Abstract

How did James Joyce see himself in relation to Henrik Ibsen? What were his views of Nietzsche, Hegel, Coleridge, or Ruskin? When did the youthful Joyce begin to devote serious attention to aesthetics and poetics? In The Aesthetics of James Joyce Jacques Aubert examines Joyce's ideas on the function of art and literature against the background of late-nineteenth--and early-twentieth-century British and European intellectual history. Aubert focuses on Joyce's critical writings, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses as well as on the literary and philosophical texts--from Aristotle to Nietzsche--with which he was most closely concerned. Aubert is less interested in tracing specific intellectual antecedents, however, than in assessing the role Joyce assigned himself in relation to his literary and philosophical contemporaries and predecessors. First published in French in 1973, The Aesthetics of James Joyce is the first full-length treatment of James Joyce's aesthetic ideas. Substantially revised and expanded and translated by the author, it gives a coherent unity to Joyce's scattered writings on aesthetics while placing them in a rich historical context.