Joyce, give and take

Joyce, Give and Take is a collection of four essays that comparatively explore the theme of influence in James Joyce’s works. The first two essays investigate the kind of influence the Italian humanist philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and the romantic poet, engraver and painter William Blake have exerted on the Irish writer. By contrast the other two focus on the influence that Joyce has exercised on the stateless writer Vladimir Nabokov, and on the postcolonial poet and playwright Derek Walcott. Such a wide perspective offers challenging insights into Joyce’s works, and into the kind of literary reciprocity that is enacted through his writing. On the one hand Joyce subsumes in his opus the Western literary canon, on the other he becomes an inescapable reference point for any writer who aims at representing modernity.