James Joyce and Cinematicity

This book investigates how the cinematic tendency of Joyce’s writing developed from popular media predating film. It explores Victorian culture’s emergent 'cinematicity' as a key creative driver of Joyce’s experimental fiction, showing how his style and themes share the cinematograph’s roots in Victorian optical entertainment and science. The book’s scope reveals and elucidates Joyce's references to optical toys, shadowgraphs, magic lanterns, panoramas, photographic analysis and film peepshows; while abundant close analysis shows how his techniques elaborated and critiqued their effects on modernity’s ‘media-cultural imaginary’, making Joyce’s writing appear in advance of the narrative forms of early film itself. The introduction historicises the visual culture during Joyce’s youth, as well as optical science, Dublin’s first screenings and the context of his Volta Cinematograph. Chapter 1 focuses on the key role of magic lantern themes and techniques in Dubliners’ breakthrough into Modernist style and form. Chapter 2 how experiments in photographic analysis and reanimation of movement furnished a model for Joyce’s representation of the dynamic development of consciousness through the three versions of A Portrait of the Artist. Chapter 3 demonstrates how Joyce created a literary equivalent to the moving panorama in Ulysses, providing an influential template for immersive representations of the city in both Modernist fiction and film. Finally, a Coda qualifies ‘radiophonic’ readings of Finnegans Wake arguing instead that it extends Joyce’s interest in the history and future of cinematicity, through ‘verbal dissolves’ and engaging with the emergent medium of television.