James Joyce's America

Abstract James Joyce’s America is the first study to address comprehensively and integrally the nature of Joyce’s relationship with the United States. It challenges the most prevalent view of Joyce as merely indifferent or hostile towards America, arguing that his works show an increasing level of engagement with American history, culture, and politics that culminates in the abundance of allusions to the United States in Finnegans Wake, the very title of which (from an Irish-American song) signals the importance of America to that work. The focus throughout remains consistently on Joyce’s concept of America within the framework of an Irish history to which his works obsessively return. That is, Joyce’s thematic preoccupation with Ireland and its history corresponds to a formal concentration in this study on America’s relation to that specifically post-Famine history. Within that context, it explores first Joyce’s relation to Irish America and how post-Famine Irish history as Joyce saw it transformed the country from a nation of invasions and settlements to one spreading out across the globe, ultimately connecting Joyce’s response to this historical phenomenon to the diffusive styles of Finnegans Wake. This then leads into discussions on American popular and literary cultures in terms of how they appear in relation to or as a function of the British-Irish colonial context in the post-Famine era, before concluding with a consideration of how Joyce incorporated aspects of his American reception into the Wake.