The centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in Paris in 1922 is the perfect occasion to revisit Joseph Hassett’s award-winning The Ulysses Trials: Beauty and Truth Meet the Law. Ultimately recognized as the greatest English language novel of the twentieth century, Ulysses was first published by the pioneering literary magazine The Little Review. Its founder, Margaret Anderson, along with her publishing partner and lover, Jane Heap, were famously convicted of the crime of obscenity. continued to run a gamut of legal obstruction until its eventual publication in the US in 1934, Hassett, a Joyce scholar and Harvard-trained lawyer, chronicles this fascinating history, and adds not only to the understanding of Joyce but also to the history of the laws of obscenity, censorship, and freedom of speech. Hassett vividly shows how arguments based on the beauty and truth of Joyce’s prose freed Ulysses from the censor’s grasp. These same values and arguments are more important today than ever because they underpin the increasingly threatened rights of journalists and protesters to freedom of expression. Period photographs by Man Ray and others bring this fascinating story to life.
"[A] superbly written gem of a book . . . Hassett's clear writing style makes this work accessible to all readers, who will find the legal analysis both comprehensive and compelling."
—Library Journal
W.B. Yeats believed in the Greek idea of the Muses as the font of poetic inspiration, and found his muses in living women. His long and fruitful career as a poet was fueled by passionate relationships with nine fascinating women to and about whom he wrote some of his most compelling poetry. In Hassett’s engaging Yeats and the Muses, these vibrant, multi-faceted women shatter the idea of the muse as a passive stereotype and leap off the page as active begetters of timeless poetry. Among them were Maud Gonne, whom he pursued for twenty-eight-years, and her daughter Iseult—both of whom he asked to marry him. Yeats’s relationship with the lesbian Dorothy Wellesley expanded the gender boundaries of musedom, as reflected in his letter telling her “it was the woman in me” that admired her “boyish movement.” Acclaimed author and Yeats scholar Joseph Hassett summarizes the different Muse traditions that inspired Yeats, and newly available letters and manuscripts, to explore Yeats’s creative process and work with a fresh eye. Approaching Yeats’s poetry through his perception of these female lovers and friends takes the mystery out of the poetry and gives it new life.
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