Abstract
James Joyce is one of the twentieth century's most admired and mythologized writers of prose fiction. Although he produced a relatively small oeuvre, he was a voluminous writer of letters. Selections from his correspondence, which is addressed to many of the major figures of the modernist period, have been published in six volumes and approximately twenty-five articles. And yet, only half of the surviving corpus of Joyce's letters has been published to date: of the 3,793 items known to be extant, 1,868 remain unpublished. These contain a wealth of material of interest to scholars and non-academic readers alike. The proposed PhD project 'James Joyce's Unpublished Letters: A Digital Edition and Text-Genetic Study' will interrelate the correspondence of a major modernist writer, James Joyce, to the composition of his novels and will determine Joyce's place within his wide network of correspondents. Central to this literary-critical undertaking will be the creation and launch of a digital edition of Joyce's unpublished letters, to be hosted by the University of Antwerp. This edition will use Joyce's letters to link his reading and writing habits to his source texts and draft materials, and to locate the author's literary and epistolary output within an intricate network of Modernist authorship. As such, the project aims to reassess and extend our current knowledge of Joyce's writing process in the context of the New Modernist Studies.
Researcher(s)
Research team(s)
Project website
Project type(s)