Introduction

Lays out the case that the cinematic tendency of Joyce’s writing developed from media predating film. It explains how Victorian culture’s emergent 'cinematicity' was a key creative driver of Joyce’s experimental fiction and details research methods and evidence for showing how his style and themes share the cinematograph’s roots in Victorian science and optical entertainment. It explicates how the book’s scope reveals and elucidates Joyce's references to optical toys, shadowgraphs, magic lanterns, panoramas, photographic analysis and film peepshows, which testify to his awareness of a moving image and projection culture before 1895, which film remediated. It also details how abundant close analysis in the following chapters will show how his techniques elaborated and critiqued their effects on modernity’s ‘media-cultural imaginary’; thus how Joyce’s writing could appear in advance of the narrative forms of early film itself. Consequently, the introduction provides detailed historicisation of Dublin’s visual culture during Joyce’s youth, as well as relevant optical science of the time, Dublin’s first film screenings and the context of his Volta Cinematograph.