Joyce & History

ELT 41 : 2 1998 as yet, no in-depth scholarship on H.D.'s lengthy, Pre-Raphaelite novels . . . and H.D.'s consuming interest in William Morris has yet to be explored." The author is over-generous and needlessly self-deprecating; she has made admirable progress on all the fronts she describes. Her reading of H.D. is a sufficient accomplishment, and her attempt to suggest otherwise in her last paragraph and in her unnecessary "Postscript " seems childishly feminine and even silly. Having begun her book with a discussion of male modernism's attitudes towards Decadent Romanticism, she is apparently compelled by the shape of her argument to conclude—logically but superfluously—in her work's last sentence that "apart from giving us insight into female strategies for subverting patriarchy, which I have attempted to do here, studying the woman writer may also teach us about the _feminine' desires, subterfuges, and secrets of her male contemporaries." Laity has no need to defend "studying the woman writer"; if such a case were needed in 1997, her own eloquent reading of H.D. has in itself made a case for doing so. Caroline Zilboorg __________________ Cambridge University Joyce & History Mark A. Wollaeger, Victor Luftig, and Robert Spoo, eds., Joyce and the Subject of History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. 248 pp. $44.50 DURING the 1970s and 1980s, much significant critical work engaged in theorizing Joyce's use of language. The 1990s have seen a concerted effort to establish a relation between "Joyce" and "history." As Mark Wollaeger, Victor Luftig, and Robert Spoo observe in their introduction to Joyce and the Subject of History, "much historical work remains surprisingly undertheorized and much theoretical work excludes the heterogeneous detail and rigor of serious historical research." The aim of this volume is to bridge that gap "without settling into any of the easily routinized conventions of established models for literary historical scholarship." From a variety of critical perspectives related to cultural studies, New Historicism, and post-Marxist critique, and using notions of theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari, Bakhtin, de Certeau, Jameson, and Bhabha as points of departure, the contributors to this volume offer eleven essays that explore the ideological implications of historical representations in Joyce's fictions. Spoo's 29-page annotated bibliography of criticism on Joyce and history concludes Joyce and the Subject 230 Book reviews of History. The idea for the collection grew out of the 1990 "Joyce and History" conference, and some papers presented upon that occasion appear in this volume, most often in expanded and updated form. These include essays by Fritz Senn, Cheryl Herr, Victor Luftig, and Daniel Moshenberg as well as Spoo's bibliography. Essays by R. B. Kershner, Garry Leonard, Vicki Mahaffey, Margot Norris, and Joseph Valente are new, written specifically for the volume. The Spoo and Wollaeger essays have been expanded and/or revised. Scholars and students from a broad range of interests, including modernism, Joyce, twentieth-century literature, Irish studies, and historical models of literary study, will find Joyce and the Subject of History stimulating and helpful. The essays are arranged in three parts. Those in Part 1, Critical and Theoretical Prospects, introduce broad issues in the historical criticism of modernism as these pertain to Joyce studies; Part 2 examines Ulysses in terms of historical concerns; Part 3 concentrates on Finnegans Wake as it offers "a present of the past" as well as "a history of the future." In describing the essays I will focus on one significant line of thought for the sake of clarity and brevity. Opening Part 1, Garry Leonard's essay explores what relation the ephemera that so interested Joyce bear to history and suggests that such objects enable Joyce to present "the history of the everyday," that which disappears "before being historicized ." Brandon Kershner compares Joyce's Portrait to Christy Brown's Down All the Days (1970), both identified as subversive bildungsromans, to consider the implications "for our own construction of history" that though the two novels construct related subjectivities for their major characters, each construction rests upon very different premises that draw upon their respective periods of modernism and postmodernism. Fritz Senn reminds us that when...