EcoUlysses

This study proposes an eco-political reading of James Joyce's Ulysses by looking into four aspects of the environment that Joyce deals with in his modernist classic. By looking respectively into Joyce's writing of gardens, garbage, trees, and the pastoral, this book provides an interdisciplinary discussion between ecocriticism and Joyce studies.

This study focuses on the relationship between environment, history, politics, and rhetorical discourses in James Joyce's Ulysses. Delving into different aspects of Joyce's use of nature and linguistic discourses in orchestrating a specific dynamic of eco-politics, it adopts an interdisciplinary approach that includes cultural politics, historiographical poetics, and genetic criticism with close reading of the text. The first of the two sessions of the book addresses the environmental questions of land and consumption through discussions on co-operative politics, garden city movement, and the eco-politics of waste. The second section moves to examine the diverse ways in which nature and nation are (re)imagined exemplarily in Joyce's composition of the forest and the marketplace.

By examining several thematic environmental issues addressed in Ulysses with the evidence of historical and archival resources, this study has demonstrated that Joyce is after all a writer with the environment in mind, and that the imagination of nature in Ulysses is inseparable from that of the emergent nation of fin-de-siècle Ireland.

Autorentext

Yi-Peng Lai is Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan.

Inhalt

Eco-political reading of Ulysses Nature Nation Consumption Garden Waste Ecosystem Trees Pastoral