Andrew Gibson – författare

'A great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page' - Anthony BurgessJames Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake, conjures up the dark underground worlds of sexuality and dream with supreme linguistic virtuosity. Here Joyce undermines traditional storytelling and the English language, and confronts the different kinds of betrayal – cultural, political and sexual – that he saw at the heart of Irish history. Dazzlingly inventive, with passages of great lyrical beauty and humour, Finnegans Wake remains one of the most remarkable works of the twentieth century.‘Here words are not the polite contortions of twentieth-century printer’s ink. They are alive. They elbow their way on to the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear’ Samuel BeckettWith a new introduction by Brian Fox.

This simple, elegant book brilliantly explains four keyelements that should feature in every conversation.  In a world of complication, this book refocusesyou towards common senseIn a world of isolation, this book helps you discoverand grow your social capitalIn a world of constant activity, this book helpsyou know your actions will give you what you wantIn a world of instant gratification, this bookhelps establish the importance and value of timeThese four elements are the Essence of Solution FocusedPractice. Once learned, they can be applied to all situations, methods andmodels, and all areas where progress is made through useful conversations.Where change is desired, or forced upon you, reach for TheEssence of Solution Focused Practice to help you identify and take your nextsteps.

The first, shortest, and most approachable of James Joyce's novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man portrays the Dublin upbringing of Stephen Dedalus, from his youthful days at Clongowes Wood College to his radical questioning of all convention. In doing so, it provides an oblique self-portrait of the young Joyce himself. Exuberantly inventive in style, the novel subtly and beautifully orchestrates the patterns of quotation and repetition instrumental in its hero's quest to create his own character, his own language, life, and art. This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, published for the novel's centennial, is the definitive text, authorized by the Joyce estate and collated from all known proofs, manuscripts, and impressions to reflect the author's original wishes.

Beckett and Badiou offers a provocative new reading of Samuel Beckett''s work on the basis of a full, critical account of the thought of Alain Badiou. Badiou is the most eminent of contemporary French philosophers. His devotion to Beckett''s work has been lifelong. Yet for Badiou philosophy must be integrally affirmative, whilst Beckett apparently commits his art to a work of negation. Beckett and Badiou explores the coherences, contradictions, andextreme complexities of the intellectual relationship between the two oeuvres. It examines Badiou''s philosophy of being, the event, truth, and the subject and the importance of mathematics within his system. It considers the major features of his politics, ethics, and aesthetics and provides an explanation,interpretation, critique, and radical revision of his work on Beckett. It argues that, once revised, Badiou''s version of Beckett offers an extraordinarily powerful tool for understanding his work.Badiou and Beckett are instances of a vestigial or melancholic modernism; that is, in the teeth of a contemporary culture that dreams ever more ambitiously of plenitude, they commit themselves to a rigorous concept of limit and intermittency. Truth and value are occasional and rare. It is seldom that the chance event arrives to disturb the inertia of the world. For Badiou, however, it is the event and its consequences alone that matter. Beckett rather insists on the common experience ofintermittency as destitution. His art is a series of limit-figures, exquisitely subtle and nuanced forms for a world whose state of seemingly rigid paralysis is also always volatile, delicately balanced.

The Ireland of Ulysses was still a part of Britain. This book is the first comprehensive, historical study of Joyce's great novel in the context of Anglo-Irish political and cultural relations in the period 1880-1920. The first forty years of Joyce's life also witnessed the emergence of what historians now call English cultural nationalism. This formation was perceptible in a wide range of different discourses. Ulysses engages with many of them. In doing so, it resists, transforms and works to transcend the effects of British rule in Ireland. The novel was written in the years leading up to Irish independence. It is powered by both a will to freedom and a will to justice. But the two do not always coincide, and Joyce does not place his art in the service of any extant political cause. His struggle for independence has its own distinctive mode. The result is a unique work of liberation - and revenge. This eminently learned but lucidly written book transforms our understanding of Joyce's Ulysses. It does so by placing the novel firmly in the historical context of Anglo-Irish political and cultural relations in the period 1880-1920. Gibson argues that Ulysses is a great work of liberation that also takes a complex form of revenge on the colonizer's culture.

Scholarly accounts of Joyce''s early work have traditionally resorted to two historical keys to try to unlock it: a concept of the Dublin and Ireland in which he grew to adulthood as stagnant and backward, and an emphasis on 1904, the year of the supposedly crucial break in which Joyce quit Ireland for continental Europe and could begin his great modernist literary project. But modernist or no, Joyce''s works are always about Ireland, and he remained vitally in touchwith Irish historical developments throughout his life. This study aims to be the first comprehensive historicisation of Joyce''s writings 1898-1915 in relation to the distinct phases and shifting currents of British-Irish history during the period. At the turn of the century, when a concept of`national resurgence'' is much in the Irish air, in his earliest essays, Joyce meditates on art as an anti-colonial and emancipatory project that addresses questions of freedom and justice in its own distinctive way. His early essays produce a compelling declaration of a principle of autonomy at a specific historical moment in a colonial culture. However, successive historical events - the crises surrounding the Land Act, the United Irish League and Devolution, the election of 1906, the ThirdHome Rule Bill crisis - call the emancipatory project ever more sharply into question. Thus `the strong spirit'' which Joyce had initially thought might transcend and even conquer the effects of history becomes indissolubly wedded to radical historical scepticism. Through Dubliners, Stephen Hero, the`Triestine Writings'' and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Exiles, Joyce responds to his predicament by examining recent Irish history and the place of the intellectual and artist within it in a variety of extremely subtle and complex or, in Joycean terms, `labyrinthine'' forms of writing.

This book presents J. M. Coetzee''s work as a complex, nuanced counterblast to contemporary, global, neoliberal economics and its societies. Not surprisingly, given his many years in South Africa and Australia, Coetzee writes from a `global-Southern'' perspective. Drawing on a wealth of literature, philosophy, and theory, the book reads Coetzee''s writings as a discreet, oblique but devastating engagement with neoliberal presumptions. It identifies and focuses on various key features of neoliberal culture: its obsession with self-enrichment, mastery, growth; its belief in plenitude, endless resources; its hubris and obsession with (self)-promotion; its desire for ease and easiness, `well-being'', euphoria; its fetishization of managerial reason and the culture of security; its unrelenting positivity, its belief in illusory goods and trivial progressivisms. By contrast, Coetzee''s writings explore the virtues of irony and self-reduction. He commits himself to difficulty, discomfort, patient and austere, if bleak, inquiry, rigorous questioning, and radical doubt. Destitution and failure come to look like a serious, dignified form of life and thought. The very tones of Coetzee''s books run counter to those of our neoliberal democracies. They point in a different direction to an age that has gone astray.

This book presents J. M. Coetzee''s work as a complex, nuanced counterblast to contemporary, global, neoliberal economics and its societies. Not surprisingly, given his many years in South Africa and Australia, Coetzee writes from a `global-Southern'' perspective. Drawing on a wealth of literature, philosophy, and theory, the book reads Coetzee''s writings as a discreet, oblique but devastating engagement with neoliberal presumptions. It identifies and focuses on various key features of neoliberal culture: its obsession with self-enrichment, mastery, growth; its belief in plenitude, endless resources; its hubris and obsession with (self)-promotion; its desire for ease and easiness, `well-being'', euphoria; its fetishization of managerial reason and the culture of security; its unrelenting positivity, its belief in illusory goods and trivial progressivisms. By contrast, Coetzee''s writings explore the virtues of irony and self-reduction. He commits himself to difficulty, discomfort, patient and austere, if bleak, inquiry, rigorous questioning, and radical doubt. Destitution and failure come to look like a serious, dignified form of life and thought. The very tones of Coetzee''s books run counter to those of our neoliberal democracies. They point in a different direction to an age that has gone astray.

The Ireland of Ulysses was still a part of Britain. This book is the first comprehensive, historical study of Joyce's great novel in the context of Anglo-Irish political and cultural relations in the period 1880-1920. The first forty years of Joyce's life also witnessed the emergence of what historians now call English cultural nationalism. This formation was perceptible in a wide range of different discourses. Ulysses engages with many of them. In doing so, it resists, transforms and works to transcend the effects of British rule in Ireland. The novel was written in the years leading up to Irish independence. It is powered by both a will to freedom and a will to justice. But the two do not always coincide, and Joyce does not place his art in the service of any extant political cause. His struggle for independence has its own distinctive mode. The result is a unique work of liberation - and revenge.This eminently learned but lucidly written book transforms our understanding of Joyce's Ulysses. It does so by placing the novel firmly in the historical context of Anglo-Irish political and cultural relations in the period 1880-1920. Gibson argues that Ulysses is a great work of liberation that also takes a complex form of revenge on the colonizer's culture.

This book presents J. M. Coetzee's work as a complex, nuanced counterblast to contemporary, global, neoliberal economics and its societies. Not surprisingly, given his many years in South Africa and Australia, Coetzee writes from a `global-Southern' perspective. Drawing on a wealth of literature, philosophy, and theory, the book reads Coetzee's writings as a discreet, oblique but devastating engagement with neoliberal presumptions. It identifies and focuses on various key features of neoliberal culture: its obsession with self-enrichment, mastery, growth; its belief in plenitude, endless resources; its hubris and obsession with (self)-promotion; its desire for ease and easiness, `well-being', euphoria; its fetishization of managerial reason and the culture of security; its unrelenting positivity, its belief in illusory goods and trivial progressivisms. By contrast, Coetzee's writings explore the virtues of irony and self-reduction. He commits himself to difficulty, discomfort, patient and austere, if bleak, inquiry, rigorous questioning, and radical doubt. Destitution and failure come to look like a serious, dignified form of life and thought. The very tones of Coetzee's books run counter to those of our neoliberal democracies. They point in a different direction to an age that has gone astray.

Beckett and Badiou offers a provocative new reading of Samuel Beckett's work on the basis of a full, critical account of the thought of Alain Badiou. Badiou is the most eminent of contemporary French philosophers. His devotion to Beckett's work has been lifelong. Yet for Badiou philosophy must be integrally affirmative, whilst Beckett apparently commits his art to a work of negation. Beckett and Badiou explores the coherences, contradictions, and extreme complexities of the intellectual relationship between the two oeuvres. It examines Badiou's philosophy of being, the event, truth, and the subject and the importance of mathematics within his system. It considers the major features of his politics, ethics, and aesthetics and provides an explanation, interpretation, critique, and radical revision of his work on Beckett. It argues that, once revised, Badiou's version of Beckett offers an extraordinarily powerful tool for understanding his work.Badiou and Beckett are instances of a vestigial or melancholic modernism; that is, in the teeth of a contemporary culture that dreams ever more ambitiously of plenitude, they commit themselves to a rigorous concept of limit and intermittency. Truth and value are occasional and rare. It is seldom that the chance event arrives to disturb the inertia of the world. For Badiou, however, it is the event and its consequences alone that matter. Beckett rather insists on the common experience of intermittency as destitution. His art is a series of limit-figures, exquisitely subtle and nuanced forms for a world whose state of seemingly rigid paralysis is also always volatile, delicately balanced.

The Ireland of Ulysses was still a part of Britain. This book is the first comprehensive, historical study of Joyce's great novel in the context of Anglo-Irish political and cultural relations in the period 1880-1920. The first forty years of Joyce's life also witnessed the emergence of what historians now call English cultural nationalism. This formation was perceptible in a wide range of different discourses. Ulysses engages with many of them. In doing so, it resists, transforms, and works to transcend the effects of British rule in Ireland. The novel was written in the years leading up to Irish independence. It is powered by both a will to freedom and a will to justice. But the two do not always coincide, and Joyce does not place his art in the service of any existing political cause. His struggle for independence has its own distinctive mode. The result is a unique work of liberation - and revenge.

Scholarly accounts of Joyce's early work have traditionally resorted to two historical keys to try to unlock it: a concept of the Dublin and Ireland in which he grew to adulthood as stagnant and backward, and an emphasis on 1904, the year of the supposedly crucial break in which Joyce quit Ireland for continental Europe and could begin his great modernist literary project. But modernist or no, Joyce's works are always about Ireland, and he remained vitally in touch with Irish historical developments throughout his life. This study aims to be the first comprehensive historicisation of Joyce's writings 1898-1915 in relation to the distinct phases and shifting currents of British-Irish history during the period. At the turn of the century, when a concept of `national resurgence' is much in the Irish air, in his earliest essays, Joyce meditates on art as an anti-colonial and emancipatory project that addresses questions of freedom and justice in its own distinctive way. His early essays produce a compelling declaration of a principle of autonomy at a specific historical moment in a colonial culture. However, successive historical events - the crises surrounding the Land Act, the United Irish League and Devolution, the election of 1906, the Third Home Rule Bill crisis - call the emancipatory project ever more sharply into question. Thus `the strong spirit' which Joyce had initially thought might transcend and even conquer the effects of history becomes indissolubly wedded to radical historical scepticism. Through Dubliners, Stephen Hero, the `Triestine Writings' and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Exiles, Joyce responds to his predicament by examining recent Irish history and the place of the intellectual and artist within it in a variety of extremely subtle and complex or, in Joycean terms, `labyrinthine' forms of writing.

A daring work of experimental, Modernist genius, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is one of the greatest literary achievements of the twentieth century, and the crowning glory of Joyce's life. The Penguin Modern Classics edition of includes an introduction by Seamus Deane'riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs'Joyce's final work, Finnegan's Wake is his masterpiece of the night as Ulysses is of the day. Supreme linguistic virtuosity conjures up the dark underground worlds of sexuality and dream. Joyce undermines traditional storytelling and all official forms of English and confronts the different kinds of betrayal - cultural, political and sexual - that he saw at the heart of Irish history. Dazzlingly inventive, with passages of great lyrical beauty and humour, Finnegans Wake remains one of the most remarkable works of the twentieth century.James Joyce (1882-1941), the eldest of ten children, was born in Dublin, but exiled himself to Paris at twenty as a rebellion against his upbringing. He only returned to Ireland briefly from the continent but Dublin was at heart of his greatest works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. He lived in poverty until the last ten years of his life and was plagued by near blindness and the grief of his daughter's mental illness.If you enjoyed Finnegans Wake, you might like Virginia Woolf's The Waves, also available in Penguin Classics.'An extraordinary performance, a transcription into a miniaturized form of the whole western literary tradition'Seamus Deane

‘There is nothing more vivid or beautiful in all Joyce’s writings. It has the searing clarity of truth’ Sunday TimesThe portrayal of Stephen Dedalus’s Dublin childhood and youth, his quest for identity through art and his gradual emancipation from the claims of family, religion and Ireland itself, is also an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce and a universal testament to the artist’s ‘eternal imagination’.‘Joyce’s depiction of the early Dublin life of Stephen Dedalus towers over modern literature, providing a stylistic blueprint and creative touchstone for artists young and old’ Guardian‘James Joyce was and remains almost unique among novelists in that he published nothing but masterpieces’ The Times Literary SupplementWith a new introduction by Joseph Brooker and notes by Steven Morrison.

'Joyce's early short stories remain undimmed in their brilliance' Sunday TimesJames Joyce's earliest major work, written when he was only twenty-five, brought his city to the world for the first time. The stories within Dubliners are rooted in the rich detail of Dublin life, portraying ordinary, often defeated lives with unflinching realism. Joyce writes of social decline, sexual desire and exploitation, corruption and personal failure, yet creates a brilliantly compelling, unique vision of the world and human experience.'Joyce redeems his Dubliners, assures their identity, and makes their social existence appear permanent and immortal, like the streets they walk' Tom PaulinWith a new introduction and notes by Anne Fogarty.

‘The undertow of unspoken feeling is tumultuous, and although hardly anything happens the action amounts to a fearful adventure’ New York TimesJames Joyce’s play Exiles follows the story of writer Richard Rowan, who, along with his 'common-law wife’ Bertha and their son Archie, has come home to Dublin after ten years away. The couple’s return triggers an existential questioning, an anxiousness which is exacerbated by meetings with old friends and lovers. All this is set against the background of the summer of 1912, when Ireland and even England were threatening to tear themselves apart over Ulster. Exiles is a profound exploration of jealousy, doubt and the complexity of human desire; it is also about the torments of disunion in both the public and private realm.With a new introduction and notes by Andrew Gibson.

‘The undertow of unspoken feeling is tumultuous, and although hardly anything happens the action amounts to a fearful adventure’ New York TimesJames Joyce’s play Exiles follows the story of writer Richard Rowan, who, along with his 'common-law wife’ Bertha and their son Archie, has come home to Dublin after ten years away. The couple’s return triggers an existential questioning, an anxiousness which is exacerbated by meetings with old friends and lovers. All this is set against the background of the summer of 1912, when Ireland and even England were threatening to tear themselves apart over Ulster. Exiles is a profound exploration of jealousy, doubt and the complexity of human desire; it is also about the torments of disunion in both the public and private realm.With a new introduction and notes by Andrew Gibson.

'His writing is not about something; it is that something itself' Samuel BeckettJames Joyce's towering genius as a novelist has often overshadowed his achievements as a poet, yet his verse occupies a pivotal position in his career. This new edition comprises all the poetry that was published in Joyce's lifetime, including his highly accomplished 1907 debut Chamber Music, which fused exuberant lyricism with sharp irony, and the later collection Pomes Penyeach, which confronted adultery, jealousy and betrayal. Also included here are the satirical poems ‘The Holy Office’ and ‘Gas from a Burner’, and ‘Ecce Puer’, written for his new-born grandson.With a new introduction and notes by Clare Hutton.

'His writing is not about something; it is that something itself' Samuel BeckettJames Joyce's towering genius as a novelist has often overshadowed his achievements as a poet, yet his verse occupies a pivotal position in his career. This new edition comprises all the poetry that was published in Joyce's lifetime, including his highly accomplished 1907 debut Chamber Music, which fused exuberant lyricism with sharp irony, and the later collection Pomes Penyeach, which confronted adultery, jealousy and betrayal. Also included here are the satirical poems ‘The Holy Office’ and ‘Gas from a Burner’, and ‘Ecce Puer’, written for his new-born grandson.With a new introduction and notes by Clare Hutton.

A freshly annotated and reset edition of Joyce's great epic, in a hardback Penguin Classics edition Ulysses, written between 1914 and 1921, has survived censorship, legal action and bitter controversy. Following the events of a single day in Dublin and the experiences of Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly, it stands as an undisputed modernist classic: a profoundly Irish book that also reaches out to the whole world. Reset from the 1922 text, the version of Joyce's masterwork that scholars increasingly prefer, this new hardback edition includes extensive annotation, as well as an introduction and textual commentary by distinguished Joyce scholars Andrew Gibson and Steven Morrison.Edited with a new Introduction and Textual Commentary by Andrew GibsonNotes by Andrew Gibson and Steven Morrison

In Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel Andrew Gibson sets out to demonstrate that postmodern theory has actually made possible an ethical discourse around fiction.Each chapter elaborates and discusses a particular aspect of Levinas' thought and raises questions for that thought and its bearing on the novel. It also contains detailed analyses of particular texts. Part of the book's originality is its concentration on a range of modernist and postmodern novels which have seldom if ever served as the basis for a larger ethical theory of fiction.Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel discusses among others the writings of Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Jane Austen, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust and Salman Rushdie.

In Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel Andrew Gibson sets out to demonstrate that postmodern theory has actually made possible an ethical discourse around fiction.Each chapter elaborates and discusses a particular aspect of Levinas' thought and raises questions for that thought and its bearing on the novel. It also contains detailed analyses of particular texts. Part of the book's originality is its concentration on a range of modernist and postmodern novels which have seldom if ever served as the basis for a larger ethical theory of fiction.Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel discusses among others the writings of Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Jane Austen, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust and Salman Rushdie.

The book consists of seven essays exploring the relationship between Pound and Browning, Yeats, Ford, Lewis, Joyce, Eliot and American epic tradition. Each essay reconsiders and reassesses one aspect of the poet, his work and his literary connections in the light of fresh insight and new research.

The book consists of seven essays exploring the relationship between Pound and Browning, Yeats, Ford, Lewis, Joyce, Eliot and American epic tradition. Each essay reconsiders and reassesses one aspect of the poet, his work and his literary connections in the light of fresh insight and new research.