Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing (Oxford World's Classics)

This volume has value to the JJ scholar, not to the casual reader. Most of these essays are drawn from Joyce's early artistic period, ca. 1898--1910, covering his undergraduate presentations and young aesthetic pronouncements. I recommend this book for Joyceans looking to augment their readings of Dubliners, Portrait, and some of Ulysses (especially the Telemachiad and "Scylla and Charybdis"). A problem I have with this volume is the fact that each essay's time and place is revealed only in the endnotes.

Joyce is an experimenter, not an essayist.This book is ugly and boring.If you want to read good essays onliterature, art, philosophy or whatever,read Chesterton, Santayana, or Russell.Not a book to smile at.