Current Projects 

New pENGUIN EDITIONS OF THE WORKS OF JAMES JOYCE

Professor Andrew Gibson has been appointed General Editor of the new editions of James Joyce to be published by Penguin. 2022 was the centenary of the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses. It was also the centenary of the formation of the Irish Free State, and therefore of the beginning of (at least a certain kind of) independence for Ireland. This is not a coincidence. Ulysses is on one level a sustained and extremely subtle meditation on the possibilities, problems and limits of the idea of the concept of an autonomous Ireland. Finnegans Wake takes to task the lack of authentic cultural independence in Ireland after 1922. Joyce’s other works can all be related to these projects. 

This supplies the rationale for a set of editions produced by a British and Irish team of scholars. Gibson himself is writing the introduction to Ulysses and assisting Steven Morrison of Nottingham University in annotating it. Anne Fogarty of University College Dublin is writing the introduction to and annotating Dubliners. Joe Brooker of Birkbeck College, London is writing the introduction to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, with Morrison again providing the notes. Clare Hutton, an Irish scholar and author of the ground-breaking Serial Encounters: Ulysses and the Little Review, is providing the introduction and notes to a new edition of Joyce’s Poems. Gibson is writing the introduction and notes to Joyce’s play Exiles. Irish scholar Brian Fox, author of James Joyce’s America, is editing the new Penguin edition of Finnegans Wake. The end product will be six new, attractively presented, scholarly but easily accessible editions of Joyce’s major works that should remain the principal editions for students and the larger reading public together for decades, but will also take a rather different critical and scholarly direction to previous editions and therefore be of interest to specialists.