James Joyce and Photography - (Historicizing Modernism) by Georgina Binnie-Wright (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

James Joyce and Photography is the first book to explore in-depth James Joyce's personal and professional engagement with photography. Photographs, photographic devices and photographically-inspired techniques appear throughout Joyce's work, from his narrator's furtive proto-photographic framing in Silhouettes(c. 1897), to the aggressively-minded 'Tulloch-Turnbull girl with her coldblood kodak' in Finnegans Wake (1939).
Through an exploration of Joyce's manuscripts and photographic and newspaper archival material, as well as the full range of his major works, this book sheds new light on his sustained interest in this visual medium. This project takes Joyce's intention in Dubliners (1914) to 'betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city' as key to his interaction with photography, which in his literature occupies a dual position between stasis and innovation.

Review Quotes

Like a skilled flash photographer, Binnie-Wright provides illuminating interpretations of familiar and unfamiliar subjects. Flickering seamlessly between meticulous historical research and deft textual analysis, this book is vital reading for Joyceans and anyone interested in literary modernism's relationship with visual technologies.

Cleo Hanaway-Oakley, Lecturer in Liberal Arts and English, University of Bristol, UK

This lucid and compelling new study is a game-changer, not just in the emerging field of research into Joyce and photography, but in its creative engagement with modern visual media in general. It is an invaluable foundation for future scholarship.

Keith Williams, Reader in English, University of Dundee, UK

About the Author

Georgina Binnie-Wright is an independent scholar who specialises in modern literature and the use of epistolary narratives in loneliness research.