Beating the Bounds: Excess and Restraint in Joyce's Later Works

by Roy Benjamin

Overview

Examining the role of boundaries and limits in James Joyce’s later works, primarily Finnegans Wake but also Ulysses and other texts, this book explains and reconciles Joyce’s contrary tendencies to establish and transgress limits and shows the Wake’s relevance to many different fields of thought.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813069616
Publisher:	University Press of Florida
Publication date:	02/07/2023
Series:	The Florida James Joyce Series
Pages:	266
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Roy Benjamin is associate professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Table of Contents

Foreword ix

List of Abbreviations xi

Introduction 1

1 Riding the Franchises 13

2 Partitioned Irskaholm 29

3 The Mountain and River System 46

4 Crossing Sexual Boundaries 61

5 Poul Soul 78

6 Betoun Ye and Be 96

7 By the Light of Philophosy 114

8 Geometry and Mother Mud 131

9 Aesthetics Unbound 151

10 From Boundless Void to Bounded World 170

11 From Bounded World to Boundless Universe 188

12 Decomposition of Place 205

Inconclusion 223

Works Cited 231

Index 247

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Allows us to rediscover why Finnegans Wake is still a vital book today: it is as bold in its exploration of universal culture as it is playful in its synthetic language, qualities that shine in the inspired pages. Linguistic excess and conceptual delimitation struggle less against one another than shape a beautiful chiasmus, the adequate equivalent of our expanding cosmos.”—Jean-Michel Rabaté, author of The Ghosts of Modernity

“This deeply learned book plunges us into the heart of Joyce’s most complex works to reveal a generative tension between boundary and excess, rule and rebellion, constraint and freedom. At once annotation and argument, this book belongs on the shelf of any serious Joyce scholar.”—Sean Latham, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Ulysses