Introduction

The Dublin James Joyce Journal has been established as a new venue for Joycean criticism. It is designed as an outlet for the work developed and produced by the UCD James Joyce Research Centre at its graduate conferences, research colloquia, workshops, public lecture series, and yearly Summer School and as a destination for the essays and findings of its associates in the widespread international community of Joycean academics. It will be published annually in conjunction with the National Library of Ireland. A further ambition of this new journal is to make available critical essays that will be accessible not only to university-based scholars and students of Joyce but also to that large-scale general audience who read his work outside the academy.

It is evident in recent years that analysis of Joyce's texts has taken several compelling and rewarding new directions. Increasingly, scholarship has turned to the rich resources of the archive in an endeavour to scrutinize and pinpoint the often elusive material and historical dimensions of his writing. Investigation of the social and political contexts of Joyce's fiction uncovers its indebtedness to an eclectic web of foundational but often ephemeral documents and raises many questions about how we interpret such a multi-layered and wayward textuality. Additionally, through the advent and growth in influence of genetic criticism, attention has latterly been redirected to the complex creative processes underlying Joyce's works. The acquisition of new manuscript material by several institutions - most prominently the National Library of Ireland - has made it possible to track the evolution of Joyce's texts and to begin to apprehend their fluidity, randomness, quirky referentiality, and protean qualities in unexpected and illuminating ways.

This first issue of the Dublin James Joyce Journal features a diverse array of work by Irish or Dublin-based Joyce scholars. Several of the contributions act as vital correctives to received views of aspects of Joyce's writing. Christine O'Neill's essay tracks the reception of Joyce by one of his most urbane and astute early readers, the Irish poet, architect, and critic, Niall Montgomery. She shows how Montgomery was alert to the radicalism of Joyce's narratives while also being ready to question some of the truisms set in motion by the author himself by which they are perennially apprehended, such as the belief that they faithfully capture the built environment of Dublin. In her exploration of late nineteenth-century popular culture in Ireland, Stephanie Rains uncovers the social and economic dimensions of the Araby Bazaar held in the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) in 1894. Her detailed investigation reveals the degree to which Joyce not only replicates particulars of this event in 'Araby' but also rearranges them to suit the nuances of his plot. Terence Killeen, for his part, casts dramatic new light on Alfred H. Hunter, the supposed inspiration for Leopold Bloom. He exposes how spurious biographical facts have accumulated around the figure of Hunter in the biographical ruminations of Richard Ellmann and Hugh Kenner. Drawing on freshly available information contained in the 1911 Irish census, he assembles a new profile for him that reliably establishes facets of his background and refutes the once-popular view that he was Jewish. Yet, tellingly, it emerges that the historical Hunter still has much in common with his fictional counterpart.

Cóilín Owens's thorough and probing account of 'After the Race' uncovers how this story which seemingly concentrates on a venal modernity is haunted by the figure of Robert Emmet and underwritten by the commemorative events that marked the centenary of his death in 1903. Seen in this manner, the story becomes a palimpsest in which the scenes of Emmet's rebellion and trial, the memorial route followed by the centenary processions, and the course of the Gordon Bennett car race through the centre of Dublin are overlaid and interfused. These interanimating temporalities, moreover, are at the root of many of the tacit references and allusions in this tale and form the shifting grounds on which we assess its characters. Malcolm Sen subjects to scrutiny the problematic representation of the Orient in Ulysses. His robust analysis...