James Joyce, Epiphanies: A Critical Edition

This book offers a critical edition of the forty short texts James Joyce called “epiphanies” (c.1901-04). The epiphanies are among Joyce’s earliest literary compositions, a series of highly polished miniatures that provide a vivid insight into his art. Composed concurrently with Chamber Music, they are often regarded as lyrical counterparts to Joyce’s poetry, but alongside prose-poems, almost half are in dramatic form, and several combine the two modes, providing a bridge to Joyce’s fiction. Since Joyce reused thirty of them, often repeatedly, in his subsequent works, through to Finnegans Wake, they make a significant contribution to major works like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Indeed, the epiphanies offer a point of origin for Joyce’s oeuvre, providing a paradigm case for scholars to study the development of Joyce’s oeuvre. NB: this book is under contract with the University Press of Florida; it has not yet been published