Background
McCourt, John F. was born on July 18, 1965 in Dublin, Ireland. Son of James C. McCourt and Maria P. Coleman.
( Since the publication of Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce ...)
Since the publication of Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce in 1959, Joyce has received remarkably little biographical attention. Scholars have chipped away at various aspects of Ellmann’s impressive edifice but have failed to construct anything that might stand alongside it. The Years of Bloom is arguably the most important work of Joyce biography since Ellmann. Based on extensive scrutiny of previously unused Italian sources and informed by the author’s intimate knowledge of the culture and dialect of Trieste, The Years of Bloom documents a fertile period in Joyce’s life. While living in Trieste, Joyce wrote most of the stories in Dubliners, turned Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and began Ulysses. Echoes and influences of Trieste are rife throughout Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Though Trieste had become a sleepy backwater by the time Ellmann visited there in the 1950s, McCourt shows that the city was a teeming imperial port, intensely cosmopolitan and polyglot, during the approximately twelve years Joyce lived there in the waning years of the Habsburg Empire. It was there that Joyce experienced the various cultures of central Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. He met many Jews, who collectively provided much of the material for the character of Leopold Bloom. He encountered continental socialism, Italian Irredentism, Futurism, and various other political and artistic forces whose subtle influences McCourt traces with literary grace and scholarly rigour. The Years of Bloom, a rare landmark in the crowded terrain of Joyce studies, will instantly take its place as a standard work.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0299169804/?tag=2022091-20
( James Joyce: A Passionate Exile is a revealing new acco...)
James Joyce: A Passionate Exile is a revealing new account of the life, times and writings of the twentieth century's most distinguished novelist. Combining words with an extraordinary collection of contemporary photographs and other images, it depicts his family's fall from riches to rags and his experience of growing up in late nineteenth century Dublin. Author and Joyce scholar John McCourt also examines Joyce's relationship with his life-long partner, Nora Barnacle, and casts new light on their 40-year voluntary exile in Europe, first in the cosmopolitan Adriatic port of Trieste, then in lively wartime Zurich and finally in Paris, the artistic centre of the world in the 1920s and 30s. Exile from Ireland was a necessary condition for Joyce to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race in his magnificent short story collection Dubliners, in his intense bildungsroman A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and his modern epic Ulysses.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312269412/?tag=2022091-20
McCourt, John F. was born on July 18, 1965 in Dublin, Ireland. Son of James C. McCourt and Maria P. Coleman.
Bachelor, University College Dublin, 1988. Master of Arts, University College Dublin, 1989. Doctor of Philosophy, University College Dublin, 1996.
Lecturer University Trieste, Italy, since 1996. Board directors International James Joyce Foundation, Ohio.
( James Joyce: A Passionate Exile is a revealing new acco...)
( Since the publication of Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce ...)
Married Laura Pelaschiar, June 8, 1998. Children: Liam, Eoin.