Latest book from Cork University Press

EcoJoyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce

This collection introduces and examines the overarching ecological consciousness evinced in the writings of James Joyce. Reading Joyce with a keen attention to the manner in which the natural and built environment functions as context, horizon, threat, or site of liberation in Joyce’s writing offers an engaging and fruitful way into the dense, demanding, and usually encyclopedic formation of knowledge that comprises Joyce’s literary legacy.

Scholars working within Irish studies draw on a wide variety of critical outlooks, including cultural studies, post-colonial studies, transnational studies, gender studies and, of course, modernist studies; this book will help that community become better acquainted with how ecocriticism elucidates the work of Irish writers, and will encourage further research in this direction. Even writers like Joyce, who are usually regarded as primarily urban, exhibit a strong ecological dimension in their work, and there are many other Irish writers who have produced work that directly engages issues in ecology and environmental studies. Eco-Joyce covers a multitude of disciplines in an attempt to serve as a point of entry into Joyce and ecocriticism, of course, but it will also suggest ways in which Irish studies and modernist studies could gain energy from this relatively new and vital approach.

Robert Brazeau and Derek Gladwin are both at Department of English and Film Studies University of Alberta, Canada.

CONTENTS

Foreword Anne Fogarty

Introduction: James Joyce and Ecocriticism Robert Brazeau and Derek Gladwin

 

I NATURE AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN

JOYCE’S FICTION James Joyce, Climate Change and the Threat to our

‘Natural Substance’ Fiona Becket

Joyce and the Everynight Cheryl Temple Herr

Joyce, Ecofeminism and the River as Woman Bonnie Kime Scott

Word and World: The Ecology of the Pun in Finnegans Wake Erin Walsh

The Tree Wedding and the (Eco)Politics of Irish Forestry in ‘Cyclops’: History, Language and the

Viconian Politics of the Forest Yi-Peng Lai

 

II JOYCE AND THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT

Negative Ecocritical Visions in ‘Wandering Rocks’ Margot Norris

Joyce Beyond the Pale Brandon Kershner

‘Aquacities of Thought and Language’: The Political Ecology of Water in Ulysses Greg Winston

‘Clacking Along the Concrete Pavement’: Economic Isolation and the Bricolage of Place in James Joyce’s Dubliners Christine Cusick

Joyce the Travel Writer: Space, Place and the Environment in James Joyce’s Nonfiction Derek Gladwin

 

III JOYCE, SOMATIC ECOLOGY AND THE BODY

‘Can excrement be art . . . if not, why not?’ Joyce’s Aesthetic Theory and the Flux of Consciousness Eugene O’Brien

Environment and Embodiment in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ Robert Brazeau

‘Sunflawered’ Humanity in Finnegans Wake: Nature, Existential Shame and Transcendence James Fairhall

Ineluctable Modality of the Visible: ‘Nature’ and Spectacle in ‘Proteus’ Garry Leonard

 

May 2014, ISBN 978-1-78205-072-8, €39, £35, Hardback,   234 x 156 mm, 348 pages

 

Further details at: http://www.corkuniversitypress.com/James-Joyce-p/9781782050728.htm