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Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities

The Edinburgh Companion to James Joyce and the Arts

Edited by Keith Williams and Cleo Hanaway-Oakley

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Published 31 December 2026

About this book

Explores the creative endeavours of James Joyce and the artistic afterlives of his work

  • Presents authoritative critical assessments, based on original research, of engagements with a wide range of artistic practices and media in the work of James Joyce
  • Includes insightful readings into how Joyce’s writing has in turn been transformational across artistic forms and media
  • Considers Joyce’s interactions with the arts in their fullest historical, intellectual and aesthetic contexts
  • Comprises thirty-six specially commissioned chapters from well-established and emerging scholars in multiple academic disciplines across the world

This Companion examines James Joyce’s interactions with the arts during his lifetime and the many ways that Joyce’s writing has been inspiring and transformational to artists since. As a landmark volume in Joyce studies as well as the study of Modernist intermediality more broadly, it brings together a wide range of artforms, aesthetics and media engaged by Joyce’s work, including painting, theatre, architecture, photography, cinema, broadcasting, animation, comics, music, song, dance, fashion and digital forms. It investigates Joyce’s creative practice and subsequent responses to it from a plethora of perspectives: archival and genetic, linguistic, aesthetic, theoretical, stylistic, creative- and performance-based. Featuring an introductory overview and thirty-six original chapters by artists, curators and established and emerging scholars from across the world, it creates a comprehensive ‘collideorscape’ of views on Joyce’s relationship with the arts.

Reviews

Expansive, adventurous, groundbreaking and often illuminating, The Edinburgh Companion to James Joyce and the Arts reveals how Joyce’s writing absorbed and transformed the arts and media of his time and, in turn, has inspired creative work ever since. Its range and intellectual vitality make it indispensable for Joyceans and modernists alike.
Table of contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Standard Works By or About James Joyce

Foreword
Stephen Coppel

Introduction: James Joyce and the Arts
Keith Williams and Cleo Hanaway-Oakley

Part I: Becoming Joyce’s Contemporaries
1. James Joyce and Art Writing: Indirect Efficacy, Potential (Art) History and Adjacency
Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes
2. Joyce and the Art of Blindness
Cleo Hanaway-Oakley
3. Joyce. Beckett. Mimesis
Sam Slote
4. Toilet Rolls and Chinese Pills: Joyce, Paper Culture and other Modernists
John Coyle

Part II: Mapping the Joycean Imaginary
5. Pacing out Ulysses: Pictorial Mapping as an Act of Reading
Michael Kirkham
6. ‘Loose ties’ in ‘Aeolus’: The Paris Commune, the 1913 Lockout and the Art of Rhetoric
Catherine Flynn
7. Architecture in Finnegans Wake
David Spurr
8. The Art of Curating Joyce
Simon O’Connor

Part III: Fine and Popular Arts
9. Henri Matisse and James Joyce: The Limited Editions Club Ulysses as a Modernist Temporal Artefact
Kathryn Brown
10. Mimmo Paladino, Ulysses c’est moi: Joyce and Paladino’s Significant Nonsense
Stephanie Morin
11. A Broken Mandala: Reading Finnegans Wake through Illustrative Practice
Clinton Cahill
12. The Logical Art of Finnegans Wake
Sangam MacDuff
13. Intermedial Joyce: Exploring Joycean Comics, Graphic Novels and Graphic Narratives
Francesco Lupatelli

Part IV: Textual Arts
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Learner and a Teacher
Elizabeth Switaj
15. Scalding the Teapot: Joyce and the Art of Psychoanalysis
Luke Thurston
16. In Search of ‘too-dimensional writing’: Hypertextual Joyce, Joycean Hypertext
David Vichnar
17. Joyce and the Art of Poetry
Norbert Lennartz
18. ‘There being more languages to start with' (U 16.352): Translation in James Joyce’s Art
Jolanta Wawrzycka

Part V: Music, Sound and Broadcasting
19. ‘Poor Old Balfe’: Joyce and Popular Music
Michelle Witen
20. Endless Melody, Endless Prose: Joyce, Wagner and the Quest for a Universal Artwork
Josh Torabi
21. Joyce’s Music of the Future
Jean-Michel Rabaté
22. Joyce and Broadcasting
Daniel Ryan Morse
23. Joyce’s Bag of Mechanical Winds: ‘Aeolus’ and Modern Listening
Leah Toth

Part VI: Arts of Performance
24. James Joyce, the Music Hall and Media Environments
Barry J. Faulk
25. Joyce and Performance
Eleanor Lybeck
26. James Joyce, Lucia Joyce and the Illuminated Letters: A Creative pas-de-deux
Genevieve Sartor
27. Garment Cultures in James Joyce
Vike Plock

Part VII: Journalism and Publishing
28. ‘[H]is eye running down the typescript’: Ulysses and the Art of Revision
Clare Hutton
29. Joyce, Censorship and the Erotic Arts
Richard Brown
30. As Writer, Reader and Collector: Joyce’s Threefold Engagement with the Press
Dipanjan Maitra
31. Joyce and the Art of Advertisement
Matthew Hayward

Part VIII: Photography and Moving Image Media
32. Photo Girls: Joyce and the Art of Photography
Georgina Binnie-Wright
33. ‘Percolating Up’: Joyce and the Art of Pre-Filmic Media
Keith Williams
34. Joyce, the Stream of Consciousness and the Camera-Eye
Adam Cuthbert
35. ‘Italian Bioscope Company Invades Dublin’: James Joyce’s Cinematograph Volta in Ireland’s
Moving-Image Culture
Denis Condon
36. Joyce’s Haunted Inkbottle: Early Animation and the Modernist Literary Experiment
Nicholas Andrew Miller

Notes on Contributors
Index

About the contributors

Keith Williams

Keith Williams is Reader in English Literature at the University of Dundee, Scotland. His most recent monograph is James Joyce and Cinematicity: Before and After Film (2020), which received excellent reviews in leading periodicals, including The James Joyce Quarterly, James Joyce Broadsheet, James Joyce Literary Supplement, Irish Studies Review and Dublin Review of Books.

He has researched and published widely on interactions between modern literature and technological media, including H.G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies (Liverpool University Press, 2007), as well as supervising PhD projects in the area.

He also engages in creative collaborations with professional magic lanternists, musicians and vocalists, showcasing relations between writers and early moving image media, including Joyce.

Dr Williams currently leads a project to recover the work of a late 19th century Scottish science fiction pioneer who imagined many new media and their global impacts. The first critical selection from this (edited with Ari Brin) is The Essential Robert Duncan Milne: Stories by the Lost Pioneer of Transatlantic Science Fiction (2025).

Cleo Hanaway-Oakley

Cleo Hanaway-Oakley is Senior Lecturer in Liberal Arts and English at the University of Bristol. She is also an elected trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation and an advisory editor for the James Joyce Quarterly. She specialises in the work of James Joyce, literary modernism and the arts, medical humanities, disability, sensing and the sensory, and notions of embodiment.

Her first monograph, James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film, was published in 2017. She is currently working on her second monograph, James Joyce and Dynamic Vision.
Her writing on Joyce captures the attention of scholars as well as lay readers. She recently published a piece aimed at medical professionals: ‘The Iridescent Vision of James Joyce’, in The New Optometrist, 23 Sep 2024, and The Ophthalmologist, 21 Oct 2024. And her public-facing article, ‘Ulysses at 100: why Joyce was so obsessed with the perfect blue cover’, in The Conversation, 1 February 2022, inspired artist Alistair Noble to create a new artwork entitled ‘ULIXES: A meditation on blue’.

More in this series

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