Up to Maughty London ─ Joyce's Cultural Capital in the Imperial Metropolis

“Fundamentally alters the received wisdom which tends to award Paris a far more central place in the making of Joyce the modernist.”—John McCourt, author of The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904–1920

While there has been extensive research on the effect of Dublin and other European urban centers such as Trieste and Paris on James Joyce and his works, few Joyceans have explored the impact of London on the trajectory of his literary career. In Up to Maughty London, Eleni Loukopoulou offers the first sustained account of Joyce’s engagement with the imperial metropolis. She considers both London’s status as a matrix for political and cultural formations, and how the city is imaginatively represented in Joyce’s work.

Examining newly discovered or largely neglected material—newspaper and magazine articles, anthology contributions, radio broadcasts, and sound recordings—Loukopoulou also assesses the promotion of Joyce’s work in London’s literary marketplace. London emerges not just as a setting for his writings, but as a key cultural and publishing vector for the composition and dissemination of his work.

Eleni Loukopoulou is an independent scholar living in London.
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