Passing on the Theme of Creative Renewal to Joyce's Many Readers

Abstract

Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2013. viii, 160 pp. $74.95 cloth.Renascent Joyce highlights the theme of creative renewal in Joyce's writings. This theme involves several strands of Joyce's writing and reception: his attempts to go beyond Ireland's cultural heritage by turning to a past of his own choosing, his creative process, and the translation of his works. The best essays in this volume follow the thread of looking to history for inspiration rather than to excavate a "truth." The organization of the book -its turn towards examining the creative process -also suggests that the spirit of Renaissance writers' relationship to the ancients is deeply analogous to contemporary readers' relationship to modernism, particularly modernism's closest readers: literary critics.