Customer Reviews

Reflections on James Joyce: Stuart Gilbert's Paris Journal (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Imprint Series)

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I co-edited this important literary document with Dr. Thomas F. Staley, Director of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, where the vast Stuart Gilbert collection was acquired in the early 1990s. Gilbert was a British citizen, who, after retiring from his work as a judge in Burma, married a French woman and moved to Paris in the early 1920s to pursue more intellectual pursuits. Once in Paris, he became an intimate part of the literary circle surrounding James Joyce, and wrote the first book on Joyce ("James Joyce's Ulysses"), before falling out of favor with him. His dyspeptic journal, at turns scandalous and illuminating, gives an inside account of life in the Parisian literary circles where Joyce lived and worked, and is prefaced by an introductory essay by Dr. Staley, one of the leading scholars of literary modernism. It should be useful to the many students and scholars interested in better appreciating Joyce, European modernism generally, or simply the joys of Paris in the twenties.

Randolph Lewis rrlewis@hotmail.com

This book gives the reader a much better understanding of Joyce and his writings . It fills in many gaps in this 'larger then life' authors career . The many previously unpublished letters to his friend and literary collaborator , Stuart Gilbert , allow one to see the author is his own light . The rare photos , provide the reader with an intriguing glimpse of this colorful author .

A must have book for the serious James Joyce scholar .