Research Ronan Crowley

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the surviving corpus of Joyce's letters has been published to date: of the 3,793 items known to be extant, 1,868 remain unpublished.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 The proposed PhD project 'James Joyce's Unpublished Letters: A Digital Edition and Text-Genetic Study' will interrelate the correspondence of a major modernist writer, James Joyce, to the composition of his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 Central to this literary-critical undertaking will be the creation and launch of a digital edition of Joyce's unpublished letters, to be hosted by the University of Antwerp.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)

• Promoter: Van Hulle Dirk
• Co-promoter: Crowley Ronan
• Fellow: Batinic Josip

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project website

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Ulysses (1922) is among the cardinal texts of literary modernism. As an émigré Irishman living on the Continent during and immediately after the First World War, James Joyce wrote the novel in 'Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921', as its final line famously proclaims. Academic criticism has suffered, however, from focusing too narrowly on the individuals and social networks to which this European itinerary introduced the writer. Moreover, while generations of readers have noted the densely allusive nature of the novel, they have entirely overlooked the role that Joyce's migrations played in creating this multilayered, reiterative effect. My project unites place with the page. By focusing on the changing accesses to print culture that Joyce had in neutral Zurich, wartime and post-war Trieste, and peacetime Paris, I trace the immediate impact that relocation around Europe had on Ulysses. What books could have crossed Joyce's desk while he was reading and researching? What itineraries or trajectories did his reading material follow? My analysis relies on recent changes in our own access to the twentieth-century print record, brought on by the mass digitization underway since the turn of the millennium. The project combines over a decade of original research on Joyce's prepublication dossier with new insights gleaned from book history and the application of database technologies to literary manuscripts in order to explain how and why certain texts contributed directly to Ulysses.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Van Hulle Dirk
• Fellow: Crowley Ronan

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project