James Joyce and the Language of History

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." Stephen Dedalus''s famous complaint articulates a characteristic modern attitude toward the perceived burden of the past. As Robert Spoo shows in this study, Joyce''s creative achievement, from the time of his sojourn in Rome in 1906-07 to the completion of Ulysses in 1922, cannot be understood apart from the ferment of historical thought t...