Lost In The City:Edward P. Jones’s Inheritance And Renovation Of James Joyce’s Dubliners

James Joyce’s Dubliners, the collection of15short stories, was first published in1914. With its Ibsenite rationalism, the collection sheds light upon the paralyzed emotional and spiritual world of Dubliners, from middle class to underclass, exposing the spiritual disease inflicted upon Ireland, a nation with nearly eight centuries of colonial history. In1992, Edward P. Jones, a contemporary African American novelist, winner of the2004Pulitzer Price for Fiction, published his first book, Lost in the City and he claimed that he drew inspiration from Joyce’s Dubliners. As with Dubliners, Lost in the City is a portrait of the emotional and spiritual world of Jones’s black folks’. To Joyce, his Dublin and its citizens are paralytic, whereas Jones’s black folks are collectively plagued with sense of loss in the Post Civil Rights era. Loss serves as the unifying theme of Lost in the City.Jones admitted that Dubliners is the literary model for Lost in the City. From the perspective of comparative literature, it is presumed that Jones has received Joyce’s influence in his process of creation, and there must exit some interactions between these two texts. Accordingly, the thesis aims to study what Lost in the City inherits from Dubliners and how it responses. Besides, the reasons for and significance of Jones’s inheritance and renovation of Joycean legacy will be sought.The thesis consists of five parts. The first chapter provides an introduction to Jones and Lost in the City, a summary of the study related to Jones and his works, and the structure of the thesis.The second chapter works on the theme of Lost in the City and its relationship with that of Dubliners. The former is "loss" and the latter is "paralysis". Both "loss" and "paralysis" are essentially the psychological malady harming a nation. However,"loss" is not merely the continuity of "paralysis". It means the balance between pain and hope; whereas "paralysis" refers to complete desperation. Transcendence comes only through death.The third chapter approaches the connection between Lost in the City and Dubliners in terms of their shared and different artistic devices employed to enhance the theme.Chapter four deals with the most important task of the thesis. Reasons behind Jones’s inheritance and renovation of Joycean legacy and its significance will be explored.While summarizing the main arguments of the thesis, the last part reaches the conclusion that Lost in the City inherits the theme of Dubliners, and Jones learns from Dubliners some artistic devices to enhance the theme. On the other hand, Jones also makes renovations on Joycean legacy. Besides, it is of great literary and political significance that Jones inherits from and responds actively to Joyce. Jones’s inheritance and renovation also provides a new topic for the study of Joyce’s influence upon African American fictions and the relationship between African American literature and Western literature.