JOYCE, James - PRESCOTT, Joseph.

£650 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

James Joyce: A Study in Words. The truly rare original offprint, with only two copies listed by WorldCat worldwide (Harvard and National Library of Israel), of this groundbreaking early article on James Joyce, published two months before the final release of Finnegans Wake. Joseph Prescott was to become a major voice in Joycean studies, in particular through his book Exploring James Joyce (1964).A contemporary reviewer of Exploring James Joyce vaunted him as a pioneer "in the American academic study of James Joyce, as author of a scholarly article in 1939, and of the first PH.D. thesis six years later... For two decades Joseph Prescott has been recognized as the man who knows most thoroughly the text of Ulysses..." (Kain, pp. 253-6). James Joyce: A Study in Words was published two months before the final release of Finnegans Wake, appraising Joyce's development through Dubliners, the Portrait, and Ulysses, to the "Work in Progress". Notably unawed by his subject, Prescott sensitively weighs Joyce's relationship to language, opening wryly: "The writings of Joyce show a progression from an early interest in words through a mature use of them to the excessive fondness of old age". His final paragraph constitutes a striking satire on the logical conclusion of Joyce's development: "To such writing there is one final conclusion. Joyce will call his next work something like Tabula Rasa and regale the reader with hundreds of pages of closely bound paper, each one of which will be inn

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