This book contains several features which have not been usual in introductory critical studies of Joyce. For example, I believe that understanding of his achievement should be firmly based on his two major works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, even though they present features which are unexpected, and even forbidding, to admirers of his early writings. For this reason my opening chapter, ‘Joyce and the Grotesque’, refers much more to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake than to their predecessors.

Joyce's rich and complex books set many traps for the unwary. His work is a standing rebuke to the parochialism of much modern writing, and it is possible for students of the English and American novel, for example, to come to him with quite inappropriate assumptions. In some of the following chapters my reading of the Joyceian text is prefaced with a more historical and/or theoretical discussion of ways of approaching it. Moreover, I have avoided referring to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as ‘novels’, believing this to be largely unhelpful – though admittedly it is hard to settle on any satisfactory alternative. Whether or not Joyce is a novelist he is, I believe, one of the greatest masters of modern prose.

It would be impossible to list the debts to teachers, students, friends, and colleagues which have been incurred during the gestation and writing of this book.