James Joyce and the Revolt of Love:Marriage, Adultery, Desire

"Surveying the entire corpus of Joyce's works, Utell proves with unprecedented clarity and eloquence that Ulysses has become the modern version of Spinoza's Ethics...Joyce has crafted a powerful parable on love and its differences offering a most encompassing and empowering fiction on how it is possible to love ethically."-Jean-Michel RabatT, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania

"James Joyce and the Revolt of Love is one of those rare books that you may have been wishing someone would write. In this thoughtful, provocative, and illuminating work, Utell explores the positive ethical implications of choices that in more conventional systems are understood as sin, moral lapse, or moral harm...Utell's specific insights into Joyce's texts and contexts are nuanced and supple, yet forceful, supporting the surprising argument that infidelity in Joyce's works provides an occasion for responsibility to another within an erotic couple."-Marian Eide, Associate Professor, Department of English, Texas A&M University and author of Ethical Joyce

"James Joyce and the Revolt of Love provides a suble and far-reaching description of 'ethical' human love as described in such major works of James Joyce as Giacomo Joyce, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. Utell's analysis opens the way to connections with theories of love...this book will open up a new field in the interpretation of the works of James Joyce, and the major works of other great modern writers."-Edmund L. Epstein, Professor English, Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York

James Joyce and the Revolt of Love is a study of marriage, adultery, and desire. Beginning with contextual and biographical background and using a vocabulary drawn from postmodern ethics and the philosophy of love, this book examines the representation of marital and extramarital relations in Joyce's texts. Janine Utell claims that Joyce uses these relations to imagine a different kind of love, one based in a radical acceptance of the otherness of the beloved. Through Joyce's explosion of conventional narrative, particularly the marriage plot, we learn a new way to read and a new way to love.

Janine Utell is Associate Professor of English at Widener University. She has published articles in the Journal of Modern Literature, The Space Between, College Literature, and James Joyce Quarterly.