The Early Joyce and the Writing of Exiles

Area 10 – Scienze dell'antichità, filologico-letterarie e storico-artistiche

It is somewhat ironic to note that, for the most part, Joycean criticism to date has taken for granted or not sufficiently investigated the very idea underlying all of Joyce’s works, namely, the concept of youth. In writing about the artist, family, religion, politics, Joyce’s perspective was often, if not always, from a young man’s point of view. Up to Ulysses, Joyce has treated this theme constantly, if not obsessively, yet relatively little has been written on the fact that at one point in his life Joyce was indeed a young man! Starting from the premise that Joyce is Stephen Dedalus, a theory first advanced in the 1950’s by David Daiches, Edmund Wilson, William York Tindall and William Empson and reinforced by the biographical research of Richard Ellmann, the thesis is advanced that the early Joyce reaches maturity with the writing of Exiles that gives us a portrait of the early Joyce and the artist as a mature man. Seeing himself in this reflection, Joyce is ready to undertake a new direction in his fiction – no longer defined by the image of the “young man”.Nick De Marco is Associate Professor at “G. d’Annunzio” University of Chieti–Pescara. He has published articles in international journals and volumes on seventeenth century literature, Victorian literature and James Joyce in particular. He has published full–length studies on Robertson Davies and Joseph Conrad. He is co–editor of Victorian Poetry (Milano, Principato, 1999) and Fiction in Transition (Milano, Principato, 1994).

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