This highly original study seeks to correct the critical misapprehension
that James Joyce was a figure who remained aloof and disengaged from the
intellectual and social concerns of his time. By exploring Joyce's
interest in sexual questions, Dr Brown shows that, on the contrary, his
work represents a more complex and subtle kind of engagement with such
concerns. There are four main areas of interest. The first is Joyce's
extensive reading on the question of marriage and its impact on his
work, a subject invested with greater interest through Joyce's elopement
with and delayed marriage to Nora Barnacle. The second is Joyce's
responsiveness to the new sexual ideology as expounded in the writings
of Freud and Havelock Ellis. Thirdly, Dr Brown considers the feminist
dimension of the oeuvre and explores Joyce's profound concern with
twentieth-century discussions of sexual divisions and difference, a
topic hitherto neglected in the classic critical treatments. Finally,
the book argues for a new type of Joycean aesthetic in which the major
works are analysed as responses to readings of other texts. Dr Brown
offers a substantial and original account of Joyce's work as modern in
its social ideas as well as in its literary form, and suggests how the
stylistic modernity itself may be seen to arise in part as a response to
the difficulties of dealing with sex.
