This challenging collection of essays by an international group of scholars aims, through the critical concept of 'context', to put the work of James Joyce in its 'place'. The four sections explore a range of contexts, offering significant perspectives - historical, theoretical, feminist, cultural and linguistic - on Joyce's writing. Essays on the modernist context place Joyce alongside contemporaries, like Woolf, Ford, and Freud, re-evaluating accepted notions of literary relationship and ideology. The context of the 'other' is invoked in essays drawing on recent developments in feminist, post-structuralist, and psychoanalytic literary theory, and taking Joyce's work as a site for provocative investigations into the nature of sexual, national, ethnic and cultural marginality. Some original re-readings of Joyce's relationship to particular writers, critics and cultural traditions draw him into proximity with Homer, Lacan, the comic strip and Irish popular literature. Finally, in essays that examine aspects and evolutions of his distinctive style, Joyce is considered within the parameters of his own oeuvre.

When physicist Robert Goddard, whose career was inspired by H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds, published "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes," the response was electric. Newspaper headlines across the country announced, "Modern Jules Verne Invents Rocket to Reach Moon," while people from around the world, including two World War I pilots, volunteered as pioneers in space exploration. Though premature (Goddard's rocket, alas, was only imagined), the episode demonstrated not only science's general popularity but also its intersection with interwar popular and commercial culture. In that intersection, the stories that inspired Goddard and others became a recognizable genre: science fiction. Astounding Wonder explores science fiction's emergence in the era's "pulps," colorful magazines that shouted from the newsstands, attracting an extraordinarily loyal and active audience. Pulps invited readers not only to read science fiction but also to participate in it, joining writers and editors in celebrating a collective wonder for and investment in the potential of science. But in conjuring fantastic machines, travel across time and space, unexplored worlds, and alien foes, science fiction offered more than rousing adventure and romance. It also assuaged contemporary concerns about nation, gender, race, authority, ability, and progress—about the place of ordinary individuals within modern science and society—in the process freeing readers to debate scientific theories and implications separate from such concerns. Readers similarly sought to establish their worth and place outside the pulps. Organizing clubs and conventions and producing their own magazines, some expanded science fiction's community and created a fan subculture separate from the professional pulp industry. Others formed societies to launch and experiment with rockets. From debating relativity and the use of slang in the future to printing purple fanzines and calculating the speed of spaceships, fans' enthusiastic industry revealed the tensions between popular science and modern science. Even as it inspired readers' imagination and activities, science fiction's participatory ethos sparked debates about amateurs and professionals that divided the worlds of science fiction in the 1930s and after.

When physicist Robert Goddard, whose career was inspired by H. G. Wells's "War of the Worlds," published "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes," the response was electric. Newspaper headlines across the country announced, "Modern Jules Verne Invents Rocket to Reach Moon," while people from around the world, including two World War I pilots, volunteered as pioneers in space exploration. Though premature (Goddard's rocket, alas, was only imagined), the episode demonstrated not only science's general popularity but also its intersection with interwar popular and commercial culture. In that intersection, the stories that inspired Goddard and others became a recognizable genre: science fiction. "Astounding Wonder" explores science fiction's emergence in the era's "pulps," colorful magazines that shouted from the newsstands, attracting an extraordinarily loyal and active audience.Pulps invited readers not only to read science fiction but also to participate in it, joining writers and editors in celebrating a collective wonder for and investment in the potential of science. But in conjuring fantastic machines, travel across time and space, unexplored worlds, and alien foes, science fiction offered more than rousing adventure and romance. It also assuaged contemporary concerns about nation, gender, race, authority, ability, and progress--about the place of ordinary individuals within modern science and society--in the process freeing readers to debate scientific theories and implications separate from such concerns.Readers similarly sought to establish their worth and place outside the pulps. Organizing clubs and conventions and producing their own magazines, some expanded science fiction's community and created a fan subculture separate from the professional pulp industry. Others formed societies to launch and experiment with rockets. From debating relativity and the use of slang in the future to printing purple fanzines and calculating the speed of spaceships, fans' enthusiastic industry revealed the tensions between popular science and modern science. Even as it inspired readers' imagination and activities, science fiction's participatory ethos sparked debates about amateurs and professionals that divided the worlds of science fiction in the 1930s and after.

"This book contributes significantly to postcolonial studies, American studies, and ethnic studies--specifically Irish studies, Jewish studies, and Asian American studies--and will have a salutary impact on the development of these fields. Cheng effectively combines the scholarly and the personal, adding critical insight and human interest to a topic that will surely attract the attention of both scholars and laymen." --King-Kok Cheung, author of Articulate Silences "In this superb and timely exploration, Vincent Cheng offers an acute and wise analysis that may offer the best hope for formulating the kind of flexible solutions needed to meet the challenge of belonging in the changing, global world." -Margot Norris, author of Writing War in the Twentieth Century "Cheng's lively description of how the academy, the marketplace, and the media profit from consumers' anxieties about culture and identity both amuses and enlightens. This is an important book for anyone who wants to understand what complicates identity in a multicultural society." -Rachel Adler, author of Engendering Judaism Who is "authentic" and who is "other" in a given culture? Who can speak for the "other?" What do we mean by authenticity? These are critical questions that today's world--brought closer together and yet pulled farther apart by globalism and neocolonialism--has been unable to answer. Inauthentic compellingly probes these issues through revealing case studies on the pursuit of authenticity and identity. Each chapter explores the ways in which we construct "authenticity" in order to replace seemingly vacated identities, including: the place of minorities in academia; mixed-race dynamics; the popularity of Irish culture in America; the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland; Jewish American identity; the status of Jewish America in relation to Israel and Palestine; the cultural problems of international adoptions; and the rapidly changing nature of the Asian American population in the United States. Written in an accessible style, Inauthentic presents provocative analyses of contemporary notions of identity to academic scholars as well as a broad reading audience. Vincent J. Cheng is the author of many scholarly articles and several books, including Joyce, Race, and Empire. He has taught at the University of Southern California, and is currently the Shirley Sutton Thomas Professor of English at the University of Utah, and the director of the Tanner Humanities Center.