James Joyce the Regionalist: The Irish Homestead, Dubliners, and Modernism's Regional Affect
Abstract:This essay reads James Joyce as a regionalist: as a writer who deliberately represented his region with scrupulous attention to detail, and whose writing illustrates the complex and mutually informing relationship between the local and the global. Reading Joyce's stories in the context of the Irish Homestead (1895–1923), the journal of Ireland's agricultural cooperative movement, reveals how his stories borrow the regionalism of the journal's editorials and fiction but are distinguished by the use of modernist narrative techniques. This regional affect defines Joyce's modernism as grounded in the local ecology, history, and culture of his city.