routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

Woolf and Joyce
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something of Molly’s excited reverie. The lack of punctuation reflects
the way in which thoughts and ideas merge into one another. This is in
many ways the epitome of the stream of consciousness technique.
Not all the linguistic experiments in the form and structure of the
novel are easy to comprehend and there are places where it is difficult
to follow the stream of consciousness. Neither is there one single
appropriate style. Different characters have different inner lives and
different writers perceive and represent the inner mind in contrasting
ways. In the hands of Modernist writers like Joyce and Woolf, brilliant
insights into the workings of the human mind are revealed which
were not possible within the limits of the nineteenth-century novel
and which have not been consistently surpassed since.
However, James Joyce’s contribution to the development of the
novel in English in the twentieth century goes beyond particular
techniques of formal experimentation. His contribution was a major
one on several levels. Joyce was born in Dublin, educated in Ireland
and spent most of his adult life in Europe, mainly in France, Italy, and
Switzerland. In Europe he was at the centre of literary circles but he
remained, throughout his life of voluntary exile from Ireland, a deeply
Irish writer and he wrote only and always about Dublin. To write
about Dublin and its people was for Joyce to write about all human
experience. Joyce wrote something in each of the principal genres
before concentrating on fiction: Chamber Music and Pomes Penyeach
(poetry); Exiles (play), and Dubliners (short stories).
His first short stories, published in the collection Dubliners (1914),
depict the lives of the ordinary people of the city with clarity and realism.
The stories are carefully organised so that meanings arise not only from
the individual sketches but also from the relations between them. The
best known of these stories – The Dead – is the final one in the sequence,
to which many of the previous stories point. It is a story in which a
husband is shocked out of his self-satisfaction and egotism by learning
of his wife’s love for a young man she had known many years before:
The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself
cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife.
One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into
that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and
wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside