James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity

Mullin offers a richly detailed account of Joyce's lifelong battle against censorship.

Katherine Mullin (Author)

9780521035965, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 31 May 2007

240 pages, 5 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.36 kg

'Part and parcel of Mullin's study is a rich documentation of the social purity movement's cultural history …a pleasure to read … represents something rare in Joyce criticism … [and] discovering a neglected strand of meaning and demonstrating how this is 'woven into the fabric of the fiction' … the study offers a rich body of cultural information based on enormously extensive research on the sexual discourses of the time in general and the history of the purity movement in particular … proof of how fruitful in many ways a cultural studies approach to literature can be.' Anglia. Zeitschrift fuer Englische Philologie

In James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity, Katherine Mullin offers a richly detailed account of Joyce's lifelong battle against censorship. Through prodigious archival research, Mullin shows Joyce responding to Edwardian ideologies of social purity by accentuating the 'contentious' or 'offensive' elements in his work. The censorious ambitions of the social purity movement, Mullin claims, feed directly into Joyce's writing. Paradoxically, his art becomes dependent on the very forces that seek to constrain and neutralize its revolutionary force. Acutely conscious of the dangers censorship presented to publication, Mullin shows Joyce revenging himself by energetically ridiculing purity campaigns throughout his fiction. Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners all meticulously subvert purity discourse, as Joyce pastiches both the vice crusaders themselves and the imperilled 'Young Persons' they sought to protect. This important book will change the way Joyce is read and offers crucial insights into the sexual politics of Modernism.

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Introduction: provoking the puritysnoopers
1. 'Works which boys couldn't read': reading and regulation in 'An Encounter'
2. 'Don't cry for me, Argentina': 'Eveline', white slavery and the seductions of propaganda
3. 'True manliness': policing masculinity in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
4. Typhoid turnips and crooked cucumbers: theosophical purity in 'Scylla and Charybdis'
5. Making a spectacle of herself: Gerty MacDowell through the mutoscope
6. Vice crusading in Nighttown: 'Circe', brothel policing and the pornographies of reform
Afterword
Select bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]