James Joyce: the Years of Growth 1882-1915 - Softcover

Costello, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0333600657 ISBN 13: 9780333600658

Publisher: Pan Macmillan, 1994

Synopsis

This biography of James Joyce concentrates on Joyce's early life in Dublin, since it was this period of obscurity that provided him with the material for "Dubliners", "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", "Ulysses" and even "Finnegans Wake". It draws on recently discovered or previously overlooked sources to show how Joyce's early life - his education, his relationship with his siblings, his youthful loss of faith and his first sexual experiences - shaped so much he was to write in later years.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

Assimilating masses of published and unpublished sources and hearsay, this ``popular'' biography, according to Costello (The Real World of Sherlock Holmes, 1991, etc.), is ``radically new'' in reconstructing Joyce's early years--the social, political, cultural, and domestic life; the family, friends, education, and economic circumstances that provided the prototypes and themes of his fiction. Although he believes that biography is ``a form of higher fiction,'' Costello offers few flights of fancy in his cautious demonstration of the relation between art and life. Indeed, he treats the life much like Joycean critics treat the fiction, assigning multiple and dark meanings to virtually everything, especially to those defining moments Joyce called ``epiphanies.'' Discussing Joyce's being bitten by a dog when he was five, for example, Costello extrapolates to the writer's lifelong aversion to dogs and ``reverence'' for cats, and his discovery--in the pharmacist who treated him--of a model for the high-school science teacher in Ulysses. And then there's Joyce's confusing pain and love, which Costello says came from the ``bizarre but not unlikely'' experience of being punished by having a toilet flushed on his head. The author offers vivid explanations of the writer's life at Bray, his Jesuit education, his sexual growth, his intellectual life, his spiritual struggles, and--detailed in a brief prologue--his life in exile following the publication of Ulysses. Costello especially admires Nora (who saved Joyce from becoming ``just another drunken failed poet''), but he depicts the couple's life together mostly as a record of places they lived and of what Joyce wrote there, of how he earned (or failed to earn) a living. The most Joycean parts of the book are in the appendices: Joyce's ``genetic make-up'' traced to his great-great-grandparents; complete genealogies, including the ``pedigree'' of Stephen, the last surviving Joyce; and a horoscope. Of interest, then, though Richard Ellmann's James Joyce remains the definitive life. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs.) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal:

The author of an acclaimed study of Irish writing, The Heart Grown Brutal (1977, o.p.), aims in this biography "for the ordinary reader of James Joyce," to eschew the academic focus of Richard Ellmann's massive James Joyce (Oxford Univ. Pr., 1981. rev. ed.). The results are mixed: Costello traces every family connection and details all the minutiae of his subject's youth but fails to link the life lived to the genius of the works, concentrating instead on possible real-life prototypes for Joyce's characters. In trying to expand on Ellmann, Costello often spreads his facts too thin; the "Notes on Sources" don't adequately document all his conjectures. The work is buttressed by family trees, notes, bibliography, index, and illustrations (some misattributed). For general and special collections that already have Ellmann.
- Shelley Cox, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0333600657
• ISBN 13: 9780333600658
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 374