James Joyce Quarterly

A summary of a recent British Broadcasting Company radio documentary exploring the influence of the many years James Joyce spent on the Continent concludes as follows: "Joyce was not only a great pathfinder; he also offers an inspiring trans-national vision of Europe and the world just at a time when borders are tightening and the darker shades of nationalism are once again looming large."¹ In March 2022, as I finish writing this review of Tekla Mecsnóber's Rewriting Joyce's Europe: The Politics of Language and Visual Design, those darker shades have thickened even further. The monograph, as Sebastian Knowles writes in his foreword, "will appeal not only to scholars of Joyce but also to scholars of the rise of twentieth-century nationalism, economics, imagery, typography, and history. … The book's great strength is to suggest new possibilities for further study, rather than simply retelling the narrative" (xii). While the latter goes without saying for any study worth reviewing in these pages, the former pinpoints exactly the significance and topicality of Mecsnóber's work. Not only scholars of the twentieth century but also of today's Europe will find a veritable Fundgrube of ideas to inform their own investigation. And students of Joyce, particularly those not yet well read in the endless intertextual galaxy invoked in his work, will find in this monograph a resource that may help them overcome their trepidations in embarking on his explorations.

Rewriting Europe offers a timely reconsideration of the reverberations of post-World-War-I Europe regarding politics, migration, the redrawing of borders, and the linguistic consequences of all this for a population that had to get used to a new kind of continent full of emergent nations and emergent (formerly suppressed) notions of national pride. Dialects and languages gained fresh significance in a Europe scarred by vicious combat and pernicious politics. The Continent would be under siege again during World War II and, beyond that, become divided by the Soviet occupation of much of [End Page 405] eastern Europe. Mecsnóber's own backstory here, as "a Joyce scholar who was educated in Hungary around the time of the fall of the Iron Curtain" (13), plays a distinct but never overbearing role in the study. After that fall, once more a new kind of Europe emerged, but its relative unity and peace is lately threatened by increasing inside pressure from populist and nationalist forces, insisting on a return to a form of independence that is reckoned to be more beneficent for the individual countries involved than the collaborative affair embodied by the European Union. Anti-immigrant sentiments run rife among these forces, with anti-Semitism and anti-Muslimism once again taking center stage. In the last pages of her book, Mecsnóber refers to various recent incidents in Europe pivoting on notions of national identity in an increasingly fragmented and volatile continent. Certainly in light of even more recent events, now also including usurping forces from outside, the monograph will remind us of how astonishingly insightful Joyce's processing of the world around him in Ulysses and the Wake was.

This, then, is a scholarly work applying the double-edged sword of historicism and genetic criticism that casts its nets widely (which in this case is not only a cliché, but also an understatement). In six information-packed chapters, Mecsnóber discusses (to mention only a handful of highlights): the politics of names and naming in Ulysses; the politics behind Joyce's choices in fabricating his Wakese; and the issues of typography and diacritics informing not only the novels as published works but certainly also the modernization in typography that went hand in hand with the invention (and marketing) of modernism.

Mecsnóber's discussion is elegant and thorough, but, for this reader, hampered at times by an unnecessary amount of signposting and repetition. The introduction summarizes the themes of the various...