James Joyce A to Z

Book excerpt: (series copy)These encyclopedic companions are browsable, invaluable individual guides to authors and their works. Useful for students, but written with the general reader in mind, they are clear, concise, accessible, and supply the basic cultural, historical, biographical and critical information so crucial toan appreciation and enjoyment of the primary works. Each is arranged in an A-Z fashion and presents and explains the terms, people, places, and concepts encountered in the literary worlds of James Joyce, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf.As a keen explorer of the mundane material of everyday life, James Joyce ranks high in the canon of modernist writers. He is arguably the most influential writer of the twentieth-century, and may be the most read, studied, and taught of all modern writers. The James Joyce A-Z is the ideal companionto Joyce's life and work. Over 800 concise entries relating to all aspects of Joyce are gathered here in one easy-to-use volume of impressive scope.