The Scandal of Ulysses: The Sensational Life of a Twentieth-Century Masterpiece - Softcover

Arnold, Bruce

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312093799 ISBN 13: 9780312093792

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1993

Synopsis

Long before its first publication, Ulysses, the greatest novel of the twentieth century, was the cause of scandal. James Joyce's prose was denounced as obscene, and the book was banned in the United States and Great Britain. Controversy surrounded the work throughout Joyce's lifetime, and he claimed that the book would keep scholars busy for centuries.
Joyce was right. The book has become a veritable minefield for scholars, and has led to one of the world's most lucrative literary industries. In The Scandal of Ulysses, Bruce Arnold compellingly traces the life of Ulysses from its inception, through the great publication scandals of the 1920s and 1930s, and concludes with a lengthy examination of the copyright wars that have engulfed the book in recent years.
In this, the most complete history of Ulysses written to date, Arnold draws a vivid portrait of Dublin, London, and Paris in the period between the two great wars, through which we gain a more complete understanding of both early conflicts and more recent ones.
Chief among these is Ulysses: The Corrected Text, which was hailed as the ideal version of the book when it appeared in 1986, and its German editor, Hans Walter Gable, as a brilliant scholar who had restored Joyce to the reading public in as near perfect a version as was possible. Two years later, he was publicly denounced by John Kidd, a young American Joyce scholar, and one of the most ferocious literary controversies of recent times erupted.
Joyceans worldwide were deeply divided over the merits and defects of the new edition. Arguments against the Gabler version grew in volume. The earlier 1961 Ulysses was restored to the market place. New publishers came forward to edit and produce new versions. And the legal copyright, which ran out at the end of 1991, has caused more chaos, particularly in light of a new version of Ulysses edited by John Kidd, being published by W. W. Norton.
In a lively work of literary detection, with an American introduction written for the new edition. Bruce Arnold sets out the background, examines the legal loopholes, analyzes the arguments on both sides, looks at some of the hidden agendas, including controversial letters, and comes up with surprising and provocative conclusions.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

The amazing printing history of James Joyce's Ulysses and its editorial disasters. Novelist Arnold (Running to Paradise, 1983, etc.) does a fine job of setting before us the horrors of getting a true version of Ulysses into print--which apparently hasn't happened yet. Though much of Arnold's material repeats itself, the repetition is all part of the disaster bred by Joyce himself and recently complicated by the three-volume Hans Walter Gabler critical edition (1984) and Gabler's one-volume Ulysses: The Corrected Text (1986), both of which caused a mudfest among Joyceans. While writing the novel in Paris (1914-21), Joyce sold individual chapters to American collectors. Those chapters also acted as the texts for first publication in The Little Review. The chapters, which bore Joyce's corrections, were never returned to him, while his own carbons had not been corrected. When The Egoist Press printed Ulysses, Joyce made entirely new corrections inconsistent with the already published chapters, which he could not get hold of, and meanwhile added nearly a third to the novel's bulk on his galley proofs. Joyce, who was going blind, was a poor editor and even embroidered imaginatively on his Paris printer's errors, thus establishing a first edition not only aswim with errors and gaga sentences but also wildly inconsistent with his own manuscripts. Moreover, when Joyce began Finnegan's Wake, he lost interest in correcting Ulysses. Joyce did help in the French translation of Ulysses, which sometimes helps to make sense of his English. When Gabler came along to establish a corrected text, however, he threw out the first edition, assembled only manuscripts, corrupt magazine versions, etc., and intuitively put together a still newer Ulysses that has incensed Joyceans. But the problems are infinitely more complicated than this. Essential. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

A Joyce scholar from Ireland, Arnold here jumps into the controversy surrounding the 1986 publication of Ulysses: The Corrected Text , edited by Hans Walter Gabler. Arnold circuitously traces the history of Joyce's masterpiece from its original publication in Paris in 1922 by Shakespeare and Co. through the labyrinth of successive versions edited by Joyce and others, partly in an attempt to get the ban (on grounds of indecency) lifted from the work. Today venerated by scholars, Ulysses , Arnold contends, has become a prisoner of Joyce academicians who wrangle over the "correct" version. Arnold argues that Gabler's 1986 edition, a computer-based merging of all previous editions, is a seriously flawed work whose publication was motivated by the Joyce estate's desire to maintain the financial benefits of copyright. Although this study will be of interest to scholars, general readers will be hard put to decode the nitpicking.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0312093799
• ISBN 13: 9780312093792
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272