‘Until Hanandhunigan's extermination’: Joyce, China and racialised world histories

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511973925.010

9 - ‘Until Hanandhunigan's extermination’: Joyce, China and racialised world histories

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2011

Finn Fordham

Edited by

Len Platt

Show author details

Finn Fordham: Affiliation:
Royal Holloway College, London
Len Platt: Affiliation:
Goldsmiths, University of London

Book contents

Get access

Summary

By the end of 1922, seeing his banned ‘epic of two races (Israel-Ireland)’ stirring up the cultural intelligentsia of Europe and America, James Joyce had developed enough confidence – or hubris – to turn to the narrative of a larger subject: the human race. To Harriet Shaw Weaver, his patron, he declared that he would now be writing a ‘universal history’. Joyce, I suggest, had been prompted to this by a trend for producing large-scale histories which had already swept up many publishers and writers, such as D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, John Buchan, Oswald Spengler and, pre-eminently, H. G. Wells. Events – the apparent end of the First World War, recognised as the first world-wide war, the establishment of the League of Nations and the multiple signatories of the Treaties of Versailles and of Sèvres – had led to a new global imaginary which required new global narratives. By 1924 – which seems to be a peak year – dozens of titles alluding to world history were available. As it was put in 1919 by Viscount Bryce (1838–1922) who, as Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1905 to 1907, might well have appeared on Joyce's radar:

For the first time in the annals of our planet its inhabitants have become one whole, a community each and every part of which is affected by the fortunes of every other part … Thus comes it that now for the first time the History of the World in the full sense of the word can begin to be written.

Information

Type: Chapter
Information: Modernism and Race , pp. 173 - 191

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511973925.010 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Joyce, James, Letters of James Joyce, edited by Stuart Gilbert (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 146Google Scholar

Hutchins, Patricia, James Joyce's World (London: Methuen, 1957), 140Google Scholar

Keatinge, M. W. and Frazer, N. L., An Introduction to World History (London: A. and C. Black, 1916)Google Scholar

Botsford, J. B., A Brief History of the World (London: Macmillan, 1917)Google Scholar

Spengler, Oswald, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, vol. i, Gestalt und Wirklichkeit (Munich: C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1918)Google Scholar

Bryce, Viscount, World History (London: Oxford University Press, 1919)Google Scholar

Short, Ernest, Introduction to World History (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1920)Google Scholar

Wells, H. G., The Outline of History (London: Waverley Book Co., 1920)Google Scholar

Wilmot-Buxton, E. M., A Short World History (London: Methuen, 1921)Google Scholar

Smith, Leslie Cecil, Main Currents in World History (London: Rivingtons, 1922)Google Scholar

Webster, Hutton, World History (London: Heath, 1922)Google Scholar

Barton, Alfred, A World History for the Workers: A Story of Man's Doings from the Dawn of Time, from the Standpoint of the Disinherited (London: Labour Publishing Company, 1922)Google Scholar

Buchan, John (ed.), The Nations of To-Day: A New History of the World (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1923)Google Scholar

Cole, Margaret, An Introduction to World History (London: Labour Research Department, 1923)Google Scholar

Wells, H. G., A Short History of the World (London: Cassell, 1922)Google Scholar

Sadler, Gilbert T., World History in a Nutshell (London: C. W. Daniel, 1924)Google Scholar

Hearnshaw, F. J. C., A First Book of World History (London: Macmillan, 1924)Google Scholar

Huntington, Samuel P., The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London: Simon & Schuster, 1996)Google Scholar

Platt, Len, Joyce, Race and ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 29–31CrossRef Google Scholar

Mason, Ellsworth and Ellmann, Richard, The Critical Writings of James Joyce (New York: Viking Press, 1964), 70Google Scholar

Roberts, J. M., History of the World (New York: Knopf, 1976), xiiiGoogle Scholar

Moore, I. R., ‘World history’ in M. Bentley (ed.), Companion to Historiography (London: Routledge, 1997), 952Google Scholar

Lawrence, D. H., Movements in European History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921), 66Google Scholar

Hegel, G. W. F., Lectures on the Philosophy of History, translated by J. Sibree (London: George Bell and Sons, 1888), 66Google Scholar

Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1964)Google Scholar

Damrosch, David, What is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003)Google Scholar

Groden, Michael (general ed.), The James Joyce Archive (New York: Garland, 1977), vol. lxiii, 146eGoogle Scholar

Budgen, Frank, James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’ (London: Grayson & Grayson, 1934), 291Google Scholar

Cheng, Vincent, Joyce, Race, and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 273Google Scholar

Fordham, Finn, ‘The universalisation of Finnegans Wake and the real H.C.E.’ in Andrew Gibson and Len Platt (eds.), Joyce, Ireland, Britain (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2006), 198–211 (202)Google Scholar

Ito, Eishiro, ‘“United States of Asia”: James Joyce and Japan’ in Richard Brown (ed.), A Companion to James Joyce (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 203Google Scholar

Mercanton, Jacques, Les Heures de James Joyce (Paris: Editions L'Age D'Homme, 1967), 23Google Scholar

Eckley, Grace, ‘Looking forward to a brightening day: book iv, chapter i’ in Begnal, Michael H. and Senn, Fritz (eds.), A Conceptual Guide to ‘Finnegans Wake’ (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974), 224Google Scholar

Vico, Giambattista, The New Science, 3rd edn, translated by T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948), 303Google Scholar

Pound, Ezra, Early Writings, edited by Ira Nadel (New York: Penguin, 2005), 290Google Scholar

Qian, Zhaoming, Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 105Google Scholar

Ellis, Henry, Proceedings of the Late Embassy to China (London: John Murray, 1818), vol. ii, 293Google Scholar

Joyce, James, The Letters of James Joyce, vol. iii, edited by Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1966), 134Google Scholar

Gotten, Lyman, quoted in William Safire, Safire's Political Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 666Google Scholar

Accessibility standard: Unknown

Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.