The Backgrounds of Ulysses

Ellmann, Richard

Offprint. 'The Kenyon Review', Vol.XVI, No.3, Summer 1954. After his Yeats’ biography (published 1948), Ellmann begins putting the foundations in place for his Joyce (published 1959) and analyses the author’s gleaning process for Ulysses, “His [Joyce] work is ‘history fabled’, not only in Portrait but in Ulysses and his other writings as well. He was never a creator 'ex nihilo', he put together what he remembered and he remembered most of what he had seen or had heard other people remember. The latter category was, in a city given over to anecdote, a large one. His art, as the following pages attempt to demonstrate, was a continual transposition and re-composition of known materials.”, 50pp; inscribed by the author - 'with admiration for his book' - to Herbert Gorman, the first biographer of Joyce: picking up the biographical baton with a nod to his predecessor.

Other books by Ellmann, Richard

Oscar Wilde

James Joyce's Tower