Up to Maughty London

Book excerpt: "Fundamentally alters the received wisdom that tends to award Paris a far more central place in the making of Joyce the modernist."--John McCourt, author of The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904-1920 "In readings equally attentive to text, avant-text, and context, this book shows us how many roads in Joyce's life and work led to London. Yet the first city of the British Empire is also decentered here, enmeshed by Joyce with Dublin through the place names, cartographies, and imperial history the two cities shared. Loukopoulou has written the atlas of their entanglement, a Londub A to Z."--Paul K. Saint-Amour, author of Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form The effect of Dublin--and other cities such as Trieste, Zurich, and Paris--on James Joyce and his works has been studied extensively, but few Joyceans have explored the impact of London on the trajectory of his literary career. In Up to Maughty London, Eleni Loukopoulou offers the first sustained account of Joyce's engagement with the imperial metropolis. She considers both London's status as a matrix for political and cultural formations and how the city is reimagined in Joyce’s work. Loukopoulou examines newly discovered or largely neglected material, including newspaper and magazine articles, anthology contributions, radio broadcasts, sound recordings, and other writings published and unpublished. She also assesses the promotion of Joyce's work in London’s literary marketplace. London emerges not just as a setting for his writings but as a key cultural and publishing vector for the composition and dissemination of his work. Eleni Loukopoulou is an independent scholar living in London. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles