James Joyce and Catholicism: The Apostate's Wake

Description

James Joyce and Catholicism is the first historicist study to explore the religious cultural contexts of Joyce's final masterpiece. Drawing on letters, authorial manuscripts and other archival materials, the book works its way through a number of crucial themes; heresy, anticlericalism, Mariology, and others. Along the way, the book considers Joyce's vexed relationship with the Catholic Church he was brought up in, and the unique forms of Catholicism that blossomed in Ireland at the turn of the last century, and during the first years of the Irish Free State.

Chrissie Van Mierlo teaches at the School of Arts, English and Drama at Loughborough University, UK.

This is a most engaging and impressive book. In terms of its critical focus and style, it should serve as a model for future monographs on the Wake. Van Mierlo manages to be clear and detailed, and yet she never loses sight of both the "human drama" of the Wake as well as its stylistic and formal charms and complexities. * James Joyce Quarterly * [The author] deploys genetic scrutiny of [Joyce's] source material ... Van Mierlo supplies important historical and textual reasons for understanding the 'saturation' of Joyce's work in 'culture of Irish Catholicism that existed in Victorian and Edwardian Dublin'. * Forum for Modern Language Studies *