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James Joyce |
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James Joyce is without doubt the most frequently written-about writer of the twentieth century, and there is hardly a possible critical approach to literature that has not been extensively applied to his work. Joyce's use of significant details from his own personal history in "The Dead," Exiles, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and other works has occasioned the BIOGRAPHICAL approach, just as the thorough grounding of his fiction in the time and place of the first twenty-two years of his life has inspired commentators to employ both the HISTORICAL and the SOCIOLOGICAL approaches.
Perhaps the dominant mode of Joyce criticism is that which takes the FORMALIST approach, since no other aspect of his work has so intrigued critics as his constant experimentation with language and with the techniques and structures of narrative, along with his heavy (occasionally smothering) use of symbolism. And, as in the title of Ulysses, Joyce himself has pointed the way toward MYTHOLOGICAL explorations of the intentions and the underlying patterns of his fiction. In the light of Joyce's detailed and sympathetic portrayal of female characters, recent studies have also applied the mode of GENDER criticism to him, including Bonnie Kime Scott's Joyce and Feminism (1984) and Richard Brown's James Joyce and Sexuality (1985).
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