Product Description

Since 1966 readers new to James Joyce have depended upon this essential guide to Ulysses. Harry Blamires helps readers to negotiate their way through this formidable, remarkable novel and gain an understanding of it which, without help, it might have taken several readings to achieve. The New Bloomsday Book is a crystal clear, page-by-page, line-by-line running commentary on the plot of Ulysses which illuminates symbolic themes and structures along the way. It is a highly accessible, indispensible guide for anyone reading Joyce's masterpiece for the first time. To ensure that Blamires' classic work will remain useful to new readers, this third edition contains the page numbering and references to three commonly read editions of Ulysses: the Oxford University Press 'World Classics' (1993), the Penguin 'Twentieth-Century Classics' (1992), and the Gabler 'Corrected Text' (1986) editions.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #43495 in Books
• Published on: 1996-09-26
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Synopsis
Since 1966 readers new to James Joyce have depended upon this guide to "Ulysses" in negotiating their way through this formidable, remarkable novel. It is a page-by-page, line-by-line running commentary on the plot of "Ulysses", which illuminates symbolic themes and structures along the way, and is aimed at anyone encountering Joyce's novel for the first time. To ensure that it remains useful to new readers, this third edition contains the page numbering and references to three commonly read editions of "Ulysses" : the Oxford University Press "World Classics" (1993), the Penguin "Twentieth-Century Classics" (1992), and the Gabler "Corrected Text" (1986) editions.

Customer Reviews

Blamires's book is essential for first-time Joyce readers
Harry Blamires's "The New Bloomsday Book" is an essential companion to Joyce's Ulysses. He guides the first-time reader carefully through Joyce's (famously difficult) novel, but does not not challenge the mystery that make Ulysses a joy to read. Blamires's book will make your first reading of Ulysses more rewarding and enjoyable. Then you can read ulysses a second time--that's when the fun really begins!

At last, a sensible exposition of Ulysses
Many books aspire to shed light on Ulysses. Many are narrowly philological or encyclopaedic. If you want to know the meaning of a word or the provenience of a song, joke, or proverb, you can use these books much as you would a dictionary. They are keyed to both the old (Random House) or new (Gabler) editions of Ulysses. Blamires, by contrast, is useful if you are--and you will be--all at sea about such rudimentary details as where you are, what is happening, and who a character is. For example, in the chapter which is set in a Dublin maternity hospital, identified by Joyce only as a place of parturition associated with a certain doctor (whose name you will never have heard), Blamires sets the scene, identifies the characters, themes, patterns of imagery and allusion in such a way that what had seemed hopelessly obscure is bathed in light. After reading Blamires I found the text approachable and moving and amusing--i.e., difficult still, but difficult in the way that any major English text is difficult, rather than hopelessly, riddlingly obscure. I ought probably to add that Blamires is a brilliant reader, a wonderful combination of the gifts that characterize a "common reader" (in Virginia Woolf's sense of the word) and a modest and helpful scholar. In other words, he does not make Joyce accessible by having failed to notice that he (Joyce) forgot more than you, reader, will ever know. I warmly recommend this book.