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  • Journey Westward: Joyce, “Dubliners,” and the Literary Revival by Frank Shovlin
  • Oona Frawley (bio)
JOURNEY WESTWARD: JOYCE, “DUBLINERS,” AND THE LITERARY REVIVAL, by Frank Shovlin. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012. 180 pp. £65.00 cloth, £19.95 paper.

The tendency, in Joyce criticism, to focus analysis overwhelmingly on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake derives from the sense that these texts most reward attention. Ulysses and the Wake, the assumption goes, pay dividends to the close reader, the academic sleuth, and the [End Page 879] cultural historian, not to mention the linguist, the scholar of ancient classics, and the obsessed amateur. The works’ length, of course, and their sheer density have confirmed the “rightness” of the tendency. An additional factor is the works’ maturity: Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are the penultimate and ultimate, the fruit of Joyce’s lifetime of labors to upend the literary world.

Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, along with the juvenilia, poetry, essays, and letters, have often been seen, as a result, as the preserve of the lesser scholar; a profound sense of machismo is attached to working on the Wake. Dubliners, in particular, with its seemingly simple language and its inability to escape the high-school-syllabus reading of the stories as a progression from boyhood to manhood to public life—how easily we rehearse this!—has remained a comparatively underexplored text that many believe to have yielded its secrets, declared them, in fact, on the very first page. In recent years, however, there has been a change in attitude about and attention to Joyce’s earliest published book of fiction.

Stand-out essays in the last few years have forced us to reconsider the relationship of individual stories to aspects of cultural history; edited collections like Vicki Mahaffey’s Collaborative “Dubliners”: Joyce in Dialogue have featured top scholars in a reengagement with stories they thought they knew well.1 Frank Shovlin joins this growing body of academics who return to Dubliners as the first site, and the one that can be read retrospectively, in light of all that we have learned about the later texts. The result, here, is a compelling and curious book that offers not only the opportunity to revisit Dubliners but the chance to situate its writing and publication alongside the work and ideology of both major and minor figures of the Irish literary revival.

In his introduction, Shovlin outlines his goals:

The west, it goes without saying, was the revivalists’ Utopia, location of Yeats’s Innisfree, Synge’s Aran and Lady Gregory’s Kiltartan. One of the things that this study will stress is that Joyce, too, was interested in what lay beyond the Shannon, but for rather more historically grounded, and sometimes more personal, reasons than those romantic, mythological considerations so close to Yeats’s heart. … Suggesting that Joyce’s stories are more complicated than has hitherto generally been understood, Journey Westward, via a series of close readings of often overlooked moments, tries to locate Dubliners in its appropriate cultural and historical contexts.

(3)

Shovlin thus aligns himself with the more general trend in Joyce studies of recent decades that has sought to assess and situate Joyce in relation to Ireland; the frequent invocation of critics like Kevin Whelan, Emer Nolan, and Andrew Gibson indicates that Shovlin is, like them, attempting to reassess the presence of Joyce’s attitudes [End Page 880] towards Irish cultural nationalism, to events of Irish history, and to establish his anti-imperialist tendencies.2 Journey Westward “aims to demonstrate how Dubliners, through a series of subtle historical and literary allusions, goes about reacting to the conqueror. Despite all his misgivings about Ireland’s long national struggle, both political and cultural, Joyce retains a deep-seated desire to commemorate the defeated Irish dead” (11). If Joyce embeds within his fiction any number of commemorations and memorial acts, Shovlin’s book also functions as an act of cultural memory in its retrieval of social and historical narratives attached to phrases, names, places, and songs that Joyce deploys. Journey Westward thus is part of a growing area in Joyce studies with cultural memorial concerns.

Shovlin’s first chapter, “‘Endless stories about...

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