This chapter discusses the reception of Hopkins in the 1920s and 1930s and his influence on modernism and twentieth-century criticism. It proposes Hopkins’s importance to the emphasis on difficulty and ambiguity in modernist critcism, as well as on relations between sound and sense. It also observes Hopkins’s significance for theories of rhythm, metre, and diction in modernist poetry.

Finn Fordham’s chapter addresses the lacuna in scholarly considerations of the early European reception of Finnegans Wake by offering a cultural historiography that focuses on England, addressing its political landscape and specific cultural traditions. Examining the wartime diaries and letters of literary figures in the United Kingdom, it traces complex ideological responses to Joyce’s last text. In doing so, it outlines events that are seminal to the development of the Joyce industry in the United States; Fordham argues that the cultural vacuum in Europe produced by the war led to the conception of a “universal” Joyce. While early reviews in the Southern Review and the Kenyon Review saw the Wake as a perfectly “impersonal work” that inspired the development of New Criticism, this study will construct an alternative account of the impact of Wake. This account centers on readers who respond privately to the text in a time of global conflict and see within its polyphony a set of tacitly political practices.

By the end of 1922, seeing his banned ‘epic of two races (Israel-Ireland)’ stirring up the cultural intelligentsia of Europe and America, James Joyce had developed enough confidence – or hubris – to turn to the narrative of a larger subject: the human race. To Harriet Shaw Weaver, his patron, he declared that he would now be writing a ‘universal history’. Joyce, I suggest, had been prompted to this by a trend for producing large-scale histories which had already swept up many publishers and writers, such as D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, John Buchan, Oswald Spengler and, pre-eminently, H. G. Wells. Events – the apparent end of the First World War, recognised as the first world-wide war, the establishment of the League of Nations and the multiple signatories of the Treaties of Versailles and of Sèvres – had led to a new global imaginary which required new global narratives. By 1924 – which seems to be a peak year – dozens of titles alluding to world history were available. As it was put in 1919 by Viscount Bryce (1838–1922) who, as Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1905 to 1907, might well have appeared on Joyce's radar:

We are still learning to be Richard Ellmann's successors, to overcome Joyce's principal interpreter. This chapter approaches the life of Joyce biography by reflecting critically on its current condition, by diagnosing its symptoms and causes, examining the roles it is failing to fulfil and outlining the obstacles that any future work faces. In my conclusion I will entertain the idea of an ideal biography, however distant or impossible it may appear to be, and suggest what it might avoid and what it might consist of.

A recent survey of current Joycean biography has been carried out by John McCourt where the impression is of a lively field in which the life has necessarily become ‘many lives’, as Ira Nadel, quoting Denis Donoghue, put it in 1999. My view is that its current state is strikingly eccentric. Imagine a city, its downtown area resembling Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast – at its centre stands a monolithic, sprawling, over-used and decaying, charming but distrusted edifice, stylish and gorgeous in detail but also, upon close inspection, with parts tacked on over gaps, creating illusory effects of completion and tidiness and representing a questionable ideological content: the Ellmann building. Intruding upon its grounds are contending but narrower structures, covering stages of Joyce's life: Peter Costello's somewhat drab and uneven picture of the years up to 1915, or John McCourt's colourful account of the role of Trieste.