Consuming Joyce: 100 Years of Ulysses in Ireland

"This book was crying out to be written." The Irish Times "Scandalously readable." Literary Review James Joyce's relationship with his homeland was a complicated and often vexed one. The publication of his masterwork Ulysses - referred to by The Quarterly Review as an "Odyssey of the sewer" - in 1922 was initially met with indifference and hostility within Ireland. This book tells the full story of the reception of Joyce and his best-known book in the country of his birth for the first time; a reception that evolved over the next hundred years, elevating Joyce from a writer reviled to one revered. Part reception study, part social history, this book uses the changing interpretations of Ulysses to explore the concurrent religious, social and political changes sweeping Ireland. From initially being a threat to the status quo, Ulysses became a way to market Ireland abroad and a manifesto for a better, more modern, open and tolerant, multi-ethnic country.

Table of Contents:
Chapter One “An Odyssey of the Sewer”: Ulysses in Ireland 1922-1940 Chapter Two Post-Mortem: Joyce in mid-century, 1941-1961 Chapter Three The beginnings of the Joyce Industry in Ireland, 1962-1982 Chapter Four Joyce goes mainstream: 1982-2022 Bibliography Index

About the Author :
John McCourt is Professor of English Literature at the University of Macerata, Italy and Vice-President of the International James Joyce Foundation. He is the author of Writing the Frontier: Anthony Trollope between Britain and Ireland, The Years of Bloom: Joyce in Trieste 1904-1920 which was translated into Italian, Hungarian, Spanish, and Japanese. He has edited many volumes including Roll Away the Reel World: James Joyce and Cinema, James Joyce in Context, and Reading Brendan Behan. He was Peter O’Brien Visiting Scholar at Concordia University in 2019.

Review :
This book was crying out to be written. Scandalously readable. Consuming Joyce takes in a comprehensive array of Irish responses to Ulysses and will be an indispensable resource for future studies of Joyce’s reception in the country. McCourt shies away from nothing ... An important corrective against single or narrowly conceived histories. The discussion of the cities and geographies associated with the writing of Ulysses, along with the fascinating and impressively illustrated history of the book itself, make [Consuming Joyce] a useful and absorbing document to mark this moment. 'Consuming Joyce' is a meticulous study of how Joyce's 'Ulysses' has been received in Ireland. John McCourt's writing is judicious, his research painstaking. He has managed to produce a portrait of a society in flux, its response to 'Ulysses' a mirror of its own fears and neuroses and its own gradual move towards openness and inclusion. McCourt's remarkable new opus reveals to what extent Joyce's ambivalence towards his native country has been fully reciprocated. The complex and tortuous road towards the canonization of Joyce as Ireland's most famous writer is here narrated with an impressive wealth of information.