'Any Other Spicy Books?': James Joyce and Pornography

Abstract

Abstract:According to some of his contemporaries, James Joyce was a pornographic writer, but over the past hundred years the definition of what constitutes pornography has changed radically. When we study the books that Joyce used in writing his own works, we find many different genres of what used to be considered obscene and thus forbidden literature, and Joyce seems to have found creative use for all of them. From lurid lives of saints and flagellation stories, to dirty songs and jokes or anthropological and medical technical literature about sex, Joyce's unromantic painting of human life had room for every aspect of lust and longing.