Joyce World-Wide Intertext

Internet search engines have radically transformed the study of the intertextual nature of literary works. The ever-widening web of Google Books has made the hunt for Joyce's possible sources a lot less arduous, as the work on the Finnegans Wake notebooks has shown. A group of Wake scholars has been able to add greatly to the list of sources that had been identified by Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer, and Geert Lernout in their paper edition of the Wake notebooks. In addition, a few examples from Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man demonstrate what internet search engines can accomplish, although it is essential to realize that, in this kind of work, critical discernment remains essential.