James Joyce and German Theory: The Romantic School and All That »

Joyce's aesthetic theories are generally seen as grounded in Aristotle and Aquinas, thinkers mentioned explicitly by the character Stephen Dedalus in a conversation in which he rejects Romantic notions. But Laman (English, Dickinson State U., North Dakota) also sees a debt in the author's works to early German Romanticism, particularly the ideas of Goethe, Schlegel, Schiller, and Novalis. Laman outlines the German theories that contributed centrally to the Europeanization of Irish literature, and she shows that even as Joyce appeared to reject Romantic ideas, he appropriated and remade them in his own image. Distributed by Associated University Presses. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR