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Guide to Remembrance of Things Past

November 6, 2009 by Roy Johnson

handbook, explanation, plot summary, and characters

After nearly 100 years, Marcel Proust’s The Remembrance of Things Past remains as formidable a reading task as when it first appeared. Indeed, possibly more so – since it was originally published in single volumes at intervals, which gave contemporary readers a chance to digest its contents slowly. But it now exists in seven volumes totalling 3,200 pages, a million and a half words, and containing more than 400 characters.

Remembrance of Things PastThis is not an intellectual journey to be undertaken lightly, and even experienced readers need all the help they can get to deal with a literary construction of this magnitude. Patrick Alexander’s guide is an attempt to provide all the assistance that’s required. The book is in three parts. The first offers an overview then a summary of what takes place in each of the seven volumes of the novel. Part two is a who’s who – thumbnail sketches of the principal characters, what they do, and to whom they are related.

Part three offers a brief account of Proust’s life, notes on Paris and the Belle Epoque, and brief essays on French history and the notorious Dreyfus affair in particular.

During the course of his paraphrase, Alexander examines the ‘epiphanies’ for which Proust is famous; he shows the links between characters and events spanning the whole of the seven volumes which will not be apparent to a first-time reader; and he looks at Proust’s techniques of detailed and protracted analysis which, to anyone who has paid close enough attention, are not simply analyses but highly imaginative and extended metaphors which demonstrate his intellectual skill for seeing similarities between apparently disparate objects.

As Alexander points out, Proust’s novel is also an amazing cultural encyclopedia. Whilst the narrative explores issues of love, friendship, jealousy, memory and time, it is also packed with cultural references:

His literary references range from Xenophon to (then) contemporary novelists such as Zola; his musical references cover western music from Palestrina to Puccini, and he refers to more than one hundred individual painters from Botticelli to the avant garde Léon Bakst. All of these references are used to express and illustrate startlingly original insights into every aspect of the human condition, from love and sex to religion and death – and all with a freshness and comic sense of the absurd.

It is often observed by those who have read Proust that so powerful are the evocations of place and the recreation of his life experiences, that readers afterwards find it difficult to believe that they are not their own. “Yes – That’s exactly how it is!” sums up this sort of reaction, though of course it is his genius to have put it into words in the first place.

And for a writer so renowned for prolixity (even longeurs) what is not so frequently observed is the fact that he is much given to placing pithy aphorisms in his text, deeply embedded in huge paragraphs though they might often be.

This book should appeal to the intelligent ‘Common Reader’ who wants to undertake the extended literary journey that a reading of Proust presents. And it will be a reliable guide mainly because it was written by exactly such a person, composed as a homage to a writer he had come to love.

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© Roy Johnson 2009


Patrick Alexander, Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time: A Reader’s Guide to The Remembrance of Things Past, New York: Vintage, 2009, pp.3391, ISBN 0307472329


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Filed Under: Marcel Proust Tagged With: In Search of Lost Time, Literary studies, Marcel Proust, Modernism, Remembrance of Things Past

Heart of Darkness

February 13, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, resources, videos, writing

Heart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain.

Joseph Conrad - portrait

Joseph Conrad


Heart of Darkness – plot summary

The story opens with five men on a boat on the river Thames. Marlow begins telling a story of a job he took as captain of a steamship in Africa. He begins by ruminating on how Britain’s image among Ancient Roman officials must have been similar to Africa’s image among nineteenth century British officials. He describes how his aunt secured the job for him. When he arrives in Africa, he encounters many men he dislikes as they strike him as untrustworthy. They speak of a man named Kurtz, who has a reputation as a rogue ivory collector, but who is “essentially a great musician,” a journalist, a skilled painter and “a universal genius.”

Joseph Conrad Heart of DarknessMarlow arrives at the Central Station run by the general manager, an unwholesome conspiratorial character. He finds that his steamship has been sunk and spends several months waiting for parts to repair it. Kurtz is rumored to be ill, making the delays in repairing the ship all the more costly. Marlow eventually gets the parts and he and the manager set out with a few agents and a crew of cannibals on a long, difficult voyage up river. The dense jungle and oppressive silence make everyone aboard a little jumpy and the occasional glimpse of a native village or the sound of drums works the voyagers into a frenzy.

Marlow and his crew come across a hut with stacked firewood together with a note saying that the wood is for them but that they should approach cautiously. Shortly after the steamer has taken on the firewood it is surrounded by a dense fog. When the fog clears, the ship is attacked by an unseen band of natives, who fire arrows from the safety of the forest. A Russian trader who meets them as they come ashore, assures them that everything is fine and informs them that he is the one who left the wood. Kurtz has established himself as a god with the natives and has gone on brutal raids in the surrounding territory in search of ivory.

Congo mapMarlow and his crew take the ailing Kurtz aboard their ship and depart. Kurtz is lodged in Marlow’s pilothouse and Marlow begins to see that Kurtz is every bit as grandiose as previously described. During this time, Kurtz gives Marlow a collection of papers and a photograph for safekeeping. Both had witnessed the Manager going through Kurtz’s belongings. The photograph is of a beautiful woman whom Marlow assumes is Kurtz’s love interest.

One night Marlow happens upon Kurtz, obviously near death. As Marlow comes closer with a candle, Kurtz seems to experience a moment of clarity and speaks his last words: “The horror! The horror!” Marlow believes this to be Kurtz’s reflection on the events of his life. Marlow does not inform the Manager or any of the other voyagers of Kurtz’s death; the news is instead broken by the Manager’s child-servant.

Marlow later returns to his home city and is confronted by many people seeking things and ideas of Kurtz. Marlow eventually sees Kurtz’s fiancée about a year later; she is still in mourning. She asks Marlow about Kurtz’s death and Marlow informs her that his last words were her name — rather than, as really happened, “The horror! The horror!”

The story’s conclusion returns to the boat on the Thames and mentions how it seems as though the boat is drifting into the heart of the darkness.


Study resources

Red button Heart of Darkness – Oxford University Press – Amazon UK

Red button Heart of Darkness – Oxford University Press – Amazon US

Red button Heart of Darkness – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Red button Heart of Darkness – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Red button Heart of Darkness – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Red button Heart of Darkness – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Red button Heart of Darkness – eBook version at Project Gutenberg – [FREE]

Red button Heart of Darkness – York Notes (Advanced) – Amazon UK

Red button Heart of Darkness – audioBook version (unabridged) – Amazon UK

Red button Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: A Casebook – Amazon UK

Red button Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ – criticism (Bloomsbury) – Amazon UK

Red button Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ – criticism (Chelsea) – Amazon UK

Red button Joseph Conrad: ‘Heart of Darkness’ – criticism (Icon) – Amazon UK

Red button Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ – criticism (Routledge) – Amz UK

Red button Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ – criticism (Penguin) – Amazon UK

Red button An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’

Red button Heart of Darkness – audioBook at LibriVox

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Joseph Conrad at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

Heart of Darkness


Heart of Darkness – film adaptation

Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of Heart of Darkness transforms events from Europe’s imperialist exploitation of the the Belgian Congo to America’s war in Vietnam in the 1960s. It remains amazingly faithful to the original, even whilst translating the settings and events into the fully mechanised assault of the world’s most powerful industrial nation against a country of poor farmers and peasants. Marlow becomes Captain Willard, who is sent on a mission to terminate (‘with extreme prejudice’) the command of rogue Major Kurtz, who has gone over the border into Cambodia with a band of followers.

Francis Ford Coppola adaptation 1979

Red button See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database


Principal characters
I an unnamed outer narrator who relays Marlow’s story
Marlow a ferry-boat captain, the principal character and narrator of events
Kurtz chief of the Inner Station of Belgian ivory traders
General manager chief of the Outer Station
Chief accountant impeccably dressed functionary
Pilgrims greedy agents of the Outer Station
Cannibals natives hired as steamer crew
Russian trader a disciple of Kurtz with patched clothes
Helmsman native sailor who is killed in the attack on the boat
Kurtz’s African mistress powerful and mysterious woman who never speaks
Kurtz’s ‘intended’ his devoted fiancee in Bussels
Aunt relative who secures Marlow his job

Biography


The Cambridge Companion to Joseph ConradThe Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad offers a series of essays by leading Conrad scholars aimed at both students and the general reader. There’s a chronology and overview of Conrad’s life, then chapters that explore significant issues in his major writings, and deal in depth with individual works. These are followed by discussions of the special nature of Conrad’s narrative techniques, his complex relationships with late-Victorian imperialism and with literary Modernism, and his influence on other writers and artists. Each essay provides guidance to further reading, and a concluding chapter surveys the body of Conrad criticism.

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Joseph Conrad - manuscript page

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness


Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a good introduction to Conrad and criticism of the text. It includes a potted biography, an outline of the novella, and pointers towards the main critical writings – from the early comments by his contemporaries to critics of the present day. The latter half of the book is given over to five extended critical readings of the text. These represent what are currently perceived as major schools of literary criticism – neo-Marxist, historicism, feminism, deconstructionist, and narratological.

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Further reading

Red button Amar Acheraiou Joseph Conrad and the Reader, London: Macmillan, 2009.

Red button Jacques Berthoud, Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Red button Muriel Bradbrook, Joseph Conrad: Poland’s English Genius, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941

Red button Harold Bloom (ed), Joseph Conrad (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, New Yoprk: Chelsea House Publishers, 2010

Red button Hillel M. Daleski , Joseph Conrad: The Way of Dispossession, London: Faber, 1977

Red button Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Red button Aaron Fogel, Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985

Red button John Dozier Gordon, Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1940

Red button Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958

Red button Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992

Red button Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness, London: Edward Arnold, 1979

Red button Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment, London: Edward Arnold, 1990

Red button Jeremy Hawthorn, Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad, London: Continuum, 2007.

Red button Owen Knowles, The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990

Red button Jakob Lothe, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008

Red button Gustav Morf, The Polish Shades and Ghosts of Joseph Conrad, New York: Astra, 1976

Red button Ross Murfin, Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties, Tuscaloosa, Ala: University of Alabama Press, 1985

Red button Jeffery Myers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography, Cooper Square Publishers, 2001.

Red button Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, Camden House, 2007.

Red button George A. Panichas, Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, Mercer University Press, 2005.

Red button John G. Peters, The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Red button James Phelan, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008.

Red button Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966

Red button Allan H. Simmons, Joseph Conrad: (Critical Issues), London: Macmillan, 2006.

Red button J.H. Stape, The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996

Red button John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, Arrow Books, 2008.

Red button Peter Villiers, Joseph Conrad: Master Mariner, Seafarer Books, 2006.

Red button Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, London: Chatto and Windus, 1980

Red button Cedric Watts, Joseph Conrad: (Writers and their Work), London: Northcote House, 1994.


Joseph Conrad - writing table

Joseph Conrad’s writing table


Other novels by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad The Secret AgentThe Secret Agent (1907) is a short novel and a masterpiece of sustained irony. It is based on the real incident of a bomb attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1888 and features a cast of wonderfully grotesque characters: Verloc the lazy double agent, Inspector Heat of Scotland Yard, and the Professor – an anarchist who wanders through the novel with bombs strapped round his waist and the detonator in his hand. The English government and police are subject to sustained criticism, and the novel bristles with some wonderfully orchestrated effects of dramatic irony – all set in the murky atmosphere of Victorian London. Here Conrad prefigures all the ambiguities which surround two-faced international relations, duplicitous State realpolitik, and terrorist outrage which still beset us more than a hundred years later.
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Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon US

 

Joseph Conrad Under Western EyesUnder Western Eyes (1911) is the story of Razumov, a reluctant ‘revolutionary’. He is in fact a coward who is mistaken for a radical hero and cannot escape from the existential trap into which this puts him. This is Conrad’s searing critique of Russian ‘revolutionaries’ who put his own Polish family into exile and jeopardy. The ‘Western Eyes’ are those of an Englishman who reads and comments on Razumov’s journal – thereby creating another chance for Conrad to recount the events from a very complex perspective. Razumov achieves partial redemption as a result of his relationship with a good woman, but the ending, with faint echoes of Dostoyevski, is tragic for all concerned.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2010


Joseph Conrad links

Joseph Conrad - tutorials Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Red button Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad - eBooks Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad - further reading Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad - adaptations Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Joseph Conrad - etexts Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

Joseph Conrad - journal The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

Conrad US journal The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Joseph Conrad - concordance Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.


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Filed Under: Joseph Conrad, The Novella Tagged With: Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, Literary studies, Modernism, study guide, The Novella

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

January 4, 2018 by Roy Johnson

young, modernist, Vorticist sculptor

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915) was one of the most dynamic and innovative sculptors of the modernist period. He was French, but produced his most important works in England in an incredibly short space of time – between 1911 and 1915.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

He was born Henri Gaudier near Orleans in France – a talented schoolboy who won scholarships that took him to London and University College, Bristol. He was supposed to be engaged with business studies, but spent his time sketching antiques in the Bristol Museum. After this he travelled to Nuremberg, Munich, then Paris, where he met Sophie Brzeska in a library.

This was a decisive turning point in his life. She was Polish, had literary aspirations, and was twice his age. They formed an immediate bond that was to last until the end of his tragically short life – and hers, since she died soon afterwards. Yet it was not a conventional romantic and sexual attachment – more of a mother and son relationship..

They were both in ill health and desperately poor. However, when they travelled into the countryside as an economy measure, even the innocent visits of a young single man to an unmarried woman staying in a rented house were enough to enrage the prurient provincial farmers, who called in the police.

Gaudier became eligible for military service, but passionately wished to avoid it. He described the French as ‘slaughterers of the Arabs’. So they moved to London. At this point they unofficially joined their surnames to form the compound Gaudier-Brzeska as a sign of their commitment to each other.

They plunged into further poverty and ill health. He made a pittance at various menial office jobs. She paid for his visits to prostitutes at five shillings a time – since they had been recommended by a doctor as conducive to his well-being.

She made efforts to establish an independent existence by seeking work, and he started to learn Polish. He was sketching whenever he had the chance, but amazingly he had still produced no sculptures, even though he only had a few years left to live. When Sophie found temporary work as a governess in Felixstowe he wrote enormously long letters (addressed to ‘Adorable Maman’) explaining his ideas about art and reproaching her for having different opinions.

In 1911 they set up home together in Chelsea. She bought a bug-infested bed: he slept in a deck chair. There is conflicting evidence about the exact nature of their relationship. She claimed they were like brother and sister: he claimed they were not. But he also confessed that he often lied.

Henri wrote to the author of an article in the English Review which led to his selling some of his posters. He also began to model in clay and secured his first poorly paid commissions. He was also introduced to Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, both of whom were rather irritated by Sophie. Henri contributed sketches to their magazine Rhythm but the relationship eventually foundered on incompatible personalities.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

Bird Swallowing a Fish 1913

When Sophie went to work in Bromsgrove it gave him more free time for his art work, but they also spent a lot of time having lovers’ tiffs via letter. He worked on paintings, drawings, plaster busts, and a scheme for producing painted tiles. All of this was what we would now call cottage industry, and the most he was ever paid for a single work was twenty pounds.

It is interesting to note that his most successful commissions around that time were for portrait plaster busts. His fellow immigrant Jacob Epstein was doing the same thing at the same time – and the two men did eventually meet. At one point he was even touting for the job of making decorative mascots on motor car radiators.

In 1913 he established himself in a leaky and cold artist’s studio in the Fulham Road and started working with stone blocks. He made friendships with Frank Harris (author of the notorious My Life and Loves, and Wyndham Lewis, with whose coterie he founded the Vorticist movement.

Living the full Bohemian life in London, it is not surprising that he eventually met Nina Hamnett, who introduced him to Roger Fry. He also sold two statues to Ezra Pound. Yet despite these early signs of success, it was Sophie’s personal savings that that put a roof over their heads and food on the table.

In 1914 when war broke out he rather surprisingly returned to France, where he was immediately jailed for twenty years as a deserter. He managed to escape and return to London. Yet later he went back to France again, serving on the front line, where he was promoted to corporal and then sergeant in recognition of his bravery. In 1915 he was killed during an attack on Neuville Saint Vaast. He was just twenty-four years old.

© Roy Johnson 2018

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska biography – But the book at Amazon UK

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska biography – Buy the book at Amazon US


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Filed Under: Art, Biography Tagged With: Art, Biography, Cultural history, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Modernism

Igor Stravinsky: 1882-1934

August 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

part one of the definitive biography

This is the currently definitive biography of Igor Stravinsky – master of European modernism whom many consider to be the greatest composer of the twentieth century. It’s a consummate and magisterial piece of work – superbly referenced and annotated; and just about every claim made within it is backed up with evidence. The notes to the text itself run to 113 pages.

Stephen Walsh begins by clearing the ground between himself and Robert Craft – the man who made himself Stravinsky’s amanuensis, secretary, helpmate, and collaborator towards the end of his life. Craft wanted to control the Stravinsky estate (including the money) as well as his critical reputation, but Walsh is having none of that. He insists on factual accuracy, backed up with hard evidence.

Igor StravinskyYet even though it’s quite clear that he knows everything there is to know about the details of Stravinsky’s life, and can justify every claim with a fully referenced source, he has problems constructing a logical and readable narrative of the composer’s life. For instance Stravinsky’s brother Roman dies three times within as many short chapters at the start of the book, and Stravinsky is abruptly announced to be twenty years old and has completed his first piece of music on page fifty. Most of the previous forty-nine have been devoted to describing the Russian countryside.

Walsh is exceptionally good at recreating the social and historical context in which Stravinsky was raised – from the lack of sanitation in late nineteenth-century Petersburg to the fact that the composer didn’t even go to school until he was nearly eleven.

The story of Stravinsky’s life is already fairly well known, so what does Walsh offer that’s new? Well, quite apart from his claim to accuracy in interpreting textual evidence, it’s quite clear that he is an authority on Russian cultural history. Every time a friend, relative, or acquaintance enters the story, his narrative swells out for pages on end with their biographical details – to the extent that (especially in the earlier part of the book) Stravinsky himself becomes a indistinct figure, hovering indistinctly like some half-forgotten ghost.

This is a feature of Walsh’s approach which you would expect to diminish as Stravinsky becomes more successful – largely because he is endlessly on the move from one city and country to another – Petersburg, Brittany, Switzerland, Paris, Cote d’Azur. This is the material of a biographer’s dream. But Walsh is more interested in scouring correspondence to apportion exact responsibility for the plot development of the early masterpieces (Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring) The composer’s dramatic private life is left relatively unexamined – despite his meeting with such luminaries as Debussy, Ravel, Proust, Schoenberg, and Manuel de Falla.

And this avoidance of the personal has some serious repercussions. When Diaghilev throws an enormous tantrum on hearing of Nijinsky’s marriage, Walsh still can’t bring himself to mention the fact that they had been lovers. Diaghilev shunned The Rite of Spring because of its close connection with his ex-favourite – and this immediately affected Stravinsky’s ability to earn a living from its success – for a personal, not a musical reason.

But we do gain benefits from his thoroughness, as well as having to endure its longeurs. On Stravinsky’s first visit to Spain, an affair with the ballerina Lydia Lopukhova is followed up biographically to record that she later married Diaghilev’s financial manager, and then later after eloping from London with a Russian general, she eventually married John Maynard Keynes.

Another thing which emerges instructively from all the background commentary on Stravinsky’s work (and that of his collaborators) is what utter rubbish many of the so-called critics wrote about the music. Jacques Riviere on the Rite of Spring for instance:

The Rite of Spring … has no juice to dull its brilliance, no cookery to rearrange or spoil its contours. It is not a “work of art”, with all the usual palaver. Nothing blurred, nothing reduced by shadows; no veils or poetic softenings; no trace of atmosphere. The work is whole and untreated…

As he becomes more successful, the 1920s are passed in the swirl of a quasi-bohemian, quasi-aristocratic milieu. Oedipus Rex was a collaboration with opium-addicted Jean Cocteau, whose detoxification cures were paid for by Coco Chanel, with whom Stravinsky had a brief affair.

But the dominant figure in this first volume is certainly Diaghilev, with whom Stravinsky collaborated on almost all his early major works. The two men had their differences, especially over money; but they respected each other as artists, and seemed to bring out the best in each other.

The other problematic leitmotif in Stravinsky’s life is that of copyright, which had not been internationally agreed at the time of his early works. There were also very complex arrangements whereby some people ‘owned’ works because they had paid a commissioning fee, and others held the rights to performances for a limited period. This resulted in erratic income for the composer – though a man who could buy a large chauffer-driven automobile in the 1920s was not in financial difficulties.

Stravinsky also had the expense of keeping two ‘families’. For his life was divided permanently between his lover Vera Sudeykina, with whom he lived in Paris and took on concert tours, and Katya, his wife and the mother of his four children, whom he left at home and visited when required.

It’s interesting to note how fond Stravinsky was of any technical developments which would assist him in both making a record of his own work and exploring the possibilities of new sounds. He made piano rolls, bought a player-piano, learnt to play the cimbalom, and eagerly recorded his work on both mechanical and electrical equipment.

Serious musicologists will be glad to learn that Walsh puts a lot of effort into tracing the developments in Stravinsky’s musical style. This goes (in this volume) from the expressive force of the Rite to the neo-classicism of Apollo. This is done in an all-round manner by looking at the original ‘idea’ (often the result of a commission) then the musical material from which he took his inspiration, through to the actual conditions (and possible limitations) which surrounded the first performance.

Despite some of the negative effects of Walsh’s writing, I found this a fascinating account of the artist and a well-informed glimpse into a rich period of cultural history. Volume one ends in 1934 with the Nazis in the ascendant and Stravinsky sharing musical chit-chat with Mussolini, for who he had a high regard. In this climactic year Stravinsky took out French citizenship and moved his entire extended family into a fifteen-room apartment near the Place de la Concorde – in the arrondissement next to his lover Vera. Stravinsky’s main worry about this proximity was that his eighty-year-old mother should not find out about his not-so-secret other life.

Igor Stravinsky - Part 2 See part two of this biography

© Roy Johnson 2009

Igor Stravinsky Buy the book at Amazon UK

Igor Stravinsky Buy the book at Amazon US


Stephen Walsh, Igor Stravinsky – A Creative Spring: Russia and France 1882-1934, London: Pimlico, 2002, pp.696, ISBN: 1845952219


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Filed Under: Biography, Music Tagged With: Biography, classical music, Cultural history, Igor Stravinsky, Modernism, Music

In Search of Lost Time

February 11, 2010 by Roy Johnson

characters, resources, video, translations

There’s no doubt about it: if you’re going to tackle In Search of Lost Time (or Remembrance of Things Past as it is also known) you need to be in good intellectual shape. The sentences are long, the paragraphs are huge, and at a million and a half words his great novel is one of the longest ever.

But it can be done – and the benefits are enormous. Proust delivers gems on every page. He is of course celebrated for his psychological insights. His characters live and breathe in a way which makes you feel they become your personal friends. Don’t expect plot, suspense, or even story in a conventional sense. This modern classic is one of characters circling around each other in a way which depicts an entire world of upper-class fin de circle France before and shortly after the First World War.

However, the greatest depths he offers are in the form of profound reflections on some of the most important issues any novelist can approach – love, desire, memory, time, and death. These are written in the form of extended aphorisms, embedded as part of his narrative in such a way that you will hardly be aware where one ends and the other begins.

Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of our lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on which that person and ourselves are ever more or less in contact.

Marcel Proust - portrait

Marcel Proust – portrait by Jaques Emil Blanche


Study resources

In Search of Lost Time In Search of Lost Time – 6 volume boxed set (Modern Library) – UK

In Search of Lost Time In Search of Lost Time – 6 volume boxed set (Modern Library) – US

In Search of Lost Time In Search of Lost Time – 4 volume boxed set (Everyman’s Library) – UK

In Search of Lost Time In Search of Lost Time – 4 volume boxed set (Everyman’s Library) – US

Red button Proust: an illustrated life – short biography with period photos

Red button Proust’s life and works – a detailed chronology

In Search of Lost Time A Reader’s Guide to Proust – Amazon UK

Red button Proust Website – general resources

In Search of Lost Time Proust’s In Search of Lost Time – web site with videos

In Search of Lost Time Reading Proust – various translations compared

Red button Swann’s Way – an essay on translations

Red button Swann in Love – 1984 DVD adaptation in English – Amazon UK

Red button Time Regained – 1999 DVD adaptation (English subtitles) – Amazon UK

Red button Monsieur Proust – the housekeeper’s memoirs – Amazon UK

Red button Marcel Proust at Wikipedia – biographical notes, web links

Red button Marcel Proust at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials


Proust in the original French

Marcel Proust - postage stamp

In Search of Lost Time A la recherche du temps perdu – 10 volumes, illustrated (Kindle) pp.2911 – £2.22 – Amazon UK

In Search of Lost Time Oeuvres complètes de Marcel Proust – Illustrated, with biography and criticisim (Kindle) pp.4100 – £1.32 – Amazon UK


Principal characters
Marcel the outer narrator of the novel
Bathilde Amedee the narrator’s grandmother
Francoise the narrator’s faithful maid
Baron de Charlus an aristocratic dandy and gay aesthete
Duchesse de Guermantes the toast of Parisian high society
Robert de Saint-Loup army officer and narrator’s best friend
Charles Swann a friend of the narrator’s family
Odette de Crecy a beautiful Parisian courtesan
Gilberte Swann the daughter of Swann and Odette
Elstir a famous painter
Bergotte a well-known writer
Vinteuil an obscure but talented musician
Berma a famous actress
Charles Morel a gifted violinist, patronised by Charlus
Albertine Simonet an orphan with whom the narrator has a romance
Madame Verdurin a rapacious social-climber

In Search of Lost Time – film adaptation

Catherine Deneuve, John Malkovich


Further reading

Red button Aciman, André (2004) The Proust Project. New York Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Red button Albaret, Céleste (Barbara Bray, trans.) (2003) Monsieur Proust. The New York Review of Books

Red button Alexander, Patrick (2009) Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time. Vintage Books, New York.

Red button Bernard, Anne-Marie (2002) The World of Proust, as seen by Paul Nadar. Cambridge: MIT Press

Red button Bloom, Harold. (2003) Marcel Proust, Chelsea House.

Red button Carter, William C. (2000) Marcel Proust: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press

Red button Caws, Mary Ann. (2003) Marcel Proust: Illustrated Lives. Overlook Press.

Red button Curtiss, Mina. (2006) The Letters of Marcel Proust Turtle Point Press.

Red button Davenport-Hines, Richard (2006) Proust at the Majestic. Bloomsbury

Red button De Botton, Alain (1998) How Proust Can Change Your Life. New York: Vintage Books

Red button Deleuze, Gilles (2004) Proust and Signs: The Complete Text. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Red button Painter, George D (1959) Marcel Proust A Biography Vols. 1 & 2. London: Chatto & Windus

Red button Shattuck, Roger (1963) Proust’s Binoculars: A Study of Memory, Time, and Recognition in À la recherche du temps perdu. New York: Random House

Red button Shattuck, Roger (2000) Proust’s Way: A Field Guide To In Search of Lost Time, W. W. Norton

Red button Tadié, Jean-Yves: Marcel Proust: A Life. Viking, New York, 2000

Red button White, Edmund (1998) Marcel Proust: A Life. New York: Viking Books


Proust’s writing – I

Mont Blanc pen - Proust edition

Mont Blanc – Marcel Proust special edition

Don’t let this glamorous fountain pen deceive you. Marcel Proust’s writing instruments and his notebooks were quite humble. He used Sergent-Major nibs and pen holder which were the cheapest of their kind. For paper, he used the common French school children’s exercise notebooks which he purchased in bulk.


Parisian interior – La belle epoque

Belle Epoque - Paris interior


Proust’s writing – II

Marcel Proust - typescript and revisions

Revisions to a typescript

Proust’s method of composition was highly accretive. He wrote primarily in children’s exercise books, but his first drafts were supplemented by countless additions, revisions, and extensions of thought which he scribbled down on any paper which came to hand.

Envelopes, magazine covers, scraps of paper of different length and format were glued into the exercise books or joined together to form long scrolls sometimes two metres long.

This process also continued when proofs of his manuscript came back from the printer. This was a habit very similar to that of his illustrious predecessor Balzac. As Terrence Kilmartin observes:

The margins of proofs and typescripts were covered with scribbled corrections and insertions, often overflowing on to additional sheets which were glued to the galleys or to one another to form interminable strips – what Françoise in the novel calls the narrator’s paperoles. The unravelling and deciphering of these copious additions cannot have been an enviable task for editors and printers.


In Search of Lost Time – editions

Click the jacket covers for further details at Amazon UK

Marcel Proust - Scott-Moncrieff editionWhich translation should you read? In English there are three options currently in print. My favourite is the oldest by C.K. Scott Moncrieff. It was the first to appear as the original volumes were published, and it even had Proust’s own blessing. Although it is based on a version of the French original which was not complete, it has a charm all of its own. It is this version which gave the novel its alternative title Remembrance of Things Past when Scott Moncrieff chose a quotation from Shakespeare’s Sonnet XXX, rather than a literal translation of the original:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,
I summon up remembrance of things past

The jacket cover illustrated here is that of the old Chatto and Windus edition which was presented in twelve volumes. Snap these up if you see them, but in the meantime this translation is available from Penguin books.

Marcel Proust - six-packThe second option is an edition which is based on the Scott Moncrieff original translation, but which was revised and re-translated by Terrence Kilmartin in the 1990s. This version is also informed by updated versions of the original text in French, including new material which has come to light since the author’s death. Kilmartin’s work was then itself edited by D.J.Enright

So this version comes to us with a guarantee of completeness and accuracy, but with the traces of three different translators’ hands since the original work. Each volume contains its own notes, addenda, and a synopsis, so readers new to Proust can feel supported by this additional material. [It’s available as a boxed set which is also known slightly mischievously as the ‘Proust 6-pack’.]

Marcel Proust - box setThere’s also a more recent version produced by seven different translators. This has the advantage of being the most up to date. It is based on the latest version of a text with a very tangled provenance, and each translator writes a preface on the problems of translation. This version got a mixed reception when it first appeared. Some people argue that it removes a certain prissiness which had clung to the English version of Proust since Scott Moncrieff’s translation. Others have claimed that it introduces new problems and lacks a unifying voice. Perhaps the best reason for choosing it is that it’s now generally available at a cut-down price.


The Cambridge Companion to Proust The Cambridge Companion to Proust provides essays on the major features of Marcel Proust’s great work. These investigate such essential areas as the composition of the novel, its social dimension, the language in which it is couched, its intellectual parameters, its humour, its analytical profundity and its wide appeal and influence. This is suitable for those who want to study Proust in depth. The discussion is illustrated by textual quotation (in both French and English) and close analysis. This is the only volume of its kind on Proust currently available. It contains a detailed chronology and bibliography.

Marcel Proust: BiographyMarcel Proust is an excellent biography by George Painter. This study has become famous in its own right, because it combines deep insights with scholarly rigour – and it is also written in a very stylish manner. Painter sketches in the background to Parisian society, which provides a historical context for what follows. He then traces Proust’s singular life (the neurasthenia, the ‘job’ he kept for one day, the cork-lined bedroom) up to his death in 1922 – where he was still revising his masterpiece in bed, which is where he had written most of it. This is regarded as a classic of modern biography, and in 1965 it was awarded the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize.


AND … now for something completely different


Other works by Marcel Proust

Red button Jean Santeuil
This was Proust’s ‘dry run’ for his major work. It’s an unfinished (though quite long) fragment of a novel about the life of a young Parisian man which tells the story of boyhood summers of strawberries and cream cheese, of garlands of pink blossom under branches of white may, of love and its lies, of political scandal and of his deep feeling for his parents.

Red button The Pleasures and the Days
Set amid fin-de-siecle Parisian salon society, these sketches and short stories depict the lives, loves, manners and motivations of a host of characters, all viewed with a characteristically knowing eye. By turns cuttingly satirical and bitterly moving, Proust’s portrayals are layered with imagery and feeling, whether they be of the aspiring Bouvard and Pecuchet, the deluded Madame de Breyves, or Baldassare Silvande, saturated with regret, memory and final understanding at the end of his life.

Red button Contre Saint Beuve
This series of essays has as its centrepiece Proust’s literary manifesto. In it he argues for an essentially modernist position – that works of art should be considered autonomously, rather than objects which we use as a means of exploring the author’s biography.

Red button The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust

© Roy Johnson 2010


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Italo Svevo biography

February 24, 2016 by Roy Johnson

his life, writings, and cultural context

Italo Svevo was the pen name of the Austro-Italian writer Aron Ettore Schmitz. He was born in 1861 in Trieste, which at that time was part of the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian empire – and remained so until the end of the first world war. His mother was Italian, and his father a German Jewish businessman. He was educated with his brothers at a commercial school in Wurzburg, Germany, where he became fluent in the language. Italian was actually his second language, the first being the Triestine dialect which was used at home.

Italo Svevo

After two further years of business studies in Trieste, he was forced to abandon his studies when his father’s glassware business went bankrupt. He took up employment as a correspondence clerk in the Viennese Union Bank, where he stayed for the next twenty years. During this time he produced his first novel, Una vita (A Life) (1893). Like all his other books, it was published at his own expense.

Following the death of his parents he married his cousin Livia Veneziano, the daughter of a wealthy Italian who manufactured specialised industrial paints used on warships. In 1897 he became a partner in his father-in-law’s business and was quite successful in commercial activities, making profitable excursions to France and Germany, and setting up a branch of the company in England.

In 1898 he published his second novel Senilità (As a Man Grows Older). Both of these novels were largely ignored at the time, but in 1907 Svevo was enrolled at the Berlitz School of Languages to learn English, where his tutor was a twenty-five year old James Joyce, who had taken up exile in Trieste. Joyce read the novels and championed Svevo’s work. The two men became great friends.

However, Svevo was discouraged by his lack of literary success, and appears to have given up writing completely around that time. He devoted the next twenty-five years to his work as a representative for the family paint business in which, despite his cultural and intellectual interests, he was successfully enterprising. He lived for some time in the borough of Greenwich in south London, documenting the differences he encountered in Edwardian English culture in a series of letters he wrote to his wife: This England is So Different: Italo Svevo’s London Writings.

In 1925 when Svevo published La Conscienza di Zeno (Confessions of Zeno), Joyce arranged for the work to be translated into French and published in Paris. The work was critically acclaimed and marked his first major success. He entered into a second phase of creativity and produced a number of stories, a novella, and an unfinished novel. He spent the last years of his life lecturing on his own work and writing Further Confessions of Zeno, which was never completed. In 1928 he was involved in a motoring accident in Trieste and he died a few days later from his injuries.


Italo Svevo – principal works

Italo Svevo 1893 – Una vita (A Life)

Italo Svevo 1898 – Senilità (As a Man Grows Older

Italo Svevo 1925 – La conscienza di Zeno (Confessions of Zeno)

Italo Svevo 1926 – La novella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla

Italo Svevo 1926 – Una burla riuscita (A Perfect Hoax)

Italo Svevo 1927 – La madre (The Mother)


Italo Svevo


Italo Svevo – study resources

Italo Svevo A Life – Secker & Warburg- Amazon UK

Italo Svevo A Life – Secker & Warburg – Amazon US

Italo Svevo As A Man Grows Older – NYRB Classics – Amazon UK

Italo Svevo As A Man Grows Older – NYRB Classics – Amazon US

Italo Svevo Confessions of Zeno – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Italo Svevo Confessions of Zeno – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Italo Svevo Italo Svevo: A Double Life – Clarendon Press – Amazon UK

Italo Svevo Italo Svevo: A Double Life – Clarendon Press – Amazon US

Italo Svevo Svevo’s London Writings – Troubador Press – Amazon UK

Italo Svevo Svevo’s London Writings – Troubador Press – Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2016


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Jacob Epstein

January 2, 2018 by Roy Johnson

controversial Anglo-American modernist sculptor

Jacob Epstein (1880-1959) was a sculptor who became a controversial pioneer in the world of modernist British art. He was born in New York’s Lower East Side to Jewish immigrant parents who had escaped anti-Semitic pogroms in Poland. When the family moved to a more respectable neighbourhood, he chose to remain amongst the ‘Russian, Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Chinese’ who clustered in what was then a very unfashionable part of the city.

Jacob Epstein

Rock Drill

In 1902 he travelled to France, enrolling at the Ecole de Beaux Arts and visiting Rodin’s studio. He was a fan of his fellow countryman Walt Whitman, and there is a distinct element of homo-eroticism in his early works that parallels the celebration of the human body (largely Male) that features in Whitman’s poems. This is an element of his vision that became important in later works and his battles with censorship and even the mutilation of his statues and carvings.

In 1905 he transferred to London and quickly made contact with people such as George Bernard Shaw and Augustus John. Even more surprisingly he secured a large public commission at the age of only twenty-seven. This was for a series of decorative statues for the new headquarters of the British Medical Association in the Strand.

The nude figures he produced depicting maternity and Hygieia (goddess of health and cleanliness) became the target of outraged prudish hostility, and a press campaign was mounted by the Evening Standard. The project was completed, but it was twenty years before he received another architectural commission.

He was supported and befriended by Eric Gill, who had similar ambitions to bring primitive elemental forms into public art. They planned to build a private temple in Sussex where they could express their enthusiasm for nudity and sexuality without hindrance. The project was never completed, but the celebration of human physicality pervaded almost everything they went on to produce.

Epstein’s next major work was the now-famous tomb of Oscar Wilde in Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris. This was admired by the young fellow-immigrant artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, but the French authorities protested against the winged figure’s nakedness and ordered its genitals to be obliterated. They were later hacked off by protesters more than once.

Meanwhile his domestic life was no less controversial. He was married to Margaret Dunlop but at the same time he had a number of lovers who his wife not only tolerated but allowed to live in the family home, along with the children who were conceived by them as a result.

Epstein isolated himself in a Sussex coastal village and produced a number of excellent abstracted figures of pregnant females and copulating doves, clearly influenced by the work of Constantin Brancusi who he had met in Paris. It has to be said that the works of Epstein, Brancusi, and Gaudier-Brzeska became almost indistinguishable around this period.

Just before the outbreak of war, in 1913 Epstein produced the first drawings for what was to become his most important work – Rock Drill. In its first version the dramatically modelled figure of a quarry worker was mounted astride a tripod, handling a real drilling machine.

Nothing could have better symbolised the Vorticist movement which championed his work in the second (and final) edition of its magazine BLAST. But Epstein refused to join the group founded by his supporter Wyndham Lewis. In fact Epstein was so appalled by the mechanised slaughter of young soldiers in the conflict of 1914-1918 that he removed the drill and tripod from the original sculpture.

This turned out to produce a much more aesthetically pleasing result – the futuristic head and torso which seemed to symbolise the machine age. Yet following this success his activity more or less split into two parts. The first was producing traditional bronze portrait busts for celebrities in a style that could have come from any time in the previous two-hundred years. The second was his far more interesting series of monumental carvings and sculptures that expressed something of the modern age. The first part provided him with an income; the second with continued notoriety.

Jacob Epstein

Femaile Figure

It is amazing to recall the virulent hostility (and anti-Semitism) that his work aroused. Even the Royal Academy participated in the mutilation of his public commissions. Following the exhibition of his controversial Adam (1938) the statue was sold off for next to nothing and later displayed in a Blackpool funfair. Visitors were charged a shilling entry to view its enlarged genitals as a form of pornographic amusement. The same fate befell his next major work, Jacob and the Angel (1941) – though this has since been rescued and is now in the relative safety of the Tate Gallery.

He participated in the Festival of Britain 1951) but by this time he was being outflanked by younger contemporaries such as Henry Moore, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Lynn Chadwick. He completed further commissions for religious figures, notably on the re-built Coventry Cathedral, but his final secular work was the magnificent war memorial that stands in front of TUC headquarters at Congress House in London.

He was knighted in 1954, but his later years were marked by personal loss. His son died of a heart attack in 1954, and his daughter committed suicide later the same year. Epstein himself died in 1959 at Hyde Park Gate in Kensington – next door but one to the birthplace of Virginia Woolf.

© Roy Johnson 2018

Jacob Epstein biography – But the book at Amazon UK

Jacob Epstein biography – Buy the book at Amazon US


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James Joyce – life and works

September 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

James Joyce - portrait1882. James Joyce was born in Dublin, the eldest of ten children. His father was a rather improvident tax collector. The family became progressively impoverished.

1888. He was educated in Jesuit schools, with emphasis on Catholic and scholastic doctrine. [These establishments were also renowned for their intellectual rigour.] Joyce was a talented student, especially good at languages. He moved from being devout to bitterly anti-Catholic. These experiences were later used as material for his autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

1893. Enters Belvedere College, a Jesuit boys’ day school – fees having been waived because of family’s needy circumstances.

1894. Joyce reads Lamb’s Adventures of Ulysses and writes theme on Ulysses as ‘my favourite hero’.

1897. Wins prize for best English composition in Ireland for his age group.

1898. Studies languages at University College, Dublin. Rebels against Church, Family, and the State. Begins to read Ibsen. Active campaigner for freedom of expression and equality for women.

1902 Leaves university to study medicine in Paris, but gives it up and writes reviews for newspapers.

1904. Back in Dublin following his mother’s death, Joyce meets Nora Barnacle on June 10, subsequently to be known as ‘Bloomsday’ and used as temporal setting for Ulysses. Opposed to marriage, but unable to live together because of moral climate at that time, they move to Trieste and live there for the next ten years. Joyce earns a precarious living teaching English at the Berlitz School of Languages.

1905. Joyce writing stories which are later collected as Dubliners, and Stephen Hero, a novel based on his own early life. Supported by his brother Stanislaus.


James Joyce - biography James Joyce is an acclaimed biography, considered by many to be the definitive account of Joyce’s life and work. Richard Ellmann has a sympathetic grasp of Joyce’s personality. A reverence for his literary accomplishment is balanced by a bemused affection for his weaknesses. Whether Joyce is putting the finishing touches to Ulysses, falling down drunk in the streets of Trieste, or writing erotic messages to his future wife, Ellmann’s account always shows us a genius and a human being. This latest edition has been revised and expanded to include newly discovered primary material, including details of a failed love affair, a limerick about Samuel Beckett, a dream notebook, and previously unknown letters.


1907. Publishes Chamber Music (poems). Financial hardship partly self-induced as a result of erratic and improvident lifestyle. Eyesight problems begin.

1908. Begins revising Stephen Hero. Many unsuccessful attempts to have Dubliners published.

1909. Returns to Dublin and opens the city’s first cinema – the ‘Volta’.

1912. Lectures on Defoe and Blake at Trieste University. Passes Italian state exams to become a teacher. Lectures on Hamlet.

1913. Writes Giacomo Joyce, a novella based on unconsummated affair with one of his language students. Corresponds with American poet Ezra Pound, who begins serialization of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in his magazine the Egoist.

1914. Joyce’s annus mirablis. Publication of Dubliners. Begins writing Ulysses.

1915. Completes Exiles, a play. Family moves to neutral Switzerland during first world war. Zurich important centre for arts, theatre, and political exiles. Awarded a grant (£75) from Royal Literary Fund.

1917. American and English editions of Portrait well received. Further eye operations. Harriet Shaw Weaver begins her financial support which lasts throughout the rest of Joyce’s life: (she even pays for his funeral).

1918. Serialization of Ulysses begins in the American magazine Little Review. Reputation grows. Forms a theatrical group, the English Players, and stages The Importance of Being Earnest.

1919. Copies of Little Review confiscated and burned by US Postal Authorities. Family returns to Trieste.

1920. Family moves to live in Paris for next twenty years. Friendships with Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and T.S.Eliot. Supported by American bookshop owner Sylvia Beech.

1921. Little Review prosecuted by the Society for the Suppression of Vice for publishing extracts from Ulysses. Sylvia Beech offers to publish under the imprint of her bookshop, Shakespeare and Company.

1922. Ulysses printed in Dijon and published on Joyce’s fortieth birthday. Nora refuses to read it.

1923. Writes the first pages of Finnegans Wake. More eye operations fail to save failing sight. Ulysses pirated in America and copies seized by customs in England.

1927. Fragments of the Wake published in small magazines, but work is constantly revised and re-written.

1930. Publication of Stuart Gilbert’s critical study James Joyce’s Ulysses, written with Joyce’s assistance.

1931. Travels to London with Nora to be married ‘for testamentary reasons’ following the death of his father. Daughter Lucia goes mad after falling in love with Samuel Beckett, who was then acting as Joyce’s secretary.

1934. First publication in USA of Ulysses by Random House. Travels to Switzerland to be near Lucia who was in a mental institution. Almost blind, Joyces writes in coloured crayons.

1935. Continues work on Finnegans Wake. (Nora describes it as – “that chop suey he’s writing”).

1936. First publication in UK of Ulysses by Bodley Head.

1939. Finnegans Wake published in London and New York in the year of Joyce’s fifty-seventh birthday.

1941. Following the occupation of France, Joyces move back to neutral Switzerland. Joyce dies after an abdominal operation. (Joyce’s dates 1882-1941 identical to those of Virginia Woolf.)

© Roy Johnson 2004


The Cambridge Companion to James JoyceThe Cambridge Companion to James Joyce contains eleven essays by an international team of leading Joyce scholars. The topics covered include his debt to Irish and European writers and traditions, his life in Paris, and the relation of his work to the ‘modern’ spirit of sceptical relativism. One essay describes Joyce’s developing achievement in his earlier works (Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), while another tackles his best-known text, asking the basic question ‘What is Ulysses about, and how can it be read?’ The issue of ‘difficulty’ raised by Finnegans Wake is directly addressed, and the reader is taken through questions of theme, language, structure and meaning, as well as the book’s composition and the history of Wake criticism.


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James Joyce criticism

September 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a bibliography of criticism and commentary

James Joyce criticism - small portraitHarry Blamires, The New Bloomsday Book, London: Routledge, 1996.

Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, Oxford University Press, 1972.

Anthony Burgess, Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce, Andre Deutsch, 1973.

Robert H. Deming (ed), James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, 2 Vols, Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1970.

Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford University Press, 1959.

Richard Ellman and Stuart Gilbert (eds), The Letters of James Joyce, 3 Vols, Faber, 1957-66.

Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses: a Study, Faber and Faber, 1930.

Seon Givens, James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, N.Y.: Vanguard Press, 1963.

S.C. Goldberg, The Classical Temper, Oxford University Press, 1961.

Suzette A. Henke, James Joyce and the Politics of Desire, Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1990.

Hugh Kenner, Joyce’s Voices, Faber, 1978.

Harry Levin, James Joyce: a Critical Introduction, New York: New Directions, 1960.

Colin MacCabe (ed), James Joyce: New Perspectives, Harvester, 1982.

W.J. McCormack and Alistair Stead (eds), James Joyce and Modern Literature, Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1982.

Patrick Parrinder, James Joyce, Cambridge University Press, 1984.

C.H. Peake, James Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist, Arnold, 1977.

Jean-Michel Rabaté, Joyce Upon the Void, Macmillan, 1991.

Lee Spinks, James Joyce, Edinburgh University Press, 2008.

W.Y. Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce, Thames and Hudson, 1959.


The Cambridge Companion to James JoyceThe Cambridge Companion to James Joyce contains eleven essays by an international team of leading Joyce scholars. The topics covered include his debt to Irish and European writers and traditions, his life in Paris, and the relation of his work to the ‘modern’ spirit of sceptical relativism. One essay describes Joyce’s developing achievement in his earlier works (Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). Another tackles his best-known text, asking the basic question ‘What is Ulysses about, and how can it be read?’ The issue of ‘difficulty’ raised by Finnegans Wake is directly addressed, and the reader is taken through questions of theme, language, structure and meaning, as well as the book’s composition and the history of Wake criticism.
The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce Buy the book here


James Joyce – web links

James Joyce web links James Joyce at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

James Joyce web links James Joyce at Project Gutenberg
A limited collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats.

James Joyce web links James Joyce at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of the major works, religion, music, list of biographies, and external web links.

James Joyce on film James Joyce at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, plus box office, technical credits, and quizzes.

James Joyce exhibition James Joyce Centre in Dublin
Exhibition centre, walking tours, lectures, and newsletter. The latest addition is a graphic novel version of ‘Ulysses’.

James Joyce web links The James Joyce Scholars’ Collection
University of Wisconsin – digitised scans of Finnegans Wake and out-of-print studies on Joyce’s language, plus rare critical studies.

James Joyce web links An Annotated Ulysses
An online version of Ulysses with hyperlinks giving explanations of obscure and classical references in the text.

James Joyce web links Cornell’s James Joyce Collection
Cornell University – a collection of letters, manuscripts, and books documenting the life and work of James Joyce on exhibition in 2005. Particularly strong on Joyce’s early life.

© Roy Johnson 2004


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James Joyce greatest works

September 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

an introduction to the major stories and novels

If you read Joyce’s work in the same order that he wrote it, the sequence forms a perfect James Joyce tutorial. His early writing is simple and easy to understand, then it gradually becomes more complex as he experimented with the possibilities of language. Be prepared to extend the range of your vocabulary, to discover prose blended with poetry, and to encounter amazingly inventive word-play in the later work. Joyce’s writing was also considered quite scandalous when it first appeared, because it is critical of religion and frank about sexual matters.

DublinersDubliners is his first major work – a ground-breaking collection of short stories in which he strips away all the decorations and flourishes of late Victorian prose style. What remains is a sparse yet lyrical exposure of small moments of revelation – which he called ‘epiphanies’. Like other modernists, such as Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, Joyce minimised the dramatic element of the short story in favour of symbolic meaning and a more static aesthetic. This collection of vignettes features both real and imaginary figures in Dublin life around the turn of the century. The collection ends with the most famous of all Joyce’s stories – ‘The Dead’. It caused controversy when it first appeared, and was the first of many of Joyce’s works to be banned in his native country. Dubliners is now widely regarded as a seminal collection of modern short stories. New readers should start here.
James Joyce greatest works Dubliners Buy the book at Amazon UK
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James Joyce greatest works A Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce’s first complete novel – a largely autobiographical account of a young man’s struggle with Catholicism and his desire to forge himself as an artist. It features a prose style whose complexity develops in parallel with the growth of the hero, Stephen Dedalus. The early pages are written from a child’s point of view, but then they quickly become more sophisticated. As Stephen struggles with religious belief and the growth of his sexual feelings as a young adult, the prose become more complex and philosophical. In addition to the account of his personal life and a critique of Irish society at the beginning of the last century, it also incorporates the creation of an aesthetic philosophy which was unmistakably that of Joyce himself. The novel ends with Stephen quitting Ireland for good, just as Joyce himself was to do – never to return.
James Joyce greatest works A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Buy the book at Amazon UK
James Joyce greatest works A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Buy the book at Amazon US

 

James Joyce greatest works UlyssesUlysses (1922) is one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, and it is certainly Joyce’s most celebrated work. He takes Homer’s Odyssey as a structural framework and uses it as the base to create a complex story of characters moving around Dublin on a single day in June 1904. Each separate chapter is written in a different prose style to reflect its theme or subject. The novel also includes two forms of the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique. This was Joyce’s attempt to reproduce the apparently random way in which our perceptions of the world are mixed with our conscious ideas and memories in an unstoppable flow of thought. There is a famous last chapter which is an eighty page unpunctuated soliloquy of a woman as she lies in bed at night, mulling over the events of her life and episodes from the previous day.
James Joyce greatest works Ulysses Buy the book at Amazon UK
James Joyce greatest works Ulysses Buy the book at Amazon US

 

James Joyce greatest works Finnegans WakeFinnegans Wake is famous in literary circles as a great novel which almost no one has ever read. Joyce said that he spent seventeen years of his life writing Finnegans Wake and that he expected readers to spend the rest of their lives trying to understand it. It continues where Ulysses leaves off in terms of linguistic complexity. Written and rewritten many times over, Joyce eventually decided to incorporate many languages other than English into the narrative. It is a fantastic crossword-puzzle of puns, parodies, jokes and linguistic invention which make enormous intellectual demands on the reader. This, in addition to the many arcane references and a very complex narrative make Finnegans Wake a literary experiment which has never been surpassed. It is one of the great unread masterpieces of twentieth century literature.
James Joyce greatest works Finnegans Wake Buy the book at Amazon UK
James Joyce greatest works Finnegans Wake Buy the book at Amazon US

 


The Cambridge Companion to James JoyceThe Cambridge Companion to James Joyce contains eleven essays by an international team of leading Joyce scholars. The topics covered include his debt to Irish and European writers and traditions, his life in Paris, and the relation of his work to the ‘modern’ spirit of sceptical relativism. One essay describes Joyce’s developing achievement in his earlier works (Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). Another tackles his best-known text, asking the basic question ‘What is Ulysses about, and how can it be read?’ The issue of ‘difficulty’ raised by Finnegans Wake is directly addressed, and the reader is taken through questions of theme, language, structure and meaning, as well as the book’s composition and the history of Wake criticism.
The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce Buy the book at Amazon US


James Joyce – web links

James Joyce web links James Joyce at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

James Joyce web links James Joyce at Project Gutenberg
A limited collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats.

James Joyce web links James Joyce at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of the major works, religion, music, list of biographies, and external web links.

James Joyce on film James Joyce at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, plus box office, technical credits, and quizzes.

James Joyce exhibition James Joyce Centre in Dublin
Exhibition centre, walking tours, lectures, and newsletter. The latest addition is a graphic novel version of ‘Ulysses’.

James Joyce web links The James Joyce Scholars’ Collection
University of Wisconsin – digitised scans of Finnegans Wake and out-of-print studies on Joyce’s language, plus rare critical studies.

James Joyce web links An Annotated Ulysses
An online version of Ulysses with hyperlinks giving explanations of obscure and classical references in the text.

James Joyce web links Cornell’s James Joyce Collection
Cornell University – a collection of letters, manuscripts, and books documenting the life and work of James Joyce on exhibition in 2005. Particularly strong on Joyce’s early life.

© Roy Johnson 2004


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Filed Under: James Joyce Tagged With: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, Finnegans Wake, James Joyce, Literary studies, Modernism, Ulysses

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