The hundredth anniversary of the birth of James Joyce has shaken loose an international avalanche of symposia, lectures, performances, exhibitions, books, special journal issues, and so forth, in honor of the occasion. This collection constitutes one more act of homage to the Master from a group of Joyceans whose essays are representative of some of the ways critics presently approach the study of the man and his work. In these post-New Critical times, those ways are varied indeed--the structuralist, semiotic, readerresponse, and deconstructionist currents (or, Miller, Culler, and Fish, to Ec[h]o the words of our thirty-second president) can all be detected here, if sometimes faintly. While not state-of-the-art surveys in most cases, the offerings nevertheless reflect how present-day critics tend to address the Joyce canon in their continuing efforts to become his contemporaries.

Each of the first four essays is devoted to one of the major works. Morris Beja examines Dubliners from the perspective of the "epiphany," a concept formulated by the young Joyce and long used as a means of examining certain facets of his work. Richard Peterson finds a rhythmic flow in A Portrait which helps us dig beneath the book's impressionistic surface and beyond the personality of its protagonist and to see its narrative structuring more clearly. Shari and Bernard Benstock explore Ulysses to discern how movement and spatiality function in the Joycean narrative. Finally, Patrick McCarthy considers the process whereby Finnegans Wake and its audience are necessarily symbiotic partners.

The remaining six essays in the collection discuss various issues central to Joyce studies and range over all the works. Edmund Epstein and Fritz Senn each investigate how Joyce handles--or manipulates--language. Among other topics, Epstein shows Joyce's use of pun and prosody to achieve his effects, while Senn offers pert insights by considering the reader's task as a translational one. Looking at three decades of criticism, Margaret Church indicates where the study of the Viconian cycle and stream-of-consciousness has taken us in understanding the role of time in Joyce's fiction. Sheldon Brivic adduces a Joycean psychology from the oeuvre which offers an additional dimension to the study of the texts. Based partly on psychological readings, Suzette Henke's essay subjects the works to a feminist scrutiny which traces the growing maturity of Joyce's attitude toward women. And ending on an appropriately eschatalogical note, Father Robert Boyle examines the considerable residue of religious ethos that shows through Joyce's work.