James Joyce in the Nineteenth Century ed. by John Nash (review)

Not “Joyce and” but “Joyce in.” James Joyce was born in the nineteenth century and, against its fin-de-siècle atmosphere, he lost both his virginity and his faith. What, if anything, did he find in the nineteenth century and take from it? A great deal we already know: Charles Stewart Parnell, Oscar Wilde, Henrik Ibsen, The Fortnightly Review, Romantic poetry, songs, W. B. Yeats’s lyrics, neo-Thomist rationalism, doubt, nationalism, and impoverishment. To that familiar barrage, this collection adds a welcome set of contexts, all either entirely new perspectives or new ones on already established topics: Irish fiction (especially George Moore), epochalism, insurance, advertising, milk, liberalism, philology, Darwinism, Queen Victoria, and lanternism.

The collection is wary about the question of Joyce’s influences, and the negotiation of the project goes back and forth in John Nash’s introduction. He is understandably unwilling to explore whether Joyce was “all along a late-Victorian” and eager instead to examine the “depth and range of [his] complex inheritances from, and inhabitation of, key literary, intellectual and cultural issues that were prominent in the nineteenth century” (2). Such an aim is surely too large for a single volume, let alone a single collection. A more modest and original goal is to show that “the modernity of Joyce lies not only in his prescient anticipation of cultural change and his undoubted influence and originality. It lies also in his past” (5). But the essays “do not seek to argue that the Victorians were already moderns” (7). The stress on finding conceptual coherence for the collection is unnecessary; its diversity is a strength, and there is not a weak essay in it. The whole compilation is unified by a set of “firmly historical” approaches (4). The editorial arrangement of the book is exemplary, with plenty of cross-references noted by the contributors. The historical approach is confident but also unquestioned and at points questionable, making it an example, perhaps, of late new historicism.

The volume as a whole is a commendable mix of familiar, well-known scholars (Emer Nolan, Luke Gibbons, Andrew Gibson, and Nash himself) and emerging voices (five of the contributors were Ph.D. students when they presented earlier versions of their chapters). It is organized into three sections, the first and third of which overlap: “The Politics of Form in Ireland” (17–76); “Public and Private Economies” (77–148); and “Formal Adaptations” (149–234). Nolan starts things off by entering the complex and relatively uncharted field in Joycean criticism of Joyce’s relation to the nineteenth-century Irish novel by including a comparison of Knocknagow with Dubliners.¹ Its conclusion—that Joyce learned from Irish novelists how to investigate “the novel in its relationship to modern society”—is too large and unsubstantiated a contention, however (29). Some evidence for Nolan’s claim is forthcoming in the next essay, in which Gibbons reads free indirect discursive styles in Irish fiction before Joyce, especially in Moore. For Gibbons, the Irish context explains a sharper political edge to the technique than had been previously asserted. Such a national(ist) perspective underestimates an older, subversive tradition in fiction (and drama) of setting vernacular and official discourses polyvocally against each other. This is in close dialogue with the next contribution in the collection by Richard Robinson. Robinson usefully reminds us of the way Dubliners and Moore’s The Untilled Field “mediate between naturalist and symbolist forms of objectivity” and points to the pathos of damaged voices struggling within and against their translation into “‘very fine’ writing” (59).²

Gibson, in what he calls a “codicil” to a chapter of his recent Strong Spirit,³ pays attention to a contrarian—almost reactionary—young Joyce, as he resisted more progressive epochalism at the turn of the century (73 n23). There is also some valuable contextualization of Mihály Munkácsy’s painting Ecce Homo in Joyce’s writings (CW 31–37). Gibson expresses surprise at Joyce’s focus...