Joycean critics have long written about Joycean criticism. Such self-reflexive tendencies are apparent in the number of published metacritical studies, appearing as early as 1956 with Marvin Magalaner and Richard M. Kain's Joyce: The Man, The Work, The Reputation – which boldly set out mid-century to tell us ‘what the twentieth century has thought of this strange Irishman over the years’. Reception studies, edited volumes collecting or responding to ‘classic’ pieces of criticism, and round-ups or critiques of Joycean theoretical work have followed, with one obvious reason for such surveys being the volume of existing critical work on Joyce's texts: disproving wonderfully the 1965 note that opens this chapter. Since that early worry, the size and growth of the field has been repeatedly complained about – with each critical complaint further increasing the field. Studies of studies help readers navigate an intimidating mass of criticism, but can also serve their own critical purposes: arguing for the re-canonisation of an overlooked work, reappraising established ideas, evaluating a particular mode or modes of criticism, or outlining patterns in previous critical thought. In this vein, the aim of this chapter and its partner, Chapter 4, is to analyse the ways in which the field of Joyce studies has engaged with questions of authorship, reading, and textuality. In order to do so, my examination is built on close readings of critical texts: of queries and presumptions, uses of language, emerging habits, repeated linguistic or analytical tics. Critical norms, such as an impulse to correct and the basis one has for doing so, indicate attitudes to the author, reader, and text – and the relationships between all three.

I will here look back at a selection of key early works of Ulysses criticism, Joyce's involvement in critical exegeses, and the resultant habits that form in critical works which predate or preclude Joyce studies’ engagement with literary theory from the 1970s and 1980s onwards; Chapter 4 will investigate the Joycean response to theory. The division of material for these chapters cannot be strictly chronological: I am qualifying ‘predate’ with ‘or preclude’ to indicate the blurry overlapping of ‘pre’- and ‘post’-theory within the Joycean critical sphere.