Music and Sound in the Life and Literature of James Joyce Joyces Noyces

Music and Sound in the Life and Literature of James Joyce: Joyces Noyces offers a fresh perspective on the Irish writer James Joyce’s much-noted obsession with music. This book provides an overview of a century-old critical tradition focused on Joyce and music, as well as six in-depth case studies which revisit material from the writer’s career in the light of new and emerging theories. Considering both Irish cultural history and the European art music tradition, the book combines approaches from cultural musicology, critical theory, sound studies and Irish studies. Chapters explore Joyce’s use of repetition, his response to literary Wagnerism, the role and status of music in the aesthetic and political debates of the fin de siècle, music and cultural nationalism, ubiquitous urban sound and ‘shanty aesthetics’. Gerry Smyth revitalizes Joyce’s work in relation to the ‘noisy’ world in which the author wrote (and his audience read) his work.

Gerry Smyth is Professor of Irish Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. He has written widely on various aspects of Irish cultural history, including a series of books on the subject of Irish music. He has also written on the role and representation of music in fiction: Music in Contemporary British Fiction: Listening to the Novel (Palgrave Macmillan 2008).