Joyce’s Choices

This major new study of the textual parallels that permeate James Joyce’s three most widely read works––'Dubliners', 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man', and 'Ulysses'––documents and discusses some eight hundred instances, just over seven hundred of them in 'Ulysses' alone, of previously unrecognized, unidentified, or misidentified echoes, most of them verbatim, of antecedent texts ranging from major and minor works of English, Irish, Italian, French and other literatures to the poems, plays, popular songs, hymns, comic operas, triple-deckers, dime novels, penny dreadfuls, and print advertisements of his own day.

By meticulously identifying hundreds of previously unknown instances of such intertextual echoes, such conscious or unconscious literary borrowings, Winnick’s study complements prior works on Joyce’s allusive practices by, among others, Weldon Thornton, Don Gifford, and, most recently and comprehensively, Sam Slote, Marc A. Mamigonian, and John Turner, shedding important new light on Joyce’s reading, thematic intentions, and creative technique.