Exiles - (Florida James Joyce) Annotated by James Joyce

About the Book

In an effort to facilitate and generate renewed scholarly interest in the play, Fargnoli and Gillespie have compiled the first and only critical edition of "Exiles." They contend that when read on its own, the play stands very much on the cutting edge of modern drama.

Book Synopsis

Joyce's only extant play, Exiles, is also his least appreciated work. Its form and its content--daunting even to Joyceans--create interpretive issues for readers and theater audiences who expect the deeper pleasures derived from Dubliners or Ulysses. Confronting a host of assumptions, misprisions, and prejudices, A. Nicholas Fargnoli and Michael Patrick Gillespie contend that the play deserves the same serious study as Joyce's fiction and stands on the cutting edge of modern drama.

The introduction situates Exiles in the context of Irish history and Joyce's other works. It highlights its often-overlooked complexity and closely examines the creative and domestic forces that contributed to the imaginative ethos from which the play emerged. The text of the play is newly annotated and unregularized, appearing for the first time as Joyce originally intended. This edition concludes with a range of critical responses, including essays on the confessional mode, characterization, and allegory, as well as an interview with Richard Nash, who has both directed and acted in the play.

Review Quotes

"Fargnoli and Gillespie have gifted us what should become the standard text of Exiles. For the first time, the play is available to us as Joyce wanted it to appear."--Irish Studies Review

"A fitting tribute to the 100th anniversary of Exiles."--English Literature in Transition

"Provide[s] us . . . with a remarkably established text as well as with the reprinting of some outstanding, thought-provoking essays."--James Joyce Quarterly

"This companion represents an excellent place for new readers to begin and for lapsed Joyceans to renew their acquaintance with this provocative play."--James Joyce Literary Supplement

About the Author

A. Nicholas Fargnoli is dean of the Division of Humanities at Molloy College. He is author and editor of several books and coeditor of Ulysses in Critical Perspective. Michael Patrick Gillespie is director of the Center for the Humanities in an Urban Environment at Florida International University. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including James Joyce and the Exilic Imagination.