A Companion to James Joyce. Edited by Richard Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). 464 pages. ISBN 13:

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1 Book Reviews 411 subsequent events and ideas as following almost logically from their collapse. Aaron Kramer rightly says in his Foreword: To relive the grand aspirations that culminated in 1848, and to share in their swift defeat, is a shattering experience for the reader (xviii). Whether, as Kramer adds, Ewen lets us know that Hegel s dialectics were at work; thesis and antithesis inexorably leading to synthesis, destined to bring new struggles, even victories is questionable, but such a Hegelian-Marxist inexorable concept of history remains luckily in the background of Ewen s presentation. Inasmuch as he adopts a Marxian perspective of , the vulnerable point of his presentation is not that he displays the inevitability of dialectical history, but that he analyses that crucial event, not unlike Marx and Engels, purely in terms of social issues and class struggle, thereby ignoring nationalism, and, to a lesser extent, imperialism, which arguably keep destabilizing Europe to this very day more powerfully than class struggles. Ewen s theory and method are perhaps best expressed in the prologue of Heroic Imagination: Consciousness translated into action itself makes history. In the formation, or better, the reformation of that collective consciousness the role of the artist, philosopher, poet, political and social thinker becomes ever more crucial as the arena of problems widens. [...] The present study is concerned with the fruits of the interaction of the public collective consciousness with the creative consciousness of the individual, the private creator (xvii). Ewen s A Half-Century of Greatness shows that beyond the crisis of Marxism, the death of the author, and the disintegration of creative products, such an approach to history writing can still be challenging, entertaining, and well worth the effort of reading. JOHN NEUBAUER University of Amsterdam DOI: /E A Companion to James Joyce. Edited by Richard Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). 464 pages. ISBN 13: James Joyce s legacy in the twenty-first century is fast emerging as a global, multilingual, and pluralistic cultural paradigm. The canonical image of the self-exiled Irish artificer has evolved into a planetary project orbiting numerous spheres of knowledge and involving a broad spectrum of historiographies, philosophies, mythologies, and cultural narratives. Joyce scholarship s internationalism seeks to both supplement

2 412 Book Reviews and transcend national and European perspectives as it migrates into unforeseen places and languages, cultures and technologies. In aiming to account for the larger-than-life figure of a macro- Joyce who has outmoded previous critical readings and perspectives, the Blackwell Companion to James Joyce, edited by Richard Brown, not just reflects this significant shift in Joyce studies, but in doing so nicely complements Zack Bowen s A Companion to Joyce Studies (1984) and Derek Attridge s The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (1990; revised 2004). Adding an expansive new Companion on Joyce, writes Richard Brown, provides the opportunity to mark a moment in this re-approach to Joyce for our new century, presenting distinctively themed, critical readings of canonical texts and places of entry into the wide variety of current approaches within a single volume (2). Indeed, Brown s Companion addresses the current trends towards globalized approaches and receptions, and interdisciplinary and comparative critical studies as part of a critical shift which had already borne fruit in the monumental two-volume series of The Reception of James Joyce in Europe (2004), edited by Geert Lernout and Wim Van Mierlo. The volume is divided into three separate but in many ways interrelated parts which give a distinct order to the very diverse thematic, geographical and critical forces at work in Joyce studies today. Part I, entitled Re-reading Texts, contains four chapters on Joyce s canonical works, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. Vicki Mahaffey s opening Dubliners: Surprised by Chance offers a stimulating re-reading of such key symbolic terms as simony, grace, and hospitality via their etymological roots. In Desire, Freedom, and Confessional Culture in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, John Paul Riquelme explores the sexual dynamics operating in Catholic boarding schools for boys around the turn of the century; rites like the Roman Catholic Sacrament of Penance come to exhibit, according to Riquelme, special kinds of sexualized aspects and contexts, which can be variably and ambiguously gendered (43). In what I consider the best essay in this collection, Maud Ellmann in Ulysses: The Epic of the Human Body takes off from Beckett s well-known assertion that Joyce s writing is not about something. It is that something itself (4).Thissomething is the human body, Ellmann argues and goes on to flesh out an inspired anatomical re-evaluation of Ulysses by subjecting the book s inner organs, cloacal obsessions, and circulatory systems amongst which are Bloom s trip to the outhouse, the throwaway economics of Stephen s art of urination, and Molly s

3 Book Reviews 413 cascading menstruation to close analytical scrutiny. Part I closes with Finn Fordham s thoroughly engaging Finnegans Wake: Novel and Anti- Novel, in which he explores the Wake s relation to metaphors of nature, leading the reader through a shifting landscape of living bogs, mountainous difficulties, and Spinoza s influential pantheistic notion of natura naturans, all of which illustrate the ways in which Finnegans Wake reflects the way the universe of nature is meaningless but becomes infinitely meaningful (76). The essays of Part II journey across time and space to various international Contexts and Locations of Joyce s works, taking the reader on a tour from such familiar locations as Ireland, Trieste, and Germany, on to such less familiar and more exotic destinations as Japan, India, Gibraltar and New Zealand. The two pieces that, for me, stood out were Geert Lernout s highly polemical essay, entitled European Joyce, which makes a rather one-sided if strongly argued case for the polyglot and self-exiled Joyce to be branded a European writer, and Mark Wollaeger s Joyce and Postcolonial Theory: Analytic and Tropical Modes, in which he launches an animated attack on the uses and abuses of postcolonial theory as a response to the deluge of studies that have emerged in Joyce scholarship in the last two decades. Pigeonholing Joyce into the restrictive schemes, terminology, and dying metaphors (175) of prominent postcolonial critics such as Bhabha and Spivak, argues Wollaeger, runs the risk of erasing Joyce s own historical context, in a process of cultural borrowing that reads models of postcoloniality derived from post-second World War African or Anglo-Indian literature side-by-side with the early colonization of Ireland (176). Despite his disenchantment with the dominant discourses of postcolonial theory, Wollaeger nonetheless optimistically gestures towards the widening global panorama that is moving us towards an ever more planetary Joyce. These are complemented by John Nash s survey of Joyce s reception in Ireland , Robert Weninger s exploration of the relationship between Joyce and three German writers, the nineteenth-century novelist Gustav Freytag on the one hand, and the twentieth-century writers Rainer Maria Rilke and Heinrich Böll on the other, Richard Brown s discussion of Molly s Gibraltar: The Other Location in Joyce s Ulysses, John McCourt s reassessment of Joyce s Triestine Home from Home, and essays by Eishiro Ito, Krishna Sen and the late David G. Wright on Joyce and/in Japan, India and New Zealand. The latter I found particularly illuminating in that it tells the little-known emigration

4 414 Book Reviews story of Joyce s sister Margaret (known to her family as Poppie ) who escaped the squalor and poverty of the John Stanislaus Joyce household for a new life in the far-off New Zealand. The pattern of this narrative carries familiar undertones for any reader of Dubliners, and Wright rightly pursues the parallels and, ultimately, different endings of Eveline s aborted elopement to Buenos Aires and Margaret s devotional migration to Australasia as part of the religious mission of the Sisters of Mercy. I wondered, however, as I finished reading this section with its superb range of essays, whether the map of Joyce s global reception could have been extended to account for the southern continent of the Americas. Latin American writers in particular, whose countries have broken free from the shackles of Spanish and Portuguese colonial domination much like Ireland has from British rule, saw their own linguistic, literary, and cultural predicament mirrored in James Joyce s early works and revolutionary novels. Moreover, several generations of leading twentiethcentury Latin American writers have acknowledged their indebtedness to Joyce, including Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, amongst others. Perhaps, in a future revised edition of the companion, Brown may be able to include an essay or two on Latin America within the ever-expanding map of Joyce s global reception. Part III, Approaches and Receptions, the largest section of the book, is more eclectic and interdisciplinary in its method, offering eleven essays drawn from the fields of critical theory, fine arts, theatre, cinema, psychoanalysis, popular culture, and radio. The section opens with Declan Kiberd s magnificent piece Joyce s Homer, Homer s Joyce which seeks to create Joyce as a precursor of Homer in the Borgesian sense of the word in that Joyce is able to reveal in Ulysses the modernity of Homer s greatest tale (243). In The Joyce of French Theory, Jean-Michel Rabaté offers an equally sophisticated and informative revision of Joyce s centrality in two determining moments of French theory: the transition period (late 1920s and 1930s), and the Tel Quel period (late 1960s and 1970s). Mark Taylor-Batty s Joyce s Bridge to Late Twentieth-Century British Theatre: Harold Pinter s Dialogue with Exiles triangulates the dramatic engagement or bridge between Joyce, Beckett, and Pinter, as represented in Pinter s resurrection of Exiles in November 1970 in the Mermaid Theatre, London. Finally, Derval Tubridy in an essay on Joyce and Irish Poetry illustrates the degree to which twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish poets have imagined themselves as the heirs of the dual traditions of Yeats and Joyce, and

5 Book Reviews 415 explores the role that Joyce has played for some of Ireland s most celebrated poets, including Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, Thomas Kinsella, Paul Muldoon, and Seán Ó Ríordáin. These are complemented by essays by Daniel Ferrer on The Joyce of Manuscripts ; R. Brandon Kershner on Joyce, Music, and Popular Culture ; Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes on the Joyce Effect in the visual arts; Luke Gibbons on The Spectres of Modernity in James Joyce s and John Huston s The Dead ; Katherine Mullin on Joyce and the Little Magazines The Egoist, The Little Review,andtransition; Jane Lewty on Joyce and Radio ; and Luke Thurston s revealing Scotographia: Joyce and Psychoanalysis. This companion to James Joyce Studies indeed lives up to its name: in offering such a wide array of essays, all of which combine to showcase the immense productivity of twenty-first-century Joyce scholarship, the volume will remain the definitive Companion to James Joyce for many years to come. Boasting twenty-five essays by well-known Joyce experts from across the globe, the companion has been designed to serve both as a comprehensive and accessible guide for university students (who will also benefit from the useful directions for further reading that feature in every essay), and as an invaluable resource for Joyce experts who will have much to glean from the expanding circuits of scholarship made available here. Above all, the volume is a testament not just to the continuing importance of James Joyce, but also the global ubiquitousness of this modernist icon. PATRICIA NOVILLO-CORVALÁN University of Kent DOI: /E Alex Hughes, France/China: Intercultural Imaginings (London: MHRA and Maney Publishing, 2007 Legenda Series Research Monographs in French Studies, 22). 115 pages. ISBN 13: France/China: Intercultural Imaginings draws from an archive of twentieth-century texts having a common subject (the experiences of French people in China) and developing it in related ways (predominantly first-person narrations about actual or fantasized acceptance or rejection by Chinese people). Alex Hughes distinguishes a first period of exoticism, when the obstacles to be overcome by the narration mainly have to do with remoteness and unknowability; a period of control of foreigners by the isolationist People s Republic, when