James Joyce Quarterly

Despite the work of John MacNicholas and other diligent scholars, Exiles, Joyce’s only extant play, has been a source of embarrassment, indifference, or bewilderment for many, myself included. Reading it was, for me, excruciating, and live performances did nothing to convince me that it was little more than time wasted between the completion of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the initiation of Ulysses. It was only when I began to study the impact of the exilic experience on Joyce’s writing that I came to see elements in the work that I had previously overlooked. The essay that appears here reflects my efforts to understand how the nostalgia and rancor that shaped Joyce’s recollections of Ireland played transformational roles in writing this play.