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ELT 39:4 1996 works, concluding with the Festy King trial, its predecessors in Joyce and Wilde, and their connection of the juridical with the comedie. No brief review can begin to explore the depths and particulars of this dense, ingenious book. It has to be read, assimilated, discussed, and then reread, as I think it surely will by the Joyce community. It opened new areas for me and its influence will be long-lasting. Zack Bowen ___________ University of Miami The Economies of Ulysses Mark Osteen. The Economy of 'Ulysses': Making Both Ends Meet. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995. 472 pp. $39.95 I THINK IT was George Bernard Shaw who said, with reference to someone's book, that the covers were too far apart. This was my impression on beginning to read Mark Osteen's The Economy of 'Ulysses ': Making Both Ends Meet. At nearly 500 pages, it is twice the length of most critical books published today by university presses; and given that its subject is a single text (albeit long and difficult), I am tempted to accuse the author of the very excess that he discovers in that text. Happily, Shaw's quip would be inappropriate, for Osteen's arguably magisterial study of the economies of Ulysses both sheds new light on the problem of narrative and narration in Joyce's text and redefines—via the many metaphors of economics, accountancy, bookkeeping and giftexchange —the critical tradition surrounding it. In a sense, the economy of Osteen's study mimics that which he finds in Ulysses: a paradoxical mixture of scrupulous husbanding of information (marked by a tendency to find synthesis, unity, and fusion at various levels of the text) and extravagant expenditure (marked by a tendency toward repetition and incremental layering of economic metaphors). This is a way of saying that this study may have to be long, for aesthetic if not for analytical reasons. In many respects, this book represents the dovetailing of two critical communities—Irish Studies and Joyce Studies—that have in recent years discovered each other. Published by Syracuse University Press, it takes its place in a distinguished Irish Studies series that is as concerned with Irish sociology, politics and history as it is with Irish literature. Osteen's book is thus filled with illuminating set-pieces on Irish economics (including forgery and counterfeiting), business, politics, and sociology . At the same time, it typifies the kind of study that we have come to 510 BOOK REVIEWS expect from the Joyce community—a painstakingly (and sometimes painfully) detailed close reading of Ulysses that seeks both to exhaust the text's meaning and to argue that it is, finally, inexhaustible. One thinks of Marilyn French's The Book as World or C. H. Peake's James Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist (both 1977) that seek to "make sense" of Ulysses by employing elaborate models of reading in order to find balance, symmetry and, finally, coherent (dare I say unified?) meaning. The 1980s yielded studies like Karen Lawrence's Odyssey of Style and John Paul Riquelme's The Teller and the Tale in Joyce's Fiction that, while aiming for a similarly "deep" reading, nevertheless concede at the outset (and throughout) that no single model can contain the possible meanings generated by Ulysses. For some years now, studies of Joyce have been less concerned with "magisterial" close analysis and more concerned with topoi (e.g., history, representation, masochism, colonialism ), often leaning more towards culture studies than to the "traditional " Joycean monograph. Indeed, if Osteen's book has a single structural flaw, it could be found in his return to a monograph style that dutifully covers all eighteen episodes and leaves the impression that no stone has been left unturned. But having noted this, it must be said (and here I find myself resorting to a rhetorical flourish that wends its way throughout this study) that what might be construed as a structural flaw is paradoxically the means by which Osteen presents his most interesting material. That is to say, his argument requires that he demonstrate the pervasiveness of economic metaphors in Ulysses, and the only way to do that (presumably) is through close reading...

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