Books by Mark Wollaeger

What did James Joyce think about history? He boasted that Dublin could be rebuilt from the pages of his novels, yet Joyce stopped writing essays and reviews at an age when many authors are just beginning to express themselves on important extra-literary topics--and the Joyce that emerges in biographies and memoirs is notoriously unreliable about history and politics.

In Joyce and the Subject of History, some of the brightest stars in Joyce criticism tease out the historical implications embedded in Joyce's oeuvre without conceding too much to the comprehensive historical claims of the fictions themselves. At a time when much historical work remains surprisingly under-theorized and much theoretical work excludes the detail and rigor of serious historical research, this collection attempts to bridge the gap between history and theory, to reconceive the field of literary historical scholarship as a whole. As an added resource, the book concludes with Robert Spoo's extensive Annotated Bibliography of historical work on Joyce.

Despite incorporating shared assumptions and common goals, this collection was not designed to issue in consensus. "Joyce and history" remains, inevitably, an open subject, and the essays in this volume give an idea of just how open that subject is.

Historical scholars of Joyce for years to come will look first to Joyce and the Subject of History. The collection will also appeal to those interested in modernism, twentieth-century literature, Irish studies, or historical models of literary study in general.

Mark A. Wollaeger is Associate Professor of English, Vanderbilt University. Victor Luftig is Associate Professor of English, Brandeis University. Robert Spoo is Associate Professor of English, University of Tulsa, and editor of the James Joyce Quarterly.

"You want more scepticism at the very foundation of your work. Scepticism, the tonic of minds, the tonic of life, the agent of truth - the way of art and salvation." Joseph Conrad wrote these words to John Galsworthy in 1901, and this study argues that Conrad's skepticism forms the basis of his most important works, participating in a tradition of philosophical skepticism that extends from Descartes to the present. Conrad's epistemological and moral skepticism - expressed, forestalled, mitigated, and suppressed - provides the terms for the author's rethinking of the peculiar relation between philosophy and literary form in Conrad's writing and, more broadly, for reconsidering what it means to call any novel 'philosophical'. Among the issues freshly argued are Conrad's thematics of coercion, isolation, and betrayal; the complicated relations among author, narrator, and character; and the logic of Conradian romance, comedy, and tragedy. The author also offers a new way of conceptualizing the shape of Conrad's career, especially the 'decline' evidenced in the later fiction. The uniqueness of Conrad's multifarious literary and cultural inheritance makes it difficult to locate him securely in the dominant tradition of the British novel. A philosophical approach to Conrad, however, reveals links to other novelists - notably Hardy, Forster, and Woolf - all of whom share in the increasing philosophical burden of the modern novel by enacting the very philosophical issues that are discussed within their pages. Conrad's interest as a skeptic is heightened by the degree to which he resists the insights proffered by his own skepticism. The first chapter introduces the idea of the Conradian 'shelter', and the next two use Schopenhauer to show how the language of metaphysical speculation in Tales of Unrest and 'Heart of Darkness' spills over into a religious impulse that resists the disintegrating effect of Conrad's skepticism. The author then turns to Hume to model the authorial skepticism that in Lord Jim contests the continuing visionary strain of the earlier fiction and Descartes to analyze the ways in which Romantic vision is more stringently chastened by irony in Nostromo and The Secret Agent. The concluding chapter touches on several late novels before examining how competing models of political agency in Conrad's last great fiction of skepticism, Under Western Eyes, situate it somewhere between ideology critique and a mystified account of the exigencies of individual consciousness.