'The Einstein of English fiction': James Joyce, the new physics, and modernist print culture

There is a substantial field of scholarship addressing the incorporation of Albert Einstein's relativity theories into the structural and thematic aspects of James Joyce's later work. Those studies tend to be based on the assumption that the theories were "in the air" after their publication in 1905 and 1916. In contrast, this dissertation examines the continuity of thought about the novel and science before and after Einstein's emergence in the periodical cultures where Joyce's work appeared. Chapter 1 surveys the discourse of science and the novel in The Egoist and The Little Review from 1914 to 1918, tracing the rise in importance given to the novel in avant-garde circles due to its supposedly scientific nature. Parallel to that rise is the development of camps of thought about "non-materialist" science, which was perceived to restore individualism and self-determination to humanity. Chapter 2 examines the serialization of Ulysses alongside various source texts that are found to have been used in its pre-publication materials. In that way, ideas that directly affected the development of the "Wandering Rocks" and "Ithaca" episodes are shown to merge with a burgeoning awareness of relativity, including a series of mid-1918 articles by Dora Marsden in The Egoist that predate Einstein's popularization at the end of 1919. These two episodes, as well as the mythic method of Ulysses, bear structural relationships in accord with aspects of Einstein's theories that were discussed in the periodicals to which Joyce contributed and in other materials that he read. Chapter 3 recontextualizes Finnegans Wake in both the mainstream popular science culture and the inter-war avant-garde, elucidating relationships between the two that have not hitherto been discussed in Joyce scholarship. The conversation among Joyce, his colleagues at transition, and Wyndham Lewis in The Enemy arises specifically in response to the British popular science industry and influences several core episodes of Finnegans Wake. In examining the relationships between Joyce's later work and popular science, we can fill in a piece of the puzzle that is modernism's relationship to the new physics and, simultaneously, the history of the novel.