Joyce and Scott

Abstract There are important similarities between Walter Scott and James Joyce as authors—both were fascinated by the histories of their respective nations, in the relationship between their home country and English power, and in the historical development of societies. Furthermore, Joyce owned some of Scott’s poetry and prose, and there is a network of intertextual links between Scott’s work and Joyce’s texts Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939). Chapter 3 studies Joyce’s reading of Scott and examines allusions and references to Scott and his work in Joyce’s texts. Special attention is paid to the links between Scott, incest, and masturbation in Joyce’s work, as well as to the different conceptions of history offered by these two writers—Scott’s quasi-Smithian view of history is contrasted to Joyce’s interest in the theories of Giambattista Vico.