Kershner, R. B.

The sheer mass of allusion to popular literature in the writings of James Joyce is daunting. Using theories developed by Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, R.B. Kershner analyzes how Joyce made use of popular literature in such early works as Stephen Hero, Dubliners, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and Exiles. Kershner also examines Joyce's use of rhetoric, the relationship between narrator and protagonist, and the interplay of voices, whether personal, literary, or subliterary, in Joyce's writing. In pointing out the prolific allusions in Joyce to newspapers, children's books, popular novels, and even pornography, Kershner shows how each of these contributes to the structures of consciousness of Joyce's various characters, all of whom write and rewrite themselves in terms of the texts they read in their youth. He also investigates the intertextual role of many popular books to which Joyce alludes in his writings and letters, or which he owned -- some well known, others now obscure. Kershner presents Joyce as a writer with a high degrees of social consciousness, whose writings highlight the conflicting ideologies of the Irish bourgeoisie. In exploring the social dimension of Joyce's writing, he calls upon such important contemporary thinkers as Jameston, Althusser, Barthes, and Lacan in addition to Bakhtin. Joyce's literary response to his historical situation was not polemical, Kershner argues, but, in Bakhtin's terms, dialogical: his writings represent an unremitting dialogue with the discordant but powerful voices of his day, many inaudible to us now.

"Dylan Thomas's life and work have made him a legendary figure since he died, amid alcohol and debts, in New York at the age of thirty-nine. At the heart of his achievement are a few dozen poems and stories which, together with the romantic comedy Under Milk Wood, haunt the imagination and give his writing a broader appeal than he could have envisaged. Beyond his writing is the chequered figure of the poet himself: often comic, at times in despair, always self-obsessed, in the end defeated by his own nature." "Paul Ferris's classic biography has been recognised as the standard life since it first appeared in 1977. He has now drawn on fresh material to revise the book. In particular, he looks again at Thomas's marriage to the fiery Caitlin, and finds in it the seeds of a fatal dependence."--BOOK JACKET.

Reading Ulysses with an eye to the cultural references embedded within it, Kershner interrogates modernism's relationship to contemporary popular culture and literature. Examples underscore Kershner's corrective to formal approaches to genre as he broadens the methodologies that are used to study it to include social and political approaches.