Hope and future are not the terms with which James Joyce has usually
been read, but this book paints a picture of Joyce's fiction in which
hope and future assume the primary colours.
Rando explores how Joyce's texts, as early as Dubliners and A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, delineate a complex hope that is
oriented toward the future with restlessness, dissatisfaction, and
invention. He examines how Joyce envisions alternatives to the
prevailing conventions of hope throughout his works and, in Ulysses
and Finnegans Wake, develops formal techniques of spatializing hope to
contemplate it from all sides.
Casting fresh light on the ways in which hope animates key aspects of
Joyce's approach to literary content and form, Rando moves beyond the
limitations of negative critique and literary historicism to present a
Joyce who thinks agilely about the future, politics, and possibility.