James Joyce
The Critical Writings.
The Viking Press, 1959. First edition. Edited by Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann. 288 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6" x 8.75", is bound in brick red spine cloth and black cloth boards, with gilt-lettered black spine compartment, and stamped black lettering above and below said compartment. Top edge of text block is tinted red. Book is in fine condition. Dust jacket, with price of $5 on front flap, exhibits light shelfwear and is preserved in mylar cover.
"From unpublished manuscripts, playbills, random pamphlets, and obscure periodicals the editors have assembled Joyce's little-known essays and critical writings (including some unexpected satirical verses). Written over a lifetime, the collection opens with a schoolboy essay from Joyce's Belvedere College days in 1896, when he was fourteen, and closed with a 1937 manifesto in French, on the Moral Right of Authors, prompted by the "Ulysses" privacy case. Between them is a rich selection of comments on novelists, dramatists, and poets from Ibsen and Yeats to Pound and Italo Svevo. These pieces, never before gathered together in a book and in some cases never printed before, reflect the wide-ranging mind, the pungent and often savage commentator, teh master of language and the defender of craft. Each of the fifty-seven items has an introduction by the editors explaining its genesis and relating it to the Joyce canon, there are also explanatory notes on many references in the text. This book is a must for the growing body of Joyce students, and will prove a delight to others who share Joyce's critical interest in his writing contemporaries."