A Companion to Joyce's "Ulysses": Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History and Essays (Companion to James Joyce Ulysses) [Paperback]

Professor Margot Norris of Irvine has written several very well received analyses of the works of James JOyce and their place in literary and political history, including Suspicious Readings of Joyce's Dubliners, The Decentered Universe of Finnegan's Wake: A Structuralist Analysis, the ahistoricity of which she later repudiates in another commentary, and the iconoclastically revolutionary commentary Joyce's Web: The Social Unraveling of Modernism (Literary Modernism Series). Another of Prof. Norris's landmark studies for any serious student of literature must be her essential Writing War in the Twentieth Century, which, passing through WWI and Hemingway, concludes with press censorship in the Persian Gulf War or Bush War One, as she examines how and why writers have been unable to effectively deal with the question of war in the modern world, including after the Bomb, and how and why writing strategies have been monopolized for the service of war making.

Pardon that brief introduction of Prof. Norris's remarkable work in order to set a context for her editting this current volume of criticism from various methods and perspectives of James Joyce's Ulysses, including her own feminist approach which notwithstanding retains its balance and perspective and appreciation of Joyce's subtle use of irony and subtexts in creating a subversively liberated literature.

Being an over 250 page volume of such varied yet profund literary criticisms, there is a portal here for nearly everyone to enter and feel comfortably challenged to deeper appreciation and understanding. Then, once safely inside this Joycean smorgasbord, you may browse to find absolutely new perspectives for comprehending more fully the gleaming cut gem which is Ulysses, voted the greatest novel of the twentieth century, a mystery of comprehension which only expands and leads on to hunger for more.

Prof. Norris has done here a great yet economical service for any student of James Joyce, both advanced and initiate, rendering what might seem unconnected and even unintelligible logical and clear and joyful. Ulysses after all has some of the most delicious jokes in all of literature, if we only have the ears to hear. The parodistic style of the later episodes in particular are a scream. Norris and company here open our ears and our minds to appreciate gratefully and happily what we are missing.

If you can get only one commentary on Ulysses kindly consider this one as a welcome opening. I have read several and this one seems to me like a great place to start, and to stay, and to read the slippery mysterious novel a million times more, while holding firmly the strong and wise hand of Prof. Norris, as Dante did Virgil, or more properly Beatrice.

Other contributers of note include Derrida on deconstruction, Devlin from a psychoanalytic perspective, and Patrick McGee on ULysses in the light of Marxist ethics.

Highly recommended and I have already ordered a second reading copy, as my first got caught outside last night with me in a heavy nightfall desert hailstorm, as I could not leave home without it, and it got soaked even inside the safety of my knapsack. Very valuable and welcome friend and helpmate in the rocky road of Ulysses. Get one and awaken.

It is an extremely detailed critique of ''Ulysses'' on many different levels but it also is a compendium of the various critical methods used in modern literatore as a whole.All contributors are obviously experts in their particular areas. The book itself was in excellent condition and despatched promptly.

I am still digesting "Ulysses." I read it while walking around Dublin a few years ago. It was marvelous to trace the steps of Leopold and Molly, and to see what they "saw," but the novel remains a distant pleasure to the reader. I must admit it is not the most accessible book ever written, but it gets four stars for its intent ... and that it is better than "Finnegan's Wake." Be warned: This novel is not for the casual reader. This is one of several excellent accompaniments to "Ulysses" and well worth the price and the time to compare against Joyce.