Joyce's Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in Ulysses: Becoming the Blooms - Hardcover

Crispi, Luca

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198718853 ISBN 13: 9780198718857

Publisher: OUP Oxford, 2015

Synopsis

This book is both a study of how James Joyce created two of the most iconic characters in literature―Leopold Bloom and Marion Tweedy Bloom―as well as a history of the genesis of Ulysses. From a genetic critical perspective, it explores the conception and evolution of the Blooms as fictional characters in the work's wide range of surviving notes and manuscripts. At the same time, it also chronicles the production of Ulysses from 1917 to its first edition in 1922 and beyond. Based on decades of research, it is an original engagement with the textual archive of Ulysses, including the exciting, recently discovered manuscripts now in the National Library of Ireland.

The book excavates the raw material and examines the creative processes Joyce deployed in the construction of the Blooms and so the writing of Ulysses. Framed by a contextual introduction and four bibliographical appendices, the seven main chapters are a critical investigation of the fictional events and memories that constitute the 'lives' of the Blooms. Thereby, it is also a commentary on Joyceâs conception of Ulysses more generally. Crispi analyses how the stories in the published book achieved their final form and discloses previously unexamined versions of them for everyone who enjoys reading Ulysses.

This book demonstrates the various ways in which specialist textual work on the genesis of Ulysses directly intersects with other critical and interpretive readings. Becoming the Blooms is a behind-the-scenes guide to the creation of one of the most important books ever written.

About this title

Review

Becoming the Blooms is an unmissable book. Critics of Ulysses will want to have a copy on their desk for ready consultation. Nowhere else will you find such a staggering elucidation of the characters, their lives and relations, and of Joyces manuscripts. (Wim Van Mierlo, James Joyce Broadsheet Number 108)

...I expect to return frequently to Joyce's Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in "Ulysses," not for its chronological arrangement of the Bloom's lives or for its often-repeated conclusions, but for the model of genetic criticism that it offers and especially Lunita Laredo showing up a week before publication, the evolving explanations of Bloom's courtship hesitancies, Joyce plundering Gogarty's memory of lying on Howth Hill, and all the other tantalizing details that Crispi offers of Joyce at work. (Michael Groden, James Joyce Quarterly)

Becoming the Blooms cautiously humanises the often bewilderingly complex study of the Joycean textual process. (Elliott Morsia, Literature & History)

Luca Crispi has given us a new format and focus for Joyce studies, providing a fine model to authors who are engaged in archival research, genetic studies, and character development ... if you are inclined to follow, he will take you down into the underworld of genetic Joyce studies. (Christy L. Burns, James Joyce Literary Supplement)

Luca Crispis new book is both an argument for genetic criticism and an excellent display of its fruits. (Tim Conley, Irish University Review)

A significant addition to Joyce studies. The books extensive research and distinctive methodology allow Crispi to demonstrate rich and valuable insights about the compositional process of Ulysses, representing its position as a vital book for all Joyceans as well as any scholar working in genetic studies. (Helen Saunders, rish Studies Review)

a thorough and thoroughly original analysis of Ulysses ... Crispi's book serves as an object lesson in how scholarship can improve our understanding and enjoyment of literature. (Sam Slote, Irish Times)

Luca Crispi's meticulously researched and superbly presented study is important both for the light it throws on Joyce's creative methods and, more generally, for its challenge to many of our assumptions about the way fictional characters are brought into being. Crispi asks what the surviving manuscripts of Ulysses can tell us about the evolution of Leopold and Molly Bloom as the novel developed, and discovers a surprisingly fluid process of revision, accretion and transferral of characteristics. The result is a penetrating account of one of the most astonishing feats of literary creativity of the twentieth century. (Derek Attridge)

original, important, innovative, well-researched, and impeccably produced ... the book soars. (John McCourt, Review of English Studies)

Joyce's Creative Process marks a turning point in the James Joyce studies because it modifies the pedagogy concerning Ulysses, a novel regularly taught in undergraduate classes. Tackling a term as central and apparently easy to grasp as "character," Crispi demonstrates that no reading of Ulysses can avoid grappling with the genesis of the text or tapping its evolutionary archive, here synthesized with rare clarity. One cannot deny the centrality of characterization ―the fictional representation of human beings when they become beings of paper―in the study of narratives. By making us revise our assumptions about the main characters of Ulysses, this book revolutionizes the study of James Joyce as a whole. (Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania)

About the Author

Dr Luca Crispi teaches on the Anglo-Irish as well as the Modern and Contemporary Literature MA programmes at University College Dublin. He is founding co-editor of the Dublin James Joyce Journal and Associate Director of the Dublin James Joyce Summer School. He was contributing co-editor of How Joyce Wrote 'Finnegans Wake': A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide. Previously, Crispi was James Joyce and W.B. Yeats Research Scholar at the National Library of Ireland and co-curator of the exhibitions 'James Joyce and Ulysses at the National Library of Ireland' and 'Yeats: The Life and Works of W.B. Yeats', and was the James Joyce Scholar in Residence, the Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

Edition details

• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0198718853
• ISBN 13: 9780198718857
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 360