"Joseph Brooker's synthesis summarizes more than seventy years of Joyce criticism. This is the first broad study of how James Joyce's work was received in the Anglophone world, written for both academic and lay readers. Brooker shows how the reading of Joyce's work has moved through different critical paradigms, periods, and places, and how Joyce's writing has given generations of readers a way to discuss the major issues of the modern world." "In the course of this investigation Brooker examines a series of episodes such as the first press responses to Ulysses, the English view of Joyce exemplified by F.R. Leavis at Cambridge, and the importance that Joyce's work commanded in literature departments in the United States. He explores the role played by Joyce in Irish culture and society, with reference to writers such as W.B. Yeats and Flann O'Brien. The book concludes by reflecting on the ambiguous homecoming that Joyce's work has received in Dublin."--BOOK JACKET.