This week (December 26-January 1) in English literary
history – William Shakespeare’s King Lear
was performed at the court of King James I (December 26, 1606); Charles Lamb
died (December 27, 1834); J.M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan opened in London (December 27, 1904); John Steinbeck
married Elaine Anderson (December 28, 1950); Theodore Dreiser died (December
28, 1945); James Joyce’s Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man was published (December 29, 1916); Rudyard Kipling
was born (December 30, 1865); Percy Shelley married Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
(December 30, 1816); Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
was published (January 1, 1818); James Fenimore Cooper married Susan Augusta de
Lancey (January 1, 1811).
Highlighted Story
of the Week -
On December 29, 1916, James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published. The book had
been previously serialized in Ezra Pound's review The Egoist. Joyce was born on February 2, 1882 in Dublin, Ireland, the
eldest of 10 children of a cheerful ne'er-do-well who eventually went bankrupt.
He attended Catholic school and University College in Dublin, where he learned
Dano-Norwegian so he could read the plays of Henrik Ibsen in the original. In
college, he began a lifetime of literary rebellion, self-publishing an essay
rejected by the school's literary magazine adviser.
After graduation, Joyce moved to Paris where he resolved
to study medicine to support himself while writing but soon gave it up. He
returned to Dublin to visit his mother's deathbed and remained to teach school
and work odd jobs. On June 16, 1904, he met Nora Barnacle, whom he convinced to
return to Europe with him. The couple settled in Trieste, where they had two
children, and then in Zurich. Joyce struggled with serious eye problems,
undergoing 25 operations for various troubles between 1917 and 1930. In 1914,
he published The Dubliners, and his
1916 novel, Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man, brought him fame and the patronage of several wealthy people,
including Edith Rockefeller.
In 1918, his revolutionary stream of consciousness novel Ulysses began to be serialized in the
American journal Little Review.
However, the U.S. Post Office stopped the publication's distribution in
December of that year on the grounds that the novel was obscene. Sylvia Beach,
owner of the bookstore Shakespeare and Company in Paris, where Joyce moved in
1920, published the novel herself in 1922, but it was banned in the United
Kingdom and the United States until 1933. Joyce's final novel, Finnegans Wake, was published in 1939.
James Joyce died on January 13, 1941 in Zurich, Switzerland and was buried at
the Flutern Cemetery.
Check back every
Friday for a new installment of “This Week in English Literary History.”
Michael Thomas Barry is the author of six nonfiction
books that include Literary Legends of
the British Isles and America’s
Literary Legends. Visit Michael’s website www.michaelthomasbarry.com for
more information. His books can be purchased from Amazon through the following
links:
No comments:
Post a Comment