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The only book-length monograph in English to review James Joyce’s impact on German-language literature and literary criticism, this volume sets out to survey a literary-historical trajectory that reaches from the early reception of Exiles (with the first staging ever of this play in German translation 1919 in Munich) and Ulysses through the Marxist Expressionism debate and the Nazi blacklisting of Joyce’s works in the 1930s to the establishment of “Joyce” as one of a handful of models for innovative modernist and postmodernist writing. Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake have become veritable text generators, and since the publication of the German translation of Ulysses in 1927 Joyce’s influence has profoundly changed the literary landscape of German-speaking countries. Three chapters delineate the German reception from the 1920s to the present, four further chapters move beyond the traditional reception perspective to explore the more intertextual dimensions of Joyce’s relationship with German literature. Here the focus lies on the parallax of scenes and settings in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Joyce’s Ulysses; the divergent forms of “abstraction” practised by Joyce and the Dadaists in Zurich between 1916 and 1919; the putting into poetic practice of Joyce’s theory of the epiphany by Rainer Maria Rilke in his poems and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge; and the uses to which Joyce’s Ulysses was put by German Marxists in the ideologically charged Expressionism debate in the 1930s, with its extension into the Lukács-Adorno debate in the 1950s.

This book poses fundamental and timely existential questions stemming from the query, how might one articulate the aspects of one's formative place particularly when one is struck with the task of conveying it in and/or against an impersonal global society? Considering the idea of place, Albert Einstein noted that because "its relations with psychological experience is less direct, there exists a far-reaching uncertainty of interpretation." Identifying, through a number of contemporary literary considerations, some of the intricate elements which lie behind the "less direct" constitutes the primary aim of this book. While recognizing that place may sometimes function unfavorably as a political variable in the workings of nostalgia, comfort, and tradition, it nonetheless remains an embarking point we never really leave over the course of our various physical journeys, as well as the mighty odyssey toward ourselves that is the great yearning endeavor of our lives. In delineating various understandings of our places, we necessarily enrich our comprehension of the variabled equations that conspire to create others. In this sense, appreciating and reading for place possesses the capacity to perceive the world passionately and deeply. It teaches us ourselves by virtue of where we are and what we read.