Music and Sound in the Life and Literature of James Joyce

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.

“The intimacy between music and fiction has long been a preoccupation of Joyce scholarship, but this intimacy is deepened to a surpassing degree in Gerry Smyth’s brilliant new study of Joyce’s musical reliances. This book is, among much else, an acutely-aware retrieval of Joyce’s musical soundscapes, a cultural history in miniature of musical meaning during Joyce’s formative years as a writer and a sequence of virtuoso readings which extends from Joyce’s early poetry to Finnegans Wake. The result is a book in which Joyce’s lived experience nimbly consorts with his artistic originality through the vital conduit of music itself. In that enterprise, the nature of Joyce’s auditory imagination is sensitively and generously reconceived. It is also wonderfully contextualized, not only in relation to Joyce's literary inherences (the chapter on George Moore is a tour-de-force), but also in relation to the everyday collisions of sound and sense which meant so much to Joyce himself.” (Harry White, Professor of Music, University College Dublin, Ireland)

“Like Joyce’s musical interests, this book covers a variety of topics—from previously unidentified musical allusions, to sound studies, to evolutionary studies, to aesthetics, to spatial considerations, to music history—presenting a study that is both far-ranging and immensely impactful on the fields of musical and Joyce studies. Smyth’s uniquely personal understanding of Joyce’s utilization of music brings together a seemingly disparate set of elements to show that intertextual repetition, soundscapes and allusion dovetail unexpectedly in Joyce’s works. Smyth’s application of his concepts onto Dubliners and Ulysses is particularly impressive and he has a gift for distilling important and previously undetected elements of music history onto Joyce’s works. This is an important addition to the wealth of criticism on Joyce and music.” (Michelle Witen, Junior Professor of English and Irish Literature, Europa-Universität Flensburg, Germany)

“Gerry Smyth’s book is a compelling, richly informative and impassioned analysis of the all-encompassing role of music in Joyce’s life and imagination. Drawing on his joint expertise as musician and academic, Smyth in his engaging, multi-faceted and accessible study brilliantly elucidates the distinctively sonic power of Joyce’s revolutionary creations. This engrossing study powerfully drives home the centrality of music to Joyce’s artistic vision and to readers’ appreciation of his works.” (Anne Fogarty, Professor of James Joyce Studies, University College Dublin, Ireland)

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).