Joyce: A Guide for the Perplexed

In clear and simple prose, Mahon explains how to connect this little black box to the Joycean engine. Just pull some gears, it falls into place and works. -Jean-Michel Rabate, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania
James Joyce’s work has been regarded as some of the most obscure, challenging, and difficult writing ever committed to paper; it is also shamelessly funny and endlessly entertaining. Joyce: A Guide for the Perplexed celebrates the daring, humor and playfulness of Joyce’s complex work while engaging with and elucidating the most demanding aspects of his writing. The book explores in detail the motifs and radical innovations of style and technique that characterize his major works-Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. By highlighting how Joyce’s texts have been read by recent innovations in literary and cultural theory, Joyce: A Guide for the Perplexed offers the reader a Joyce that is contemporary, fresh, and relevant.