Joyce for Beginners

James Joyce is one of the key innovators of modernism, along with such figures as Picasso, Schoenberg and Stravinsky. However, a myth of Joyce's "difficulty" has taken root which discourages many readers from approaching his work. This is a great pity, because Joyce's writings are deeply human, enormously comic and make compelling reading. Although Joyce spent much of his life in self-imposed exile, all his writings are obsessively, microscopically focussed on Dublin's fair city. This book provides a beginner's map to the labyrinth of Joyce's visionary Dublin. It takes the reader step by step from the early stories, "The Dubliners", and his immensely readable novel, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", into the sprawling comic universe of "Ulysses" and finally to the mythic dreamworld of "Finnegan's Wake". This book aims to persuade the reader to overcome his or her doubts about tackling the Irish Sphinx.