James Joyce (biography)

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James Joyce
James Joyce (biography).png
Author Richard Ellmann
Country United States
Language English
Subject James Joyce
Genre Biography
Publication date
1959

James Joyce by Richard Ellmann was published in 1959 (a revised edition was released in 1982). It provides an intimate and detailed account of the life of Irish modernist James Joyce, which informs an understanding of this author's complex works.

Reception

Anthony Burgess was so impressed with the biographer's work that he claimed it to be "the greatest literary biography of the century." [1] [2] Edna O'Brien, the Irish novelist, remarked that "H. G. Wells said that Finnegans Wake was an immense riddle, and people find it too difficult to read. I have yet to meet anyone who has read and digested the whole of it—except perhaps my friend Richard Ellmann." [3] Ellmann quotes extensively from Finnegans Wake as epigraphs in his biography of Joyce.

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Richard David Ellmann, FBA was an American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joyce (1959), one of the most acclaimed literary biographies of the 20th century. Its 1982 revised edition won James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Ellmann was a liberal humanist, and his academic work focuses on the major modernist writers of the 20th century.

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Waywords and Meansigns: Recreating Finnegans Wake [in its whole wholume] is an international project setting James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake to music. Waywords and Meansigns has released two editions of audio, each offering an unabridged musical adaptation of Joyce's book. A third edition, featuring over 100 artists and performing much shorter passages of the book, debuted May 4, 2017.

Krzysztof Bartnicki is a Polish translator, writer, musician/composer, lexicographer and Joyce scholar. His translations into English include poetry of Stanisław Dróżdż and Bolesław Leśmian. He is the author of several Polish-English dictionaries.

Amalia Popper was the first Italian translator of James Joyce's works and author of his first biography, published as an introduction to his translation of Dubliners, published in 1935 in Trieste under the title "Araby".

References

  1. Lorraine, Janzen Kooistra (Winter 1993). "The Biography of the Century: Another Look at Richard Ellmann's James Joyce". Biography. 16 (1): 31–45. doi:10.1353/bio.2010.0340. JSTOR   23539556. S2CID   162295867.
  2. Menand, Louis, "Silence, Exile, Punning: James Joyce's chance encounters". The New Yorker , 2 July 2012, pp. 71–75.
  3. Interview, The Art of Fiction No. 82, The Paris Review, Issue 92, Summer 1984.