Writing in 1841, Thomas Carlyle reads the works of Shakespeare as ‘so many windows, through which we see a glimpse of the world that was in him’. In his Homeric scholar role of 1897, Samuel Butler declares that ‘art is only interesting in so far as it reveals an artist’. And in response to Hugh Kenner's reading of Ulysses ‘not as the expression of Joyce himself but of a persona’, in 1961 S. L. Goldberg sighs: ‘It sounds – one must say – remarkably boring.’ Though written seventy years ago, Goldberg's view is not out of date in Joyce studies. Joyce's life and work are both of interest to critics, and often treated together: it's not unusual for Joyce critics today to make efforts to prove the author’s interest in a particular topic through reference to his life – or records thereof. Thematic studies – such as recent work on Joyce and betrayal or exile – frequently attempt to underpin an interpretation of a given theme's importance to Joyce's texts with alleged evidence of that theme's importance to Joyce's life. This positioning is often now carefully framed and self-aware: critics might acknowledge the limits of reading the work via the life, while arguing the life is of interpretive value. Some refuse the implication that they are in fact reading Joyce's texts in order to reach the author, or that they are conflating Stephen and Joyce. The way in which one reads the ambiguously autobiographical elements of Joyce's texts can enhance or lessen the romantic link between an author's life or personality and their works, but Stephen is not the only reason Joyceans study the author's life.

For this is, of course, not a Joycean-specific tendency: while autobiographical touches might encourage a critic to delve into letters and biographies, so will an author's status, as will the general fascination with the lives of authors which exists within and without literary academia to this day. Literary biographies, collected letters, memoirs from friends, and an ongoing exchange of anecdotes result from this interest, and as an author gains more fame or celebrity, the demands for biographical works increase – in turn enhancing the author's renown.