'James Joyce's Geographies of Reading: Trieste-Zurich-Paris'.

Ulysses (1922) is among the cardinal texts of literary modernism. As an émigré Irishman living on the Continent during and immediately after the First World War, James Joyce wrote the novel in 'Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921', as its final line famously proclaims. Academic criticism has suffered, however, from focusing too narrowly on the individuals and social networks to which this European itinerary introduced the writer. Moreover, while generations of readers have noted the densely allusive nature of the novel, they have entirely overlooked the role that Joyce's migrations played in creating this multilayered, reiterative effect. My project unites place with the page. By focusing on the changing accesses to print culture that Joyce had in neutral Zurich, wartime and post-war Trieste, and peacetime Paris, I trace the immediate impact that relocation around Europe had on Ulysses. What books could have crossed Joyce's desk while he was reading and researching? What itineraries or trajectories did his reading material follow? My analysis relies on recent changes in our own access to the twentieth-century print record, brought on by the mass digitization underway since the turn of the millennium. The project combines over a decade of original research on Joyce's prepublication dossier with new insights gleaned from book history and the application of database technologies to literary manuscripts in order to explain how and why certain texts contributed directly to Ulysses.

Keywords:JAMES JOYCE

Disciplines:Language studies, Literary studies, Theory and methodology of language studies, Theory and methodology of linguistics, Theory and methodology of literary studies, Other languages and literary studies