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31:4 Book Reviews Although he surveys a great number of writers, major and minor alike, it is probably in the chapters dealing with Yeats, Synge, Moore, and Joyce that his judgments will prove most influential. The analysis of Synge's The Aran Islands as an attempt to recover primal unity, a journey to self-discovery in which "the writer is his own romantic hero," is one of the best readings of that book that I have seen. Foster is astute in recognizing the island's symbolism as "the pared habitat of self and in noting the ambiguity of Synge's position among the Aran Islanders: Reading The Aran Islands, we accompany Synge in the painful process of discovering himself, not as one with the islanders, as the pressures of the revival suggest he do (or suggest he assert ), but as a man cut off from them as he is from his sophisticated fellows, a man whose stay on the islands merely confirms his feeling of ultimate and eternal isolation. (106) Likewise, the 33-page chapter devoted to Joyce's "The Dead" is suggestive in its tracing of Gabriel Conroy's situation. Foster argues that Gabriel is unwittingly "suspended between two Irelands vying for supremacy": the "sentimentally recollected Dublin" of the Ascendancy, associated with the Act of Union, and the "sentimentally imagined Gaelic-speaking west," associated with Catholic Emancipation and Irish cultural separation from Britain. At the end of the story, however, Gabriel transcends not only his own situation but all the "exclusive viewpoints" that limit and separate the other characters in the story. In his vision of the snow he reaches a high level of self-awareness, thereby achieving the true goal of all journeys westward during the Revival. Foster's reading of Joyce is quite original, and if it does not replace more standard readings it certainly gives us one more legitimate perspective from which to view "The Dead." AU in all, Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival is a worthy addition to the Irish Studies series at Syracuse. Both as a set of readings of individual works and as a study of the Revival's ideological discourse, this is a volume of genuine significance. No one who lectures or writes on modem Irish literature can afford to ignore it. Patrick A. McCarthy ____________________________________University of Miami JOYCE AND SYLVIA BEACH James Joyce's Letters to Sylvia Beach, 1921-1940. Eds. Melissa Banta and Oscar A. Silverman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. $25.00 Sylvia Beach was an important, perhaps even a vital, figure in the shaping of Joyce's literary career. As the owner oi Shakespeare and Company bookstore and the eventual publisher of Ulysses, Ms. Beach helped to launch Joyce, only to 499 31:4 Book Reviews find herself being pressed into service to run his endless enands, to lend him pocket money, to give him a sympathetic ear and a supportive hand. That she gave much more than she received is true enough, although it is also true that had she not been mid-wife to Ulysses, Beach would likely have faded into the obscurity of footnote. This volume joins others—principally, Noel Riley Fitch's Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation (1983) and Shari Benstock's Women of the Left Bank (1986)—in making it clear, and between hard covers, precisely how important she was for modem letters. Still, one lives life in the day-to-day, and it is here that Joyce's letters reveal just how exasperating the quotidian must have been for Beach. The Banta and Silverman edition gives us the whole record: 200+ letters, along with postcards, telegrams, verses, and other extraneous material. Only thirteen of these letters had been published previously. James Joyce's Letters to Sylvia Beach is, therefore, an important book, not only because it documents the extraordinary anangements and difficulties that led to the publication of Ulysses, but also because Joyce's urgent requests that Beach supply him with this or that book reveal much about his intellectual landscape. That said, however, some caveats are in order: those who look forward to letters that crackle with Joycean wit, with the elaborate puns and playful misspellings that were...

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