A Portrait of James Joyce as a Romantic Artist

Abstract

This thesis attempts to explicate the novelty of James Joyce’s literary contribution in comparison with two others that have established English literature as known today. The first was the systematised production of the court of Queen Elizabeth and the systematising works by the Enlightenment and the Victorian men of letters. The second contribution was engendered by individual literary men, like Samuel Johnson, whose imprint on English literature remains undeniable. This study ascribes the novelty of James Joyce’s contribution to his milieu and provenance. And it delineates his milieu, as a Catholic-by-birth in the socio-political turmoil of Dublin, which shaped his artistic attitude and drove him to exile himself in Europe for thirty-seven years (ended in his death in Zurich) during which he devoted himself to an intensive reading activity. These readings, which comprised the Italians Dante Alighieri, Giambattista Vico, Giordano Bruno and Thomas Aquinas, underlay the artistic project of James Joyce and led him to first counter the dominance of the Catholic church and the provincialism of the Irish cultural and social atmospheres and then to develop a broader project that would deal with the human self in general. The study also details how James Joyce’s provenance has resulted in a romantic attitude traceable in his affinity with the poets William Blake, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley as well as in his poetry and single play Exiles. And it delineates how James Joyce’s artistic preoccupation diverges that of his contemporary Modernists Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats and distinguishes his prose fiction from that of his peers the female novelists Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf as manifested in his two last works Ulysses and Finnegans Wake that took him twenty-four years to accomplish despite the hardships of poverty, the two World Wars and his eye troubles.