James Joyce and the Matter of Paris

This book is essential reading for Joyceans, Irish modernists, and Anglophone modernists, and also for scholars of transnational modernism, of comparative European literatures, of the life of the sensorium, and of culture and capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In James Joyce and the Matter of Paris, Catherine Flynn recovers the paradigmatic city of European urban modernity as the foundational context of Joyce''s imaginative consciousness. Beginning with Joyce''s underexamined first exile in 1902–03, she shows the significance for his writing of the time he spent in Paris and of a range of French authors whose works inflected his experience of that city. In response to the pressures of Parisian consumer capitalism, Joyce drew on French literature to conceive a somatic aesthetic, in which the philosophically disparaged senses of taste, touch, and smell as well as the porous, digestive body resist capitalism''s efforts to manage and instrumentalize desire. This book resituates the most canonical of Irish modernists in a European avant-garde context while revealing important links between Anglophone modernism and critical theory.