Together with Morris Beja, Angus McFadzean and Daniel Ferrer, I am co-editing a critical edition of the forty short texts Joyce called “epiphanies” (c.1901-04). These texts are among Joyce’s earliest literary works, a series of highly polished miniatures that provide a vivid insight into his art. Composed concurrently with Chamber Music (1907), they are sometimes regarded as lyrical counterparts to Joyce’s poetry, but alongside prose-poems, almost half are in dramatic form, and several combine the two modes, providing a bridge to Joyce’s fiction. Since Joyce reused thirty of them, often repeatedly, in his subsequent works, right through to Finnegans Wake, they make a significant contribution to major works like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Indeed, to the extent that Joyce’s oeuvre can be considered as “one great work” (Tindall), the epiphanies offer a point of origin, providing a paradigm case for genetic scholars to study the development of Joyce’s oeuvre.
This project is being conducted in association with L’Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes (http://www.item.ens.fr/thematique/).