Customer Reviews

Allusions in Ulysses: An Annoted List

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Pay no attention to the negative review above. If you are looking for an apparatus to use in reading Ulysses, this book and Harry Blamires' Bloomsday Book are the best available. Neither seeks to use Joyce's text to advance its own agenda, but rather to explicate the text, which is difficult going for a new reader, but worth the effort. Whereas Blamires summarizes each chapter of Joyce in his book, this is a page by page list of Joycean allusions, permitting more back and forth shuttling between the apparatus and Ulysses. If you are looking for a guide for students, I would prefer Blamires for younger undergrads who might not be able to follow what is happening in Joyce without summaries, and this one for more advanced students and scholars.

For those who want to understand some of the apparent oddities in the text. This book does not tell you what's going on, but clarifies where certain words and phrases come from (music hall songs, philosophy texts, political campaigns, etc.) that a modern reader or even non-scholar would have no idea of. Of all the companion books to Ulysses I'm familiar with this is the most useful for actively reading the pages themselves.

This result in Google Books kept providing the most satisfactory answer to every Ulysses-based search query I made, so I went ahead and bought it. Not only is the cover (Hamlet architecture!) awesome, the notations are wonderfully thorough. The roots of references are indicated without being overly interpreted. Makes reading Ulysses even better (if that is possible).

I recommend "Ulysses Annotated" before I recommend this one to fans of Joyce's great novel "Ulysses." However, as an aid, this book is highly readable and is less encyclopedic than "Ulysses Annotated," which covers more ground, as is its nature. So, buy "Ulysses," "Ulysses Annotated," and then "Allusions in Ulysses," in that order, and you should be set for life. Long life and success to Joyce and his followers!

I recommend "Ulysses Annotated" before I recommend this one to fans of Joyce's great novel "Ulysses." However, as an aid, this book is highly readable and is less encyclopedic than "Ulysses Annotated," which covers more ground, as is its nature. So, buy "Ulysses," "Ulysses Annotated," and then "Allusions in Ulysses," in that order, and you should be set for life. Long life and success to Joyce and his followers!

This book is extremly hard to decipher. I feel the book is patterned after Homer's THE ODYSSEY.