Review Extracts, 2000-2014: A Selection

Please find below a selection of Professor Andrew Gibson's Review Extracts from between 2000-2014:

JOYCE’S REVENGE

`I had been wondering if history and politics in Ulysses were such well-mined veins that only materials for articles and monographs remained. Happily, Andrew Gibson’s superb study dispelled my doubts.’ James Fairhall, James Joyce Quarterly

`It is hard to pay sufficient tribute to Gibson’s keenly detailed research and grasp of nuance in his discussion of the web of relations conjoining the powerful and the powerless’.  James Fairhall, James Joyce Quarterly

`Joyce’s Revenge deserves to become one of the landmarks in criticism devoted to Ulysses. Several chapters alone are worth the price of the book. For example, Gibson’s research on Gibraltar, fascinating in itself, deepens and enriches our understanding of Molly in a way that is unlikely to become outmoded’. James Fairhall, James Joyce Quarterly 

`Joyce’s Revenge stands as a pinnacle of Joyce studies, a culmination and climax of the historicist turn that the field had taken in the previous decade’. Ronan McDonald, Textual Practice

'Joyce's Revenge splendidly serves to show us how significant is a scrutiny of the intertwined history of Britain and Ireland for understanding the radical aesthetics of Ulysses. This is a book that will keep Joyce scholars busy, and rightly so, for some time to come.' Irish Studies Review

'Aside from Joyce scholars those working more generally in Irish Studies should also read the book, as it indicates how closely Ulysses is an intervention into the crucial debates around history, culture, and national identity that shaped Ireland from the end of the nineteenth century.' Irish Studies Review 

`Almost every page shows evidence of the most scrupulous research into the text, and is almost always persuasive in its arguments. Joyce's Revenge is a genuinely innovative and fascinating account of Ulysses; undoubtedly it will change the contours of Joyce criticism with its profoundly historicised discussion of Joyce's relation to Britain and Ireland.' Irish Studies Review

'Gibson's nuanced historicist semi-colonial reading is particularly effective in the interpretation of the most challenging parts of the novel, especially the last three episodes.' Clare Hutton, Times Literary Supplement 

'This thought-provoking study makes a significant and highly original contribution to scholarship on Ulysses ... a particular strength of this book is the way in which it seeks to interpret the aesthetic of Ulysses as a whole, rather than focusing on a few key features or episodes.' Clare Hutton, Times Literary Supplement

'Andrew Gibson mentions that it took him fifteen years to write Joyce's Revenge. It's remarkable that he was able to produce this challenging, original study with its dense and learned historical detail that quickly. The book was worth waiting for.' Jean-Paul Riquelme, James Joyce Broadsheet 

'Joyce's Revenge makes a significant and distinctive contribution to Joyce studies, and it deserves a wide readership. The author is impressively well read in English and Irish cultural history, and the book identifies and explores an aspect of this history about which most Joyceans, perhaps, know less than they might. Among the books on Joyce I've studied recently this is perhaps the most absorbing read, cover to cover, of all of them.' Timothy Martin, James Joyce Literary Supplement 

`Gibson's detailed reading of Ulysses against the background of its intertextual archive provides highly revealing and often surprising insights into Joyce's deconstructive representation of the ideological forces at work both in England and Ireland. Joyce's Revengecombines a masterly analytical approach with a supreme grasp of theory, intellectual rigour and a convincing power of persuasion. Among the many books on our shelves produced by the Joyce industry, Gibson's will figure among the first things to read on Ulysses.' Wolfgang Wicht, Anglia 

'The true distinction of Joyce's Revenge lies in its density. This comes in two forms: intellectual and historical. Every page in this book feels hard-won; every argument is sophisticated enough to include a host of variations, or a sequence of counter-arguments. There is almost a hint of Hegel or Adorno in Gibson's thought, the unremitting intensity with which a position is carried through in all its exemplification, then inverted with equal rigour.' Joseph Brooker, Textual Practice 

'Joyce's Revenge deserves more than a review: better a colloquium dedicated to following its myriad trails. For all the headlong pursuit of its argument, its chapters are also diversions in themselves, localized and surprising.' Joseph Brooker, Textual Practice 

`Political Joyce’is not new. Its task must now be to age wisely: to root its claims not in theoretical fashion but in deep historical soil. No one has yet undertaken this task with more care and skill than Andrew Gibson.' Joseph Brooker, Textual Practice 

'Andrew Gibson combines a wealth of knowledge and research ... with an admirable sensitivity to the Joycean text. The book has much to do with what postcolonial theory calls 'hybridity' and 'mimicry', but is also densely and precisely historicized ... Joyce's Revenge immerses itself in a broad range of specific cultural discourses on subjects from nationalist politics to medical debates to the politics of street names, the politics of Shakespeare and bardolatry, Protestant-Catholic relations, Jewishness, Irish historiography, women's journals, and astronomy. The result is an important new study that will alter the ways we read Ulysses.' Professor Vincent J. Cheng, University of Utah
'Andrew Gibson's is easily one of the most serious of academic books to have appeared on Joyce in recent years. It is densely researched, full of ideas, and well-embedded in current academic questions, and is sure to become a familiar point of reference in future debates as well as a standard to which subsequent researchers will have to aspire.' Richard Brown, Modernism/Modernity

`Andrew Gibson has written a book to be mined for decades to come for its unique historical insight, its extraordinary attention to detail and its powerful theoretical grasp. Joyce's Revenge is the kind of rare book one compulsively recommends to students and friends'. Marian Eide, South Central Review

`Andrew Gibson's book presents a convincing and fruitful method to interpret Ulysses. It also ― unlike many students of Joyce ― takes Joyce seriously as both a thinker and an artist ... The worth of any theory is not in its cleverness but in its explanatory value. On this basis Gibson's book is a success and a most refreshing one.' The Compulsive Reader 

JAMES JOYCE: A CRITICAL LIFE

`The strength of Gibson’s scholarship lies in his confident grasp of the social, intellectual and religious details of Anglo-Irish history, science and material culture out of which Joyce’s work sprung…His books on Joyce prove the mischievous contention of George Bernard Shaw that Ireland is one of the last spots on earth still generating the ideal Englishman of history…It may be that his own rereading of Joyce’s masterpieces is a chapter of the moral history of England and its liberation too.’ Declan Kiberd, Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature, University College Dublin

`[In Joyce’s Revenge], with critical acumen and subtle scholarship, Gibson mapped out a radically new approach to Joyce and Ulysses…here the concentration is on the work in the context of the life…This is an important study that should send us all back to the master’s scriptures with wiped eyes and big questions’. Gerry Dukes, Irish Independent

`The care with which Gibson analyses the play Exiles in his study is essential reading, as is his change in perspective regarding Ulysses itself, where he emphasizes the novel’s profoundly Irish historical and existential freight’.  El Pais 

`Gibson’s focus on Joyce’s Irishness produces original and provocative readings not only of Joyce’s works, but also of key moments in his life and even of his work habits….James Joyce makes for engrossing and satisfying reading. Gibson’s knowledge of Irish history, like his prose, is impeccable’.  James Joyce Literary Supplement

`There is an elegance to the whole package, and especially to Gibson’s writing…his skill at conveying quantities of information without losing momentum, and his fingertip familiarity with Irish history’.  English Literature in Transition 1880-1920

JOYCE, IRELAND, BRITAIN

`Deeply researched and meticulously written, these essays offer important insights into the historical context of Joyce’s work and adjust, significantly, our sense of Joyce’s relation to rIrish politics as well as to England and English culture’. Timothy Martin, Rutgers University

`Joyce, Ireland, Britain is likely to be considered one of the most important essay collections ever produced on Joyce, and will be talked about and used for decades to come’. Sebastian Knowles, Ohio State University

`The essay in this volume employ the “London method”.... The London school appears to have learned the lessons of Michel Foucault, for while it “aims at exactitude”, it is also `attentive to the possibility of historical discontinuities, ruptures, breaks. What we find [in Joyce, Ireland, Britain] is contextual narrative and reflection on historical events and figures, much of it insightful and original, supported by a wide range of published material...these essays, and the editors’ theoretical reflections, advance historical Joyce criticism in the direction of greater specificity and nuance. They also raise anew the question of the status of historical analysis in literary studies’. Gregory Castle,James Joyce Quarterly

`The introduction demonstrates the importance of persistent critique and an equal belief in the perfectibility of scholarship’s enterprise. The essays that follow are of uniformly high quality, written by scholars of great talent and conviction; their insights will be of real interest to researchers and teachers of Joyce’s work’. Marian Eide, James Joyce Literary Supplement

`This informative, even distinguished collection of essays promises to immerse its reader into a newly specific, historically accurate context for reading Joyce's work in relation to British and Irish politics and culture. Perhaps its most arresting claim is that unlike the Englishman Haines in Joyce's Ulysses, the English critics represented here refuse to treat history as a scapegoat in an effort to evade personal or national responsibility for historical wrongs against Ireland. Instead, the editors argue that the responsibility of "a new kind of English Joyce scholar" might be "to hold back from too ready a surrender to historical amnesia" and "to gesture toward the immense debtorship" [of a thing done; an echo of Stephen's telegram to Mulligan in Ulysses] "by doing a great deal of extremely hard and painstaking historical work"’. These two goals are something that every contributor succeeds in’. Vicki Mahaffey, Modernism/Modernity)

`Gibson and Platt's Joyce, Ireland, Britain and Shelton's Joyce and the Narrative Structure of Incest... acknowledge a crisis of method; both are impressively grounded in textual commentary and explication, whilst being overtly aware of the theoretical and methodological contracts into which they enter ― aware, that is, of the fact that their respective arguments emerge in response to a clear demand for methodological innovation. It is this awareness that lends the readings they advance a special quality and urgency’. Journal of Modern Literature

 BECKETT AND BADIOU

`Beckett and Badiou is all the better for its inherent difficulties, and even uncertainties, for its ultimate twisting and turning in on itself. What it lacks at times in elegance ― and the book feels in parts, unlike most of Gibson’s other criticism, almost self-denying in its stylistic dryness ― it makes up for with a nuance and rigour that make it a richly satisfying and productive account on Beckett’s oeuvre’. David Cunningham, Radical Philosophy

`Gibson probably takes us further than any other recent reader of Beckett…is direction of grasping the full social and critical form of his art’.  David Cunningham, Radical Philosophy

`Gibson’s book, with its intricate layers of theoretical complexity and its vast ambition, is certainly a formidable feat of scholarship…. The book is a testimony to its author’s intense participation in a set of intellectual debates and exchanges which are ― or at least should be ― of the greatest significance in literary studies’. English

`Gibson is masterful in his grasp of Badiou’s system (even its more knotty mathematical formulae), and he effortlessly weaves his argument from Badiou’s theorems to Beckett’s literary texts....By suggesting that Beckett’s work describes a waiting for something (the event) as well as an aimless, anxious, endlessly postponed process (of intermittency), Gibson provides an absorbing account of the hesitant expectancy of Beckett’s writing’.  Benjamin Keatinge, Irish University Review

'The book is impeccably researched.....Badiou's reading of the author has hitherto been less influential in the Anglo-Saxon (empirical) context than it has in le monde francophone. Gibson's book constitutes the first sustained study of the subject. In its depth of analysis, it will be difficult to surpass.'  Ulrika Maude, Modernism/Modernity

'Scrupulous, immensely well-read'. Leslie Hill, French Studies

`Gibson’s book is much more than a programmatic “Beckett and...” exercise that shoehorns Beckett into some pre-designed philosophical system. It is a far more sophisticated and dynamic critique than that. It is a tremendously alert and penetrating exercise in intellectual synergy, highlighting unexpected connections between the philosopher and artist that helps us consider both in a new light’. Textual Practice

`That Gibson can so comfortably move between historicist and abstract approaches reveals him as one of the most ambidextrous modernist specialists in an area that is still quite often split between scholars and theorists’. Textual Practice 

SAMUEL BECKETT: A CRITICAL LIFE

'In his recent short biography of the writer, Samuel Beckett, Andrew Gibson makes the essential attempt to restore to the dramatist and his characters the difficult and thankless nobility of the compassionate view . . .  An excellent and necessary volume’. George Hunka, Artistic Director, Theatre Minima, New York

'[The book] undoubtedly sheds light on the historical circumstances that informed [Beckett's] texts, and there are many interesting details that allow us to see his literary achievement more clearly’. Times Literary Supplement 

'This new biography . . . considers the writer's work in relation to the historical circumstances of his life and provides an original insight into one of Ireland's greatest writers.' Irish Post 

ON INTERMITTENCY: THE CONCEPT OF HISTORICAL REASON IN RECENT FRENCH PHILOSOPHY

`This book is to my knowledge the most subtle and original study of a crucial orientation in French philosophy that took place after the heyday of the best-known, now dead, great masters (Althusser, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan etc.), but which refused to ally itself with the nouvelle philosophie (Lévy, Finkielkraut and their followers). Gibson clarifies what the principal representatives of this orientation have in common, what separates them, and why thought must set out from them today, even if it preserves ― as Gibson does ― a real critical distance from them. The book is without equal or rival anywhere, including France’. Alain Badiou 

`Gibson is not merely a skilful interpreter of texts, not merely a passeur, who enables us to discover new vistas in contemporary French philosophy, but also a philosopher in his own right...the book you are going to read is not merely a book, it is a landmark’. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Preface 

THE STRONG SPIRIT: HISTORY, POLITICS AND AESTHETICS IN THE WRITINGS OF JAMES JOYCE 1898-1915

 `A compelling intellectual portrait of Joyce as he attempts to become “the artist of an emergent culture”’.  Sarah Davison, Times Literary Supplement

 `A much-needed intervention into thinking about Joyce’s politics, and no Joycean, or scholar of irish Studies generally, should neglect it.... Essential’. J.M. Utell, Choice