James Joyce and Photography is the first book to explore in-depth James Joyce's personal and professional engagement with photography. Photographs, photographic devices and photographically-inspired techniques appear throughout Joyce’s work, from his narrator's furtive proto-photographic framing in Silhouettes (c. 1897), to the aggressively-minded 'Tulloch-Turnbull girl with her coldblood kodak' in Finnegans Wake (1939).Through an exploration of Joyce's manuscripts and photographic and newspaper archival material, as well as the full range of his major works, this book sheds new light on his sustained interest in this visual medium. This project takes Joyce’s intention in Dubliners (1914) to ‘betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city’ as key to his interaction with photography, which in his literature occupies a dual position between stasis and innovation.
Georgina Binnie-Wright is an independent scholar who specialises in modern literature and the use of epistolary narratives in loneliness research.
List of Illustrations Editorial Preface to Historicizing Modernism Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction 1. Photography and Paralysis in Dubliners 2. That ‘spoof of visibility’: Stereoscopic ‘Realism’ in Stephen Hero to Finnegans Wake3. ‘it simply wasn’t art in a word’: Leopold Bloom, Photography and Artistic and Erotic Debate4. James Joyce’s ‘Photo girl[s]’ Coda: ‘A photograph […] may be so disposed for an aesthetic end’ NotesWorks Cited Index
This lucid and compelling new study is a game-changer, not just in the emerging field of research into Joyce and photography, but in its creative engagement with modern visual media in general. It is an invaluable foundation for future scholarship.