Product Description

The New Bloomsday Book is a crystal clear, line by line running commentary on the plot of James Joyce's Ulysses which illuminates many symbolic themes and literary structures along the way.

Since 1966, readers new to James Joyce have depended upon this essential guide which makes this intimidating novel accessible. Designed to help the student and the general reader to find their way quickly about Joyce's formidable novel, The New Bloomsday Book will enable someone approaching Joyce for the first time to reach an understanding of the novel which otherwise might have taken several readings.

"It remains, the only commentary in which paraphrase is largely employed without detriment to one's sense of the interest of the novel." --Books Ireland

To ensure that Blamires' classic work will remain useful to new readers, this third edition contains the page numbering and references to the three most commonly read editions of Ulysses: the Gabler `Corrected Text' (1986) editions, the Oxford University Press `World Classics' (1993), and the Penguin `Twentieth-Century Classics (1992).

From the Preface: "Ulysses must not be made to appear more difficult than it is. Joyce's text is a highly organized one, and it only requires a little attention to the network of thematic linkages which undergirds the work to make the reader feel at home in Joyce's world." --Harry Blamires

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #115141 in Books
• Published on: 1996-08-29
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Customer Reviews

A Great Guide
I like the Bloomsday guide because it helps the reader understand Ulysses. It is good to see crossreferences and interpretations. He is very strong on religious symbolism, but Blamires helps get through the book Ulysses.

A Miracle of Literary Criticism.
This book is an excellent example--if not THE example--of why literary criticism exists; it is a concise but amazing classic. I was first introduced to it in college and today I just read it for the third time. Its pages enhance Ulysses and in no way detract from the art and beauty of the most complex and scholarly book ever published (in my humble opinion). Blamires is a serious man who wastes few words or sentences in his sterling discussion and recapitulation of Joyce's masterpiece. His narrative features extraordinary erudition, yet it is quite readable. Nowadays, most people are not familiar with the intricacies of Latin, Greek, and the symbols of Christianity, but Blamires makes such mysteries obtainable. The effect of his analysis is to magnify both our enjoyment and our education. Literary criticism, in this new millennium, seems to be about everything other than the text with its omnipresent, and opaque, references to the troika of class, gender, and race. Luckily, Blamires is above all forms of trendiness and non-sense. The Bloomsday Book brings us closer to the truths James Joyce meant for us to discover, and there is no better service with which the author could have provided.

Highly Recommended (Except maybe if you want to become a Joyce Purist)
I took Ulysses as part of a course, and The New Bloomsday Book was a tremendous help in my enjoying Ulysses.

I read up to the Cyclops episode without Blamires, and, though I was basically comprehending the book, I was losing a lot of the significance of what I was reading.

My practice from there on in was to read the episode, read Blamires's guide for that episode, and then read the episode again - a bit tedious, you might think, but Joyce is all in the details and the repeated reading.

There are some arguments against having a guide: clearly, part of the reason for Joyce's style was to disorient the reader, to make the reader work, to make the reader give up the dream of total comprehension, of "licking up the cream of thought", to use the phrase of Joyce's protege, Beckett.

On the other hand, why torture yourself! If you read it concurrently with Ulysses, episode by episode, it really doesn't ruin anything plotwise (there's not much plot to speak of!), but it opens up a the world of significant details that otherwise might have passed you by.

I say Blamires accomplishes what he says he aims to do: to reveal the significance of details of Ulysses' on the first read that would normally only come to be seen on a second or third read through.