Mission Statement
For over 50 years, the James Joyce Quarterly has been the flagship journal of international Joyce studies. In each issue, the JJQ brings together a wide array of critical and theoretical work focusing on the life, writing, and reception of James Joyce. We encourage submissions of all types, welcoming archival, historical, biographical, and critical research.
Each issue of the JJQ provides a selection of peer-reviewed essays representing the very best in contemporary Joyce scholarship. In addition, the journal publishes notes, reviews, letters, a comprehensive checklist of recent Joyce-related publications, and the editor’s “Raising the Wind.” To supplement the print journal, we will soon provide a wide array of electronic resources for scholars, including an archive of past issues, a calendar of Joyce events, and an on-line checklist.
Our goal is simple: to provide an open, lively, and multidisciplinary forum for the international community of Joyce scholars, students, and enthusiasts.
History
The James Joyce Quarterly was founded in 1963 at the University of Tulsa by Thomas F. Staley, who was the journal’s editor for its first twenty-five years. Beginning as a modest publication of forty pages, the JJQ grew in size and quality under Staley’s guidance and was soon unchallenged as the journal of record on the life and writings of James Joyce. From 1989 to 2001 Robert Spoo edited the journal, overseeing its continuing expansion by encouraging a wide variety of theoretical, critical, and historical work on Joyce. In 2001, Sean Latham succeeded Spoo as editor and has served in that capacity since.
The first issue of the JJQ, appearing in the fall of 1963, carried only eight advisory editors on its masthead, but, as the community of Joyce scholars expanded and specializations proliferated, that number grew, and the JJQ currently boasts more than forty advisors from North America and Europe. The journal has a strong base of academic library subscriptions, and its total subscriptions number approximately 1,400, with readers in North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. One of the JJQ’s traditional strengths has been its special issues, which allow for both intense focus and creative expansion of topics, and the journal’s special issues have made signal contributions to criticism and theory within and beyond Joyce studies.
About James Joyce
James Augustine[1] Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century.
Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer‘s Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominent among these the stream of consciousness technique he utilized. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners(1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, occasional journalism, and his published letters.
Joyce was born in 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, Dublin—about half a mile from his mother’s birthplace inTerenure—into a middle-class family on the way down. A brilliant student, he excelled at the Jesuit schools Clongowes and Belvedere, despite the chaotic family life imposed by his father’s alcoholism and unpredictable finances. He went on to attend University College Dublin.
In 1904, in his early twenties he emigrated permanently to continental Europe with his partner Nora Barnacle. They lived in Trieste, Paris, and Zurich. Though most of his adult life was spent abroad, Joyce’s fictional universe centres on Dublin, and is populated largely by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there; Ulysses in particular is set with precision in the streets and alleyways of the city. Shortly after the publication of Ulysses he elucidated this preoccupation somewhat, saying, “For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.”[2]
Awards
Honorable Mention, Best Design, Council of Editors of Learned Journals.