The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904 -1920 McCourt, John €32.00 - now €25.60 20% off save €6.40 ISBN: 1 901866 45 9 Format: Size: Publication Date: March 2000 Physical Copy (supplied by Lilliput Press) Add to Basket View Shopping Basket

Since the publication of Richard Ellmann's James Joyce in 1959, Joyce has received remarkably little biographical attention. Scholars have chipped away at various aspects of Ellmann's glittering edifice, but have failed to construct anything that might stand alongside it. The Years of Bloom is unquestionably the most important work of Joyce biography since Ellmann. Based on extensive scrutiny of previously unused Italian sources, and informed by the author's intimate knowledge of the culture and dialect of Trieste, The Years of Bloom documents a fertile period in Joyce's life.

While living in Trieste, Joyce wrote most of the stories in Dubliners, turned Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and began Ulysses. Triestine echoes and influences are rife throughout Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Contrary to Ellmann's depiction of Trieste as a sleepy backwater, not unlike the Dublin Joyce left, Mc Court shows that in the waning years of the Habsburg Empire the city was a teeming imperial port, intensely cosmopolitan and polyglot. There Joyce experienced the various cultures of central Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. He met many Jews, who collectively provided much of the material for the character of Leopold Bloom. He encountered continental socialism, Italian Irredentism, Futurism, and various other political and artistic forces whose subtle influences Mc Court traces with literary grace and scholarly rigour. The Years of Bloom, a rare landmark in the crowded terrain of Joyce studies, will instantly take its place as a standard work.

THE AUTHOR
John Mc Court was born in Dublin in 1965 and educated at Belvedere College and University College Dublin. He received his PhD from the latter institution for an early version of The Years of Bloom. Since 1991 he has lived in Trieste, and he currently teaches at the University of Trieste. He is the author of James Joyce: A Passionate Exile (an illustrated biography, forthcoming), Dubliners: A Guide to Text Analysis (1998), and (with Renzo Crivelli) Joyce in Svevo's Garden (1995).