James Joyce and the Revolt of Love Marriage, Adultery, Desire [Hardcover]

This study examines the representation of marital and extramarital relations in James Joyce's texts, with reference to context and to Joyce's biography. Utell claims that Joyce uses these relations to imagine a different kind of love, one based in a radical acceptance and a rejection of a utilitarian and sexually repressive stance towards marriage.Introduction: Joyce's Sexual/Textual Ethics Nora and Marthe Katharine and Parnell? Beyond the Margins of Marriage in Exiles and Giacomo Joyce Ulysses and Adultery:?Wandering Ulysses and Adultery:?Homecoming The solid man saved by his sillied woman: Reconciliation and Radical Alterity in Finnegans Wake

A thought-provoking, complex and persuasive examination. - James Joyce Literary Supplement

A commendable critical debut. - James Joyce Quarterly

Readers will find in Utell's close readings a compelling account of how Joyce eludes familiar labels and asks his audience to resist them. - Journal of Modern Literature

The late-nineteenth-century notion of marriage is wildly overblown and overladen with cultural values and expectations of the negation of the self, especially for the wife; this is presented as foundational fact for Utell's study, and she does not spend any time rehashing that well-trodden ground. Instead, she starts in the empty space beyond that to suggest that Joyce presents adultery 'not only as part of the world of two' - a piece of the marriage puzzle either ignored, rejected, or denied by the culture of the time - but also as 'potentially transformative.' - Modern Fiction Studies

In this engaging monograph, Janine Utell takes a bold position in the current academic climate: she analyzes literary representations of love without cynicism, and reads marriage as having positive transformational potential . . . Utell shows how Joyce 'seeks to puncture and twist' the 'ethically suspect' cultural scripts circumscribing marriage il#Ÿ