James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity

Mullin offers a richly detailed account of Joyce's lifelong battle against censorship. She shows Joyce responding to Edwardian ideologies of social purity by accentuating the 'contentious' or 'offensive' elements in his work. This important book offers crucial insights into the sexual politics of Modernism.

In James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity, Katherine Mullin offers a richly detailed account of Joyce's lifelong battle against censorship. Through prodigious archival research, Mullin shows Joyce responding to Edwardian ideologies of social purity by accentuating the 'contentious' or 'offensive' elements in his work. The censorious ambitions of the social purity movement, Mullin claims, feed directly into Joyce's writing. Paradoxically, his art becomes dependent on the very forces that seek to constrain and neutralize its revolutionary force. Acutely conscious of the dangers censorship presented to publication, Mullin shows Joyce revenging himself by energetically ridiculing purity campaigns throughout his fiction. Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners all meticulously subvert purity discourse, as Joyce pastiches both the vice crusaders themselves and the imperilled 'Young Persons' they sought to protect. This important book will change the way Joyce is read and offers crucial insights into the sexual politics of Modernism.