In her review of Joshua Goldstein’s War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa, Francine D’Amico writes: “War is constructed as a test or signifier of manhood/masculinity: victory is confirmation of male identity, defeat is emasculation. Femininity is constructed to reinforce the ‘man as warrior’ construction, both in support roles as nurse, mother, or wife and in opposition as peace activist: all confirm militarized masculinity.” Building on this observation, this chapter asks whether war fiction and poetry support and reinforce these popularized conceptions, or whether they offer opposing or more complex views. Examining some of the most classic and popular war novels of the twentieth century such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, this chapter shows that these popular war novels of the twentieth century do not promote “militarized masculinity” but focus instead on the physical, psychological, and emotional cost of war by portraying its devastating effects on both men and women.

The notion of place could be considered relatively simple in Joyce's writing, given that his major works – Dubliners, Portrait, Ulysses, and even, in a sense, Finnegans Wake – all take place in the city of Dublin, Ireland. But as Michael Seidel indicates in the title of his study of Ulysses, geography and travel in Joyce's work also have an epic dimension. The concept of place therefore signifies a variety of issues, and arguably two of the most worthy of consideration are the ecological and the political. Attention to the role of nature and environment in Irish literary works has been growing since the publication of Tim Wenzell's Emerald Green: An Ecocritical Study of Irish Literature in 2009, although that work pays considerably more attention to such Joyce contemporaries as Yeats, Lady Gregory, George Moore, and A. E. than to Joyce himself. However, with the growing prominence of ecological study in the field of literature, attention to its significance in Joyce's work will continue to grow. I will therefore offer a survey of moments in Joyce's fictions in which the natural world as a setting plays a role, beginning with the poems of Chamber Music. Stephen Dedalus's encounters with nature in Portrait and Ulysses also deserve attention, as does Molly Bloom's monologue at the end of Ulysses and its echo in ALP's conversation at the end of Finnegans Wake. The coastal nature of Ireland makes the sea an important figure in many of these moments, and yet it is the urban spaces of the city and their effects on human activity that ultimately dominate the role of place in Dubliners, Portrait, and Ulysses, if not Finnegans Wake. Ireland's geography therefore has not only ecological but also political implications. Its structure as an island with bounded and therefore constrained space made it vulnerable to emigration, particularly after such an epic disaster as the Great Famine produced by the potato blight of the mid-nineteenth century. The Dubliners story “Eveline” glosses a version of the emigration dilemmas produced by Irish poverty in the twentieth century, although a play such as Joyce's Exiles offers a rather different perspective on Irish emigration and return.

There may be occasional funny moments in Dubliners and Portrait, but we would hardly think of either work as comic. Indeed, “A Painful Case” does not mislead with its title, for the story of a failed romance that leads to the possibly suicidal death of a woman and the anguished regrets of a man is profoundly sad. The struggles of young Stephen Dedalus in Portrait surely evoke compassion and concern, not laughter. Yet the designation comic is certainly appropriate for Ulysses, as Zack Bowen's 1989 “Ulysses” as a Comic Novel makes clear, and, we can argue, for Finnegans Wake as well, even though these later works also resound with many other emotional conflicts. Joyce's works give readers palettes of many moods, and these, in turn, are produced by the myriad voices that tell his stories in myriad styles. Indeed, Joyce's stylistic experimentation over the course of his writing has become a signature feature of his contribution to modernist literature. In its variety, its differences, its complexity, the multitude of ways he makes the language of his fictions expressive becomes almost overwhelming. When it comes to style, it may seem as though the ordinary has effectively been put aside, though this is far more evident in the later works – Ulysses and Finnegans Wake – than in the more conventional narrations of Dubliners and Portrait. Yet the ordinary has not disappeared entirely. In Ulysses style and voice begin relatively conventionally by remaining in the background at first, only to move more and more to the foreground, drawing as much attention to the way in which things are told as to the actions, events, and conflicts in the episodes themselves. An episode such as “Nausicaa” has characters, actions, and conflict, to be sure, but they are narrated by such a peculiar voice that it takes us a moment to understand that the first section is telling us about Gerty MacDowell's evening on the beach with her friends in the style in which she would wish her story to be told if it were written, using the conventions of style and diction of the romance novel. In other words, it is a “popular” or more ordinary literary style that tells the events, and the experimentation lies not in the complexity of the language but in the complex role of imitation and possible parody.

Richard Ellmann said it best: “Joyce's discovery, so humanistic that he would have been embarrassed to disclose it out of context, was that the ordinary is the extraordinary.” How so? Is there anything extraordinary about depicting a man going to the outhouse in the morning and defecating, pleased to find “that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone” (4.508)? Surely the act is commonplace enough, but its depiction in a 1904 novel, complete with the quiet thoughts that accompany it, is not. It suggests that even the most insignificant moments of a day can have meaning to human beings, and their representation in literature sharpens its realism to an extraordinary degree. In a 1920 letter to Carlo Linati, Joyce called Ulysses “the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life).” The representation of the ordinary thereby becomes one of the most important elements of Joyce's democratic impulse. By giving the figures of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses a keen specificity with respect to the banal activities and feelings of their everyday lives, he intensifies the vitality of what it means to be human. The ordinary therefore plays a number of important roles in Joyce's fiction, notwithstanding its complication by the perspectives produced by narration and the thoughts of its characters. Its most external manifestation can be found in the intimate connection between many of the settings in the works and their prototypes in the historical world of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Dublin. This reminds us that Joyce's work belongs to the realm of Irish literature, with an emphasis on what sets Dublin apart from cities in English literature. Number 7 Eccles Street, the home of the Blooms, remains a historical address in the northern part of the city, and tourists can still visit the James Joyce House, which is located at 15 Usher's Island, the home of the Morkan sisters in “The Dead.” These places now enjoy a special literary significance for tourists and Dubliners alike, but in 1904 they were ordinary addresses, ordinary buildings and homes. Critics have inevitably followed Joyce's own description of Dublin as “the centre of paralysis” by emphasizing the metaphorical qualities of the place, as when Hugh Kenner writes in Dublin's Joyce that the city in its present paralysis “remains a ghost, not a heap of bones.”

Classical literature could well be considered to offer the opposite of the ordinariness of daily life, with its focus on events of great importance with significant implications for the welfare and fate of nations and cultures. Joyce's Ulysses, with its many allusions to the activities and texture of ordinary life previously discussed, is simultaneously structured on the narrative events of Homer's epic Odyssey, a device already evoked in the earlier A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. There Joyce complicates the identity of young Stephen with that unconventional name, for an Irishman, of Dedalus. By connecting Stephen to the Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus, Joyce extends the story of oppressive life on an island from modern Ireland to ancient Crete, and traces the ambition (and failure) of artists to fly across the waters to freer environments back to classical mythology. For scholars of literary history the classical frameworks of Portrait and Ulysses made Joyce one of the premier figures of early twentieth-century Modernism as a movement. Beginning with T. E. Hulme's 1911 essay on “Romanticism and Classicism,” such Modernists as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot embraced the concept of Classicism as a modernist principle. Their focus was largely stylistic, urging clean, dry, objective, precise language both in poetry and in prose rather than emotional flights of Romantic aesthetic excess. But Modernists also incorporated classical themes into their poetry and fiction, with Ulysses as a premier example. The thematic analogues to various events and adventures in the Homeric epic are of course programmed into the titles of the episodes that Joyce revealed to Carlo Linati, even though they are not listed as chapter titles in the book. Their function is, once again, to enlarge and enhance the story of ordinary and mundane life on a Thursday in Dublin by making it resonate with epic and heroic adventures. Classical mythology is not Joyce's only fictional intertext, however, and the democratic impulse that spurs his focus on ordinary life in his works also extends to what we now call “popular culture” – the panoply of media productions that ordinary citizens encounter in the course of their daily experiences. The title of Ulysses may have been inspired by Homer's Odyssey, but Finnegans Wake alludes to the popular Irish ballad that recounts the death and resurrection of a fallen man.

James Joyce is one of the most challenging and difficult writers in the English language, highly respected as “the epitome of a high modernist, an artist for and of the cultural elite,” as Brandon Kershner put it. Yet ironically he is also one of the most popular – not only among academics, but also among many common readers. The iconic image to make this point is, of course, the 1955 Eve Arnold photograph of Marilyn Monroe, dressed in a chaste bathing suit in a children's playground, reading a copy of Joyce's Ulysses. This was not a stunt, we learned from Richard Brown, who interviewed the photographer. Monroe told Arnold that she had been reading the book for a long time. “She said she loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to herself to try to make sense of it – but she found it hard going.” One can only wish that Monroe could have enjoyed access to one of the many Ulysses reading groups that have sprung up not only in the United States but also in many other countries in recent decades. Mary Lowe-Evans writes of this Joyce community of varied readers: “Economists, musicologists, physicians, clergymen and women, literary scholars, linguists, students, and housewives engage in lively debate about Joyce's work with soldiers, sailors, architects, and attorneys.” The curious ability to fascinate both high-brow academics and ordinary readers is an important quality of Joyce's work – important because it speaks to a major aspect of its value as art with a remarkably democratic impulse. Sylvia Beach is reported to have said that Joyce himself “treated everyone as an equal, whether they were writers, children, waiters, princesses or charladies.” Joyce resists hierarchical judgments, whether in classifying people according to wealth, status, culture, intelligence, or even virtue, or in selecting thematic and stylistic vehicles for presenting their fictional lives. His strategy was to pursue forms of diversity in most aspects of his writing in order to balance thematic profundity with banality and stylistic aestheticism with commonalities of speech. This democratic tendency is evident in the multiplicity of his characters, the richness and depth of their exploration by the texts, the political and ethical implications in the historical moments of their settings, the inclusion of both the highest and lowest cultural expressions, and the generic and stylistic proliferation found in the works.

In Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence created some of the most intense representations of early twentieth-century English parties to be found. Published in 1920, the novel had been completed in 1917, and it was difficult for contemporaries not to read the party sequences as recreations of the author's interactions with Lady Ottoline Morrell and her circle at her Oxfordshire country home, Garsington Manor. Lawrence and his wife Frieda were among the very first guests invited to Garsington – to attend a small birthday-party for Morrell on 16 June 1915 – and they were frequent and sometimes contentious guests there in the ensuing year. Garsington was flamboyantly decorated and beautifully landscaped and Lady Morrell had ‘created a magic reflection of her visitors' dreams and illusions’ with the place, Michael Holroyd notes. But Holroyd goes on to say that ‘[w]henever these dreams and illusions vanished, her guests would take their revenge on her’. Lawrence belonged to this disillusioned cohort and even before the publication of Women in Love, his friendship with Morrell was already ‘in retreat’. When the novel was published, her portrayal as Hermione Roddice in the book struck her as a shocking betrayal and the friendship ended in grief and bitterness. But the ‘Breadalby’ and ‘Water-Party’ chapters in the novel offer much more than a satirical memoir, although they do explore the social dimensions of class differences, public aesthetics and power relations.

In 2003, Harvey Shapiro edited an anthology called Poets of World War II as part of the American Poets Project published by The Library of America. In his introduction he expresses his regret that “common wisdom has it that the poets of World War I - Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Isaac Rosenberg - left us a monument and the poets of World War II did not” (p. xx). Given America's late entry into the war in 1917, little of the monumental poetry of the Great War was written by Americans. Shapiro writes, “The American poets of World War I - John Peale Bishop, E. E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Alan Seeger - were too few to constitute a group” (p. xx). This imbalance in the poetic production of war poetry should have been redressed in World War II, although here a different set of impediments intervened. Paul Fussell suggests two reasons why the war produced more silence than poetic expression. The first was the sheer magnitude of violence and the level of cruelty produced by the war. “Faced with events so unprecedented and so inaccessible to normal models of humane understanding, literature spent a lot of time standing silent and aghast.” The second was that redemptive notions of patriotism, heroism, and even elegiac sentiment had been effectively exhausted by World War I. “It is demoralizing to be called on to fight the same enemy twice in the space of twenty-one years, and what is there to say except what has been said the first time?” Fussell writes. And yet poetry was produced in response to World War II, including a wide range of American poetry, as Shapiro's anthology demonstrates. Taken as a whole, these poems exemplify another reason why their response to World War II has not achieved the same public visibility and cultural significance as the poetry of the Great War.

The matter of (with) Finnegans Wake

Thus begins James Joyce's last work, figuratively and thematically in midstream. The sinuous sentence, the swerving phrase, continues a journey: by water, by bodily fluid, by verbal fluency. If we, the readers, are encompassed in the ambiguous 'brings us', then we can begin to understand why the voice of that opening sounds so like the narration of a tour guide. For we have no way of knowing where we, as readers, are situated in this opening. Are we on a boat in the river Liffey in Dublin, or are we inside a human body; are we at the beginning of time, or in the eternal present of every human utterance? The opening of Finnegans Wake drops us, without map, clock, compass, glossary, or footnotes, into an unknown verbal country, and the voice of the tour guide, alas, speaks their language rather than ours, although we catch enough cognates to keep from drowning altogether in that verbal stream. The role of that tour guide is, in a sense, duplicated by the enterprise of this essay. Surely, no other existing literary work needs a 'guide' more sorely than James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, with its strange language, its neologisms, its generic ambiguity, the obscurity of its allusions, the mysterious status of its speech.