James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus's Nightmare

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." Stephen Dedalus's famous complaint articulates a characteristic modern attitude toward the perceived burden of the past. As Robert Spoo shows in this study, Joyce's creative achievement, from the time of his sojourn in Rome in 1906-07 to the completion of Ulysses in 1922, cannot be understood apart from the ferment of historical thought that dominated the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tracing James Joyce's historiographic art to its formative contexts, Spoo reveals a modernist author passionately engaged with the problem of history, forging a new language that both dramatizes and redefines that problem.

Review :
"Robert Spoo's book provides an indispensable contribution to the current critical discussion of Joyce and history. Lucid in its theorizing, rich and detailed in its textual engagements, this is a work that restores Stephen Dedalus to the center of the Joycean project and so renews and deepens our sense of its intellectual coherence."--Vincent Sherry, Villanova University "Robert Spoo has illuminated the cunning passages of Joycean historiography with many cunning passages of his own. He has written one of the most consistently interesting and important books about Joyce published in recent years."--Modernism/Modernity "Although Joyce himself declared while writing Ulysses the character Stephen Dedalus no longer interested him, Robert Spoo has given us...a complex portrait of Stephen worthy of our interest."--English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 "Spoo has written an intellectually sophisticated, and in places brilliant book. It maintains a high level of critical poise, shedding fresh light upon the structural and stylistic contours of Joyce's work....And it offers many original and carefully developed analyses of particular passages."--James Joyce Literary Supplement "Robert Spoo's book provides an indispensable contribution to the current critical discussion of Joyce and history. Lucid in its theorizing, rich and detailed in its textual engagements, this is a work that restores Stephen Dedalus to the center of the Joycean project and so renews and deepens our sense of its intellectual coherence."--Vincent Sherry, Villanova University "Robert Spoo has illuminated the cunning passages of Joycean historiography with many cunning passages of his own. He has written one of the most consistently interesting and important books about Joyce published in recent years."--Modernism/Modernity "Although Joyce himself declared while writing Ulysses the character Stephen Dedalus no longer interested him, Robert Spoo has given us...a complex portrait of Stephen worthy of our interest."--English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 "Spoo has written an intellectually sophisticated, and in places brilliant book. It maintains a high level of critical poise, shedding fresh light upon the structural and stylistic contours of Joyce's work....And it offers many original and carefully developed analyses of particular passages."--James Joyce Literary Supplement