James Joyce And The Language Of History

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: All the more welcome ... is the emphasis on form in Robert Spoo's James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus' nightmare. Times Literary Supplement As its subtitle suggests, this study is not just an analysis of historical energies in Joyce; it is also a radical rehabiliation of Stephen Dedalus as the figure whose intellectual concerns anchor the formalistic battles of Ulysses ... artfully controlled, painstaking and consistently erudite. Times Literary Supplement clever, interesting, lucid, engagingly modest book ... It offers us a Joyce intently preoccupied with history as ideological construction, with the orthodoxies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historiography. Perhaps the most impressive features of Spoo's book are the erudition and precision with which it supplies the relevant contexts ... an engrossing book. Andrew Gibson, James Joyce Broadsheet, Number 47, June 1997