Past Exhibition – ‘James Joyce, Apocalypse & Exile’

James Joyce read in Marsh’s Library in October 1902, and the Library appears in Ulysses, Finnegans Wake and Joyce’s unfinished semi-autobiographical novel Stephen Hero.

The exhibition – ‘James Joyce, Apocalypse and Exile’ – examined what Joyce read here. It shows that he sought out particular texts, and in doing so the exhibition sheds new and intriguing light on Joyce’s attitudes to Irishness, exile and Catholicism.  Visitors can see the mystical medieval prophecies that he came to read, and can sit at the same desk, and in the very chairs that Joyce would have used in the Reading Room in 1902.

One of the most intriguing findings of the exhibition is Joyce’s admiration for St Francis of Assisi, and his interest in the Franciscan tradition within the Catholic Church.

The exhibition was launched on 23 October by Professor Anne Fogarty, Professor of James Joyce Studies at University College Dublin.  It ran until 16 June 2015.

An online version was subsequently made available and is now to be found here

The exhibition was been curated by Dr Anne Marie D’Arcy, Co-director of the Medieval Research Centre, Leicester; Professor John McCafferty, Director of the Mícheál Ó Cléirigh Institute at University College; Dr Marina Ansaldo of the School of English in UCD; and Dr Jason McElligott, the Keeper of Marsh’s Library.