Joyce Writing Disability

Jeremy Colangelo

• Publisher: University Press of Florida
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780813069135
• eBook ISBN: 9780813072128
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this book, the first to explore the role of disability in the writings of James Joyce, contributors approach the subject both on a figurative level, as a symbol or metaphor in Joyce’s work, and also as a physical reality for many of Joyce’s characters. Contributors examine the varying ways in which Joyce’s texts represent disability and the environmental conditions of his time that stigmatized, isolated, and othered individuals with disabilities.

The collection demonstrates the centrality of the body and embodiment in Joyce’s writings, from Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Essays address Joyce’s engagement with paralysis, masculinity, childhood violence, trauma, disorderly eating, blindness, nineteenth-century theories of degeneration, and the concept of “madness.”

Together, the essays offer examples of Joyce’s interest in the complexities of human existence and in challenging assumptions about bodily and mental norms. Complete with an introduction that summarizes key disability studies concepts and the current state of research on the subject in Joyce studies, this volume is a valuable resource for disability scholars interested in modernist literature and an ideal starting point for any Joycean new to the study of disability.

A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

Contributors: Rafael Hernandez | Boriana Alexandrova | Casey Lawrence | Giovanna Vincenti | Jeremy Colangelo | Jennifer Marchisotto | Marion Quirici | John Morey | Kathleen Morrissey | Maren T. Linett  



Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Disability Writing Joyce
• 1. Two Sides of Hemiplegia: On the Affect of Paralysis in Dubliners
• 2. “Limping and Devious”: The Disabled Male Body in “A Mother”
• 3. When the Personal Becomes Historical: Portrait and the Textual Memory of Childhood Trauma
• 4. Debility as Disability: Disorderly Eating in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• 5. “Dark Men in Mien and Movement”: Blindness and the Body in Ulysses
• 6. Degeneration, Decadence, and Joyce’s Modernist Disability Aesthetics
• 7. Boulez, Cage, and the Disabled Wake
• 8. Joyce, Swift, and the “Creep o’er Skull” of the Gods
• 9. The Anti-Erasure of Lucia Joyce: Resignification of Mad Histories in Finnegans Wake
• List of Contributors
• Index