Hamilton Books
Pages: 414
•
Trim: 6⅜ x 9¼
978-0-7618-6919-1 • Hardback • December 2017 • $104.00 • (£80.00)
978-0-7618-6918-4 • eBook • December 2017 • $98.50 • (£76.00)
Grace Eckley in the 1980s retired from teaching to devote full time to research writing. After more than twenty years in beloved Colorado, she returned to family in Des Moines, Iowa, and now profits from their many contributions to research efforts.
List of Figures
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Chapter One: The Stead Source and the Critical Dilemma
Chapter Two: The Predication of the Portrait’s “Good Man Stead”
Chapter Three: The Strategy of the Encrypted Name
Chapter Four: The Thunder of Stead’s Scandalous Maiden Tribute
Chapter Five: The Park Maid and the Sinister Sir
Chapter Six: Who Was the Hen and Whose the Letters
Chapter Seven: Light and Science in the “Dark Night of the Soul”
Chapter Eight: Maamtrasna Retrial Defends the Joyce Family Name
Chapter Nine: The Brunonian “Hiresiarch” and the Russian general (Sic)
Chapter Ten: Timing and Terrain of the Snake and the Whale
Chapter Eleven: The Encrypted Hero of Finnegans Wake
References
Students of late Victorian Britain, which then included Ireland, have long seen W. T. Stead, both as a colourful journalist and a leading public figure, as one of the most influential opinion makers of his era. Grace Eckley, in her indefatigable researches into the allusional depths of Finnegans Wake, shows that for James Joyce's parallel universe W. T. Stead was equally important. She demonstrates that far from being a mere phantasmagoria, the text is deeply rooted in the mental and moral atmosphere of its times, and that Stead plays there as great a role as he did in the real world. She demonstrates too not just the value of close reading, but also of ever-deeper researches into what Joyce, like so many millions, actually read and absorbed, and how so many almost forgotten events form an integral part of his imaginative world.
— Peter Costello, Irish critic, historian, and editor, author of James Joyce: The Years of Growth and co-author of John Stanislaus Joyce: The Voluminous Life and Genius of James Joyce's Father