' Vincent Sherry, Washington University, St Louis

In James Joyce and the Matter of Paris, Catherine Flynn recovers the paradigmatic city of European urban modernity as the foundational context of Joyce's imaginative consciousness. Beginning with Joyce's underexamined first exile in 1902–03, she shows the significance for his writing of the time he spent in Paris and of a range of French authors whose works inflected his experience of that city. In response to the pressures of Parisian consumer capitalism, Joyce drew on French literature to conceive a somatic aesthetic, in which the philosophically disparaged senses of taste, touch, and smell as well as the porous, digestive body resist capitalism's efforts to manage and instrumentalize desire. This book resituates the most canonical of Irish modernists in a European avant-garde context while revealing important links between Anglophone modernism and critical theory.

Introduction: the matter of Paris
1. Paris encountered: 1902–03 writings
2. Paris recognized: Stephen Hero and Portrait
3. Paris digested: 'Lestrygonians'
4. Paris re-envisioned: 'Circe'
5. Paris profanely illuminated: Joyce's Walter Benjamin
6. Paris compounded: Finnegans Wake.

Subject Areas: Philosophy: aesthetics [HPN], European history [HBJD], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Poetry by individual poets [DCF]