Joyce Companion

ELT: VOLUME 34:4, 1991 to the editing of previously unpublished material. Moore claims to have "let Firbank have his way as often as possible" and to have corrected only the "more egregious errors." Yet, spot comparisons between Moore's text and that of The New Rythum, the posthumously published miscellany edited by Alan Harris, reveal numerous differences in spelling, punctuation , and sentence structure. Either Moore or Harris has silently emended the material, but Moore offers no explanation as to which. These are small matters to the general reader but serious stuff to the textual scholar, especially since Firbank, more than many writers, has suffered from the sloppy reproduction of his texts (even the recent Penguin edition of The Flower Beneath the Foot contains a high number of typos for so short a novel). One also wonders why Moore follows the French text of "La Princesse aux Soleils" with a translation by Edgell Rickword instead of Firbank's own English version. In Alan Ansen's recently published The Table Talk of W. H. Auden, we have proof of what many of us Firbank devotees have long suspectedthat Auden admired Firbank's fiction and acknowledged its influence on his own work (try reading "Miss Gee" without thinking of Firbank). So great was his admiration that Auden even entertained the idea of editing a Viking Portable edition of Firbank's work. As a Firbank fan, I am wont to wish that Auden's "unbook" had been the subject of this review. For Auden, the fellow exile, could have led many new readers to the delights of Ronald Firbank, and done himself no harm in the process. Sarah Barnhill Global Southeastern International Education Consultants Brevard, North Carolina Joyce Companion Derek Attridge, ed. The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 305 pp. $45.00 IF ASKED, most new-comers to Joyce would undoubtedly point to the plethora of Joyce criticism, and not to the author's difficult texts, as the primary impediment to reading. The obstacle presented by the great mountains of writing about Joyce—everything from traditional close readings to theoretical investigations, background and source studies to politically-oriented criticism—is sure to intimidate if not discourage the uninitiated. Many novice readers of this author will therefore welcome 492 Book Reviews The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, a volume "offered as a first resort for those who wish to deepen and extend their enjoyment and understanding of Joyce's writing" without having to traverse the scholarly mountains. Edited by Derek Attridge, this volume is the first text since Bernard Benstock's James Joyce (1985) and Zack Bowen's and James F. Carens's A Companion to Joyce Studies (1986) to consider the entirety of Joyce's canon without a single specialized focus. Yet this volume claims to have another difference that makes a difference. Unlike the others, this collection is based on the notion that this "most international of writers in English" is best discussed in a series of essays by an international team of Joyce scholars—from the United States, Canada, Ireland, England, Germany, and France. Moreover , many chapters of this volume emphasize "the interconnectedness of all Joyce's productions: not just the way the early texts prefigure the later texts, but the way the later texts rewrite the early texts," while other chapters "deal with some of the most significant historical contexts within which Joyce's writing takes on its manifold meanings, with the problems and rewards of reading Joyce's texts, with the processes through which those texts came into existence, and with Joyce's place in the intellectual and political movements of the century." Attridge includes five essays of contextual criticism: Klaus Reichert considers "The European Background of Joyce's Writing," Jean-Michel Rabaté discusses "Joyce the Parisian," Karen Lawrence addresses "Joyce and Feminism," Christopher Butler ponders "Joyce, Modernism and PostModernism ," and Seamus Deane writes on "Joyce the Irishman." Deane's fascinating piece focuses on the author's complex and problematic relation to the Irish Revival. For example, is it more appropriate to view Joyce, de facto, as a key element of this revival or, rather, as an unrelenting critic of it? For Deane...