James Joyce

B.C. Southam, B.C. Southam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134539864
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

The Collected Critical Heritage II comprises 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995. The Critical Heritage series gathers together a large body of critical figures in literature. These carefully selected sources include: * comtemporary reviews from both popular and literary media. In these students can read about how Lady Chatterly's Lover shocked contemporary reviewers or what Ibsen's Doll's House meant to the early women's movement. * little-known documentary material, such as diaries and correspondence - often between authors and their publishers and critics. * landmark essays in the history of criticism. * significant pieces of criticism from later periods to demonstrate how an author's reputation changed over time.

1. George Russell (Æ) on James Joyce

1902

George Russell (Æ), in a letter to W. B. Yeats (? 11 August 1902).

From The Letters From Æ (1961), ed. Alan Denson, p. 43; also in The Letters of James Joyce, Volume II (1966), ed. Richard Ellmann, pp. 11–12.2.

. . . I want you very much to meet a young fellow named Joyce whom I wrote to Lady Gregory about half jestingly. He is an extremely clever boy who belongs to your clan more than to mine and more still to himself. But he has all the intellectual equipment, culture and education which all our other clever friends here lack. And I think writes amazingly well in prose though I believe he also writes verse and is engaged in wrriting a comedy which he expects will occupy him five years or thereabouts as he writes slowly. [George] Moore who saw an article of this boy’s says it is preposterously clever. [The essay is ‘The Day of the Rabblement,’ a 1901 attack on the Irish National Theatre Society.] . . . He is I think certainly more promising than Magee [William K. Magee who wrote under the pseudonym of John Eglinton]. . . .

2. Æ on Joyce

1902

George Russell in a letter to Sarah Pruser (15 August 1902).

From Æ, Letters, ed. Alan Denson, pp. 42–3; also in Joyce, Letters, Volume II, ed. Richard Ellmann, p. 13.

. . . I expect to see my young genius on Monday and will find out more about him. I wouldn’t be his Messiah for a thousand million pounds. He would be always criticising the bad taste of his deity. . . .

3. Stanislaus Joyce on his brother

1903

Extract from The Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce (1962), ed. George H. Healey, pp. 13–14.

One of the earliest, 1903, critical comments on Joyce is this one by his brother Stanislaus in his Diary (see Introduction, p. 3).

His intellect is precise and subtle, but not comprehensive. He is no student. His artistic sympathy and judgment are such as would be expected in one of his kind of intellect—if he were not more than a critic, I believe he would be as good a critic of what interests him as any using English today. His literary talent seems to be very great indeed, both in prose and in verse. He has, as Yeats says, a power of very delicate spiritual writing and whether he writes in sorrow or is young and virginal, or whether (as in ‘He travels after the wintry sun’) [from ‘Tilly’, published in Pomes Penyeach] he writes of what he has seen, the form is always either strong, expressive, graceful or engaging, and his imagination open-eyed and classic. His ‘epiphanies’—his prose pieces (which I almost prefer to his lyrics) and his dialogues—are again subtle. He has put himself into these with singular courage, singular memory, and scientific minuteness; he has proved himself capable of taking very great pains to create a very little thing of prose or verse. The keen observation and satanic irony of his character are precisely, but not fully, expressed. Whether he will ever build up anything broad—a drama, an esthetic treatise—I cannot say. His genius is not literary and he will probably run through many of the smaller forms of literary artistic expression.

4. Æ on Joyce

1903

George Russell (Æ) in a letter to T. B. Mosher (3 November 1903).

From Æ, Letters, ed. Alan Denson, p. 50.

. . . Another boy named Joyce writes with perfect art poems as delicate and dainty as Watteau pictures. . . .

5. Stanislaus on Joyce

1904

Extract from The Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce (1962), ed. George H. Healey, p. 23 (see Introduction, p. 4).

Diary entry for 29 February 1904: . . . I have no doubt that he is a poet, a lyric poet, that he has a still greater mastery of prose. He may be a genius—it seems to me very possible—but that he has not yet found himself is obvious.

6. Æ on Joyce

1905

George Russell (Æ) in a letter to T. B. Mosher (? April 1905).

From Æ, Letters, ed. Alan Denso...