The University of Wisconsin Press
Literature & Criticism / Irish Studies
Names and Naming in Joyce
Claire A. Culleton
Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography
William L. Andrews, General Editor
“Claire A. Culleton’s Names and Naming in Joyce is an immensely stimulating and engagingly readable work. Written with great verve, an engaging sense of humor, and an obviously impassioned interest in its subject, it demonstrates a confident mastery both of Joyce’s work and of the scholarship on Joyce, consolidating a great deal of scattered research and integrating it with its own original insights to advance a coherent, unexpectedly fresh, and compelling argument about the ways in which Joyce thought about, selected, and used names in his fiction. Almost every major critic of Joyce has somewhere passingly acknowledged Joyce’s fascination with names, but no one outside of this work has yet so systematically explored it.”
—John Bishop, University of California, Berkeley
By examining names and naming patterns from Stephen Hero through Finnegans Wake, Culleton not only discusses what they reveal about Joyce’s thought and practice as a writer, but explores their historical, literary, and cultural implications, stressing that naming is not only a creative act but a political and patriarchal impulse as well. Following Joyce’s example of continually raising larger questions, Culleton considers the function names have in modern aesthetics and in life and what names reveal about the people that bear them.
Both serious and playful, Culleton’s study demonstrates how Joyce’s onomastic bravado is tied to his aesthetics and grounded in the Irish literary tradition of magic, creation, power, and rhetorical one-upmanship.
Claire Culleton is assistant professor of English at Kent State University.
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October 1994
LC: 94-015380 PR
160 pp. 6 x 9
The 1994 cloth edition of this book is out of print.
Paper $15.95 s
ISBN 978-0-299-14384-8ADD TO CART
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