Joycean Cultures, Culturing Joyces

Book excerpt: This volume presents a cultural criticism that analyzes the politics, art, fashion, and constructions of the body inscribed and transcribed in the Joycean text. The essays illustrate the dynamic interaction of art, culture, and criticism. They simultaneously explore the impact that Joyce's own culture, both high and low, had on his art, while assessing Joyce's reciprocal influence on our own contemporary culture. Following the paths of a long and pluralistic tradition of Joyce criticism, the new methodologies in this volume create, or culture, a new Joyce for the nineties.