Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: ‘The journey westward’
- 1 ‘Endless stories about the distillery’: Joyce and Whiskey
- 2 ‘Their friends, the French’: Joyce, Jacobitism and the Revival
- 3 ‘He would put in allusions’: The Uses and Abuses of Revivalism
- Conclusion: Protestant Power and Plates of Peas
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Introduction: ‘The journey westward’
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: ‘The journey westward’
- 1 ‘Endless stories about the distillery’: Joyce and Whiskey
- 2 ‘Their friends, the French’: Joyce, Jacobitism and the Revival
- 3 ‘He would put in allusions’: The Uses and Abuses of Revivalism
- Conclusion: Protestant Power and Plates of Peas
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I'd love to see Galway again.
— Gretta Conroy, ‘The Dead’Where was James Joyce from? If there is one question that even the most novice of initiates to the study of Irish literature could answer correctly, it is surely this one. Joyce's burning obsession with the city of his birth has provided Dublin a permanent place in literary history; his loving recreation of its streets, shops, statues, brothels and pubs stands as a valuable historical document as well as a magnificent and enduring artifice. Yet one of the earliest critical mentions of Joyce wishes to connect him not so much with Dublin but with the west. Ireland in Fiction (1916), a still-useful bibliographic guide by the Jesuit priest Stephen J. Brown, provides the following entry for the author of Dubliners:
Joyce, James A., B. of Galway parentage about thirty years ago. Was a student of Clongowes Wood College and of University Coll., Dublin. Published some years ago a small book of verse that has been much admired, entitled Chamber Music. Is at present in Trieste.
Joyce soon became aware of the book, and was keen to correct the error and provide a slightly fuller account of his background, as is clear from a letter of 1918 to his London agent:
I shall be glad if you can send a note to the Reverend Stephen Browne [sic], S.J., Clongowes Wood College, Sallins, Kildare, Ireland thanking him in my name for the inclusion of me in his work Ireland in Fiction and, as he invites corrections for the second edition now in the press, informing him that I was born in 1882 (2 February), that my father's family came from Cork not from the west of Ireland. My father is from Cork city, his father from Fermoy, county Cork. The family comes, of course, from the west of Ireland (Joyce's country) but mine is a southern offshoot of the tribe. My wife is from Galway city.
That ‘of course’ is telling. Though keen to clarify the facts of his lineage, Joyce was always pleased to think of himself as connected with Galway, his surname that of one of the city's storied fourteen tribes.
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- Journey WestwardJoyce, Dubliners and the Literary Revival, pp. 1 - 11Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012