Fiction, General & Miscellaneous Drama, British & Irish Drama

Exiles

Name: Exiles
Author: James Joyce
ISBN: 9781447469285

by James Joyce

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Overview

"The only extant play by the great Irish novelist James Joyce (1882-1941), Exiles is of interest for its autobiographical content. The main character, Richard Rowan, the moody, tormented writer who is at odds with both his wife and the parochial Irish society around him, is clearly a portrait of Joyce himself. The character of Rowan's wife, Bertha, is certainly influenced by Joyce's lover and later wife, Nora Barnacle. And, as in real life, the play depicts the couple with a young son, and Rowan, like Joyce, has returned to Ireland because of his mother's illness and subsequent death." In the largely interior drama focused on the characters' relationships, the undertones of guilt and the longing for freedom mirror themes of the great Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Long an admirer of Ibsen, Joyce emulated the Scandinavian master in making the central issue of his drama the conflict between individual freedom and a demanding, judgmental society.

About the Author, James Joyce

James Joyce (1882-1941) is the author of "Dubliners," "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," "Ulysses," "Finnegans Wake" and many poems. He met Nora in Dublin in 1904 and the two of them lived in Pula and then Trieste until 1915, when the War forced them to move to Zurich, where Joyce died. Conor McPherson was born in Dublin, where he still lives. His plays include This Lime Tree Bower, St. Nicholas, The Weir, Port Authority and Dublin Carol. He has written three films, I Went Down, Saltwater and The Actors, and directed the last two.

Biography

James Joyce was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882. He was the oldest of ten children in a family which, after brief prosperity, collapsed into poverty. Nonetheless, he was educated at the best Jesuit schools and then at University College, Dublin, where he gave proof of his extraordinary talent.

In 1902, following his graduation, he went to Paris, thinking he might attend medical school there, but he soon gave up attending lectures and devoted himself to writing poems and prose sketches, and formulating an "aesthetic system'." Recalled to Dublin in April 1903 because of the fatal illness of his mother, he circled slowly towards his literary career. During the summer of 1904 he met a young woman from Galway, Nora Barnacle, and persuaded her to go with him to the Continent, where he planned to teach English.The young couple spent a few months in Pola (now in Yugoslavia), then in 1905 moved to Trieste, where, except for seven months in Rome and three trips to Dublin, they lived until June 1915. They had two children, a son and a daughter. His first book, the poems of Chamber Music, was published in London in 1907, and Dubliners, a book of stories, in 1914. Italy's entrance into the First World War obliged Joyce to move to Zürich, where he remained until 1919. During this period he published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Exiles, a play (1918).

After a brief return to Trieste following the armistice, Joyce determined to move to Paris so as to arrange more easily for the publication of Ulysses, a book which he had been working on since 1914. It was, in fact, published on his birthday in Paris, in 1922, and brought him international fame. The same year he began work on Finnegan's Wake, and though much harassed by eye troubles, and deeply affected by his daughter's mental illness, he completed and published that book in 1939. After the outbreak of the Second World War, he went to live in Unoccupied France, then managed to secure permission in December 1940 to return to Zürich. Joyce died there six weeks later, on 13 January 1941, and was buried in the Fluntern Cemetery.

Author biography courtesy of Penguin Group (USA).