James Joyce and the question of history

the long version

This study of James Joyce's fiction as a response to Irish and European history exemplifies Fredric Jameson's injunction 'Always historicize!' James Fairhall examines the effects of colonialism, nationalism, and World War I on Joyce's work; and he explores significant absences in his treatment of women, the lower classes, and the Irish countryside. He maintains that Joyce's great problem was his desire to transcend the artist's subject position within history. Joyce responded to the difficulties of being an artist in Ireland by going into self-exile; but in his work he grappled increasingly with the constraints of all history, any history. Drawing on a wide range of critical theories Fairhall argues that Joyce opened up seemingly closed possibilities by destabilizing conventional ideas of history and historical agents.