Textual play, especially onomastic play, is a central element throughout James Joyce’s writings. Onomastic Joyce examines individually, in a single alphabetical listing with multiple cross-references, each of roughly a thousand personal names, selected for their particular textual interest, in Joyce’s work up to and including Ulysses, thus also involving Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
The central focus throughout is on the multifarious games names play, or can be made to play, in Joyce’s textual universe – a universe understood here as including onomastic games Joyce certainly intended, onomastic games he may or may not have intended, and onomastic games he is very unlikely to have intended. This final category includes onomastic games occurring only in translations of Joyce’s texts in multiple languages. Joyce was fascinated throughout his life both by etymology and by the possibilities of literary translation, and sustained attention is therefore paid to the ludic implications of literary etymology, translational issues, onomastic enigmas and puzzles, and multiple humorous varieties of deliberate teasing and misdirection of the reader.
The project, to be thought of as a reader’s handbook or reader’s guide to Joyce’s onomastic practice, is structured in the form of a dictionary, the alphabetical format allowing for multiple and varied cross-references.