JOYCENSTEIN: James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and the modernist coterie.

PR: DDr. Georgina Nugent, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow

James Joyce and Gertrude Stein are icons of literary modernism. Notorious and central to the movement’s genesis and evolution, participants in early celebrity culture, they still represent modernist literature at its most transgressive and avant-garde. Both exiles (from Ireland and America, respectively), they lived alongside one another in Paris for twenty years, regularly appeared in the same literary magazines, kept overlapping circles of friends, and published some of the era’s most innovative and linguistically challenging texts. Both also fostered a strong animosity towards one another, developed radically divergent styles of writing and – as a direct consequence of these factors – are rarely considered in tandem by critics of the period.

JOYCENSTEIN will remedy this by conducting the first ever extended comparative study of Joyce and Stein’s divergent modernisms, comparing all of their major works, and exploring the critical fallout of the competitive and antagonistic relationship fostered between their respective coteries throughout their lifetimes.

JOYCENSTEIN is funded by the European Union's Horizon Europe, Marie Sklodowksa Curie Action grant agreement #101063822.

Principal Researcher: DDr. Georgina Nugent

Georgina Nugent hold PhDs from Trinity College Dublin (2016) and the University of Antwerp (2020), and completed her B.A. in English Studies at Trinity College Dublin (2011), where she was elected a Trinity Scholar and awarded the Trinity Gold medal upon graduating. Before coming to the University of Vienna in April 2023, she was Assistant Professor of Modern English Literature at LMU Munich (2018-2023), and a postdoctoral research fellow at Centre for Digital Humanities, Trinity College Dublin (2017-2018). Her Mentor for this MSCA Project at the University of Vienna is Univ.-Prof. Dr. Sylvia Mieszkowski.

Research Interests:

Modernist Literature
Modern and Contemporary Irish Literature
Intertextuality
Genetic Criticism

Specific authors of interest:

Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein

ORCID ID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6216-9317

Books:

Beckett and Stein (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Compagnie/ Company (Bloomsbury/ UPA 2021; paperback edition, 2022). 

Edited Volumes:

Georgina Nugent & Sam Slote (eds.), "Ulysses Forty Years: A Critical Retrospective of Hans Walter Gabler’s Critical and Synoptic Edition Edition of Ulysses" (Clemson University Press & Liverpool University Press, forthcoming 2024).

Georgina Nugent (ed.), "Beckett's Women Contemporaries," Special Issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies, (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).

Georgina Nugent, James Little, Mark Nixon, and Emilie Morin (eds.), "Draff / Résidu", Special Issue of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui (April 2019).