The Culture of Joyce’s Ulysses

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.

"Impressive." - James Joyce Quarterly

"Providing a valuable appraisal of strategic sources shaping Ulysses - whether in derision, revolt, or amplification - the book in particular adds significantly to understanding Joyce's borrowing, thanks to Kershner's detailed exploration of Marie Norelli's The Sorrows of Satan (1895) and Stephen Phillip's verse drama Ulysses (1902)." - CHOICE

"This is the book I've been waiting for! The sequel to Kershner's brilliant, award-winning study of the dialogic in Dubliners and Portrait, The Culture of Joyce's Ulysses broadens the terrain to take on modernism(s)'s and modernity's complex traffic with popular culture. Kershner's turn to the Frankfurt School is inspired, and his demonstration that Joyce's readers must contribute not just insights but also actual 'copy' alters the playing field for Joyce scholars and Joyce followers alike. As always with Kershner's work, the writing is both lucid and fun, while the breadth of research is stunning." - Cheryl Herr, Professor of English, Cinema and Comparative Literature, The University of Iowa

"I have waited a long time for this book, and it does not disappoint: Kershner has read Ulysses incredibly carefully and has produced a study full of informative, often fascinating, tidbits-with corresponding analyses. His study brings to the fore all sorts of neglected intertexts from the cultures of Joyce's time - newspapers and periodicals, popular romances and bestselling novels, advertisements, contemporary ideologies and theories, and so on - so as to illuminate fuller, richer readings and understandings of Ulysses.This is also a delightfully readable study." - Vincent Cheng, Shirley Sutton Thomas Professor of English, The University of Utah

"Kershner goes spelunking in the archive, then returns to fill his own Aladdin's cave. The Culture of Ulysses teems not just with bric-à-brac (as Wyndham Lewis said of Joyce's book) but also with trouvailles, new enigmas, and glittering aperçus. This is scholarship less interested in literary monuments than in their secret miscellaneity: an inspired rummaging that unmakes a book you thought you knew." - Paul Saint-Amour, Associate Professor and Graduate Chair of English, University of Pennsylvania

R. Brandon Kershner is Alumni Professor of English at the University of Florida, USA.