Ulysses' Crib: Joyce, Woolf, Wyndham Lewis

Lewis, who called himself the ‘enemy’ and the ‘solitary outlaw’, was in the habit of launching vigorous attacks on the literary scene of his time. Among his targets were Joyce and especially Woolf, whose Mrs Dalloway he defined “an undergraduate imitation” of Ulysses. Woolf herself held contradictory opinions about the book, listing Joyce among the “spiritual” Georgian writers, but also judging his novel boring and obscene. Nonetheless, both she and Lewis measured their own achievements against it, compelled to face the disrupting force of Joyce’s experiment. Searching into Lewis’s and Woolf’s comments on Ulysses, and particularly into the images they respectively employ to describe his work (images of the body, food, and enclosed spaces, among others), this paper aims to highlight the differences and the similarities between their critical views, in addition to shedding some light on their own writings and literary principles.