Bloomsday 100: Essays on Ulysses Paperback - 2011

"Readers benefit from the erudition, elegance, humor, and originality of a wide variety of Joyce scholars."--English Literature in Transition 1880-1920

"Ulysses is always lauded as one of western culture's most important books. This collection of essays re-asserts the worth and vitality of Joyce's monumental text, not because it is challenging but because it speaks so powerfully to significant present-day issues: anti-Semitism, film, melodrama, fashion, photography, silenced women, advertising, and more."--Jennifer Fraser, author of Rite of Passage in the Narratives of Dante and Joyce

June 16, 2004, was the one hundredth anniversary of the day on which James Joyce's novel Ulysses takes place. Now celebrated as Bloomsday, the date is among the most celebrated and famous in modern literary history. To observe the centennial, thousands took to the streets in Dublin, following in the footsteps of protagonist Leopold Bloom. The occasion also was marked by the Bloomsday 100 Symposium, where world-renowned scholars discussed Joyce's seminal work. This volume contains the best, most provocative readings of Ulysses presented at the conference.

The contributors to Bloomsday 100 urge a close engagement with the novel. They offer readings that focus variously on the materialist, historical, and political dimensions of Ulysses. The diversity of topics covered include nineteenth-century psychology, military history, Catholic theology, the influence of early film and music hall songs on Joyce, the post-Ulysses evolution of the one-day novel, and the challenge of discussing such a complex work amongst the sea of extant criticism.

Morris Beja, professor emeritus of English at Ohio State University, is the author or coauthor of many books on Joyce and other modernists, including Twenty-First Joyce. Anne Fogarty, professor of English at University College Dublin and president of the International James Joyce Foundation, is the coeditor of Joyce on the Threshold.

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