Joyce's Grandfathers

Download or read book Joyce's Grandfathers written by John M. Warner and published by . This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Defoe, Smollett, and Sterne, Joyce found not only earlier challenges to that mode but also "a revolutionary nostalgia for myth that paralleled his own response to his rationalist culture." Yet their works also revealed a clear responsiveness to historical circumstances, creating a tension between the timelessness of myth and the chronology of history. Unlike the realists, these particular eighteenth-century novelists "did not try to conceal the tensions between the synchronic and diachronic thrusts of their fiction but rather explored them openly, unafraid of jagged edges and cacophonous effect." It was these explorations, Warner argues, that Joyce found especially useful in the writing of Ulysses. By compelling us to look backward and to see what he saw in his eighteenth-century forebears, Joyce "recreates" them for us