James Joyce and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel

Book excerpt: The essays of this volume show how Joyce’s work engaged with the many upheavals and revolutions within the French nineteenth-century novel and its contexts. They delve into the complexities of this engagement, tracing its twists and turns, and reemerge with fascinating and rich discoveries. The contributors explore Joyce’s explicit and implicit responses to Alexandre Dumas, Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo and Émile Zola and, of course, Flaubert. Drawing from the wide range of Joyce’s writings - Dubliners, A Portrait., Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and his life, letters, and essays - they resituate Joyce’s relation to France, the novel, and the nineteenth century.