Names And Naming In Joyce

by Claire A. Culleton

Overview

By examining names and naming patterns from Stephen Hero through Finnegans Wake, Culleton not only discusses what they reveal about Joyce’s thought and practice as a writer, but explores their historical, literary, and cultural implications, stressing that naming is not only a creative act but a political and patriarchal impulse as well. Following Joyce’s example of continually raising larger questions, Culleton considers the function names have in modern aesthetics and in life and what names reveal about the people that bear them.
    Both serious and playful, Culleton’s study demonstrates how Joyce’s onomastic bravado is tied to his aesthetics and grounded in the Irish literary tradition of magic, creation, power, and rhetorical one-upmanship.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299143848
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	10/15/1994
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Claire Culleton is assistant professor of English at Kent State University.

Editorial Reviews

Claire A. Culleton’s Names and Naming in Joyce is an immensely stimulating and engagingly readable work. Written with great verve, an engaging sense of humor, and an obviously impassioned interest in its subject, it demonstrates a confident mastery both of Joyce’s work and of the scholarship on Joyce, consolidating a great deal of scattered research and integrating it with its own original insights to advance a coherent, unexpectedly fresh, and compelling argument about the ways in which Joyce thought about, selected, and used names in his fiction. Almost every major critic of Joyce has somewhere passingly acknowledged Joyce’s fascination with names, but no one outside of this work has yet so systematically explored it.”—John Bishop, University of California, Berkeley

From the Publisher

A scholarly work exploring James Joyce's choice of names in his fiction, with consideration of history, politics, gender, and literary consequences, and the symbiotic ties among the four. Paper edition (unseen), $14.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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