Drawing on draft manuscripts and other archival material, James Joyce and Absolute Music, explores Joyce's deep engagement with musical structure, and his participation in the growing modernist discourse surrounding 19th-century musical forms. Michelle Witen examines Joyce's claim of having structured the "Sirens" episode of his masterpiece, Ulysses, as a fuga per canonem, and his changing musical project from his early works, such as Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Informed by a deep understanding of music theory and history, the book goes on to consider the "pure music" of Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake. Demonstrating the importance of music to Joyce, this ground-breaking study reveals new depths to this enduring body of work.

This collection offers an overview of the ways in which space has become relevant to the study of Shakespearean drama and theatre. It distinguishes various facets of space, such as structural aspects of dramatic composition, performance space and the evocation of place, linguistic, social and gendered spaces, early modern geographies, and the impact of theatrical mobility on cultural exchange and the material world. These facets of space are exemplified in individual essays. Throughout, the Shakespearean stage is conceived as a topological 'node', or interface between different times, places and people - an approach which also invokes Edward Soja's notion of 'Thirdspace' to describe the blend between the real and the imaginary characteristic of Shakespeare's multifaceted theatrical world. Part Two of the volume emphasises the theatrical mobility of Hamlet - conceptually from an anthropological perspective, and historically in the tragedy's migrations to Germany, Russia and North America.

Drawing on draft manuscripts and other archival material, James Joyce and Absolute Music, explores Joyce's deep engagement with musical structure, and his participation in the growing modernist discourse surrounding 19th-century musical forms. Michelle Witen examines Joyce's claim of having structured the "Sirens" episode of his masterpiece, Ulysses, as a fuga per canonem, and his changing musical project from his early works, such as Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Informed by a deep understanding of music theory and history, the book goes on to consider the "pure music" of Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake. Demonstrating the importance of music to Joyce, this ground-breaking study reveals new depths to this enduring body of work.