Joyce, Medicine, and Modernity

James Joyce’s interest in medicine has been well established—he attempted to embark on medical studies no fewer than three times—but a comprehensive assessment of the influence his interest in medicine had on his work has been lacking until now.

In this wide-ranging study, author Vike Plock balances close readings of Joyce’s major texts with thorough archival research that retrieves principal late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical debates. The result is a fascinating book that details the ways in which Joyce reconciled, integrated, and blurred the paradigmatic boundaries between scientific and humanist learning.