Sangam MacDuff

Panepiphanal World is the first in-depth study of the forty short texts James Joyce called ‚Äúepiphanies.‚Äù Composed between 1901 and 1904, at the beginning of Joyce‚Äôs writing career, these texts are often dismissed as juvenilia. Sangam MacDuff argues that the epiphanies are an important point of origin for Joyce‚Äôs entire body of work, showing how they shaped the structure, style, and language of his later writings. Tracing the ways Joyce incorporates the epiphanies into Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, MacDuff describes the defining characteristics of the epiphanies‚Äîsilence and repetition, materiality and reflexivity‚Äîas a set of recurrent and inter-related tensions in the development of Joyce‚Äôs oeuvre. MacDuff uses fresh archival evidence, including a new typescript of the epiphanies that he discovered, to show the importance of the epiphanies throughout Joyce‚Äôs career. MacDuff compares Joyce‚Äôs concept of epiphany to Classical, Biblical, and Romantic revelations, showing that instead of pointing to divine transcendence or the awakening of the sublime, Joyce‚Äôs epiphanies are rooted in and focused on language. MacDuff argues that the Joycean epiphany is an apt characterization of modernist literature, and that the linguistic forces at play in these early texts are also central to the work of Joyce‚Äôs contemporaries including Woolf, Beckett, and Eliot.

Panepiphanal World

Sangam MacDuff

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