James Joyce: Commentary - Index

Bruce Stewart, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 93, 370 (Summer 2004) - notice by Sadbh [Caroline Walsh, Lit. Ed.] in The Irish Times (q.d.): ‘A fascinating episode in the long story of Ireland’s reaction to James Joyce is analysed in the current issue of Studies. In an essay by Bruce Stewart called Another Bash in the Tunnel: James Joyce and the Envoy, the focus is on a volume called A Bash in the Tunnel: James Joyce by the Irish (1970), edited by man of letters and publican John Ryan, and including articles by Flann O’Brien, Patrick Kavanagh and others which they had contributed to a James Joyce special issue of Envoy, which Ryan had published in 1951. / Stewart says that apart from isolated enthusiasms in that issue of Envoy and its sequel, the pieces represented a moment when the expropriation of Joyce’s Dublin triggered apoplectic irritation on the part of its living literary denizens. They simply carped, he adds, giving a flavour of what was said at the time. “It remains a pity that they did seek in Joyce’s works an explanation for their own confusions at the same time as they berated transatlantic Joyceans for their inevitable failings,” Stewart concludes.