James Joyce

Molly Bloom is a fictional character in the novel Ulysses by James Joyce. The wife of main character Leopold Bloom, she roughly corresponds to Penelope in the Odyssey. The major difference between Molly and Penelope is that while Penelope is eternally faithful, Molly is not, having an affair with... Hugh 'Blazes' Boylan after ten years of her celibacy within the marriage. Molly, whose given name is Marion, was born in Gibraltar in 1870, the daughter of Major Tweedy, an Irish military, and Lunita Laredo, a Gibraltarian of Spanish Jewish descent. Molly and Leopold were married in 1888. She is the mother of Milly Bloom, who, at the age of 15, has left home to study photography. She is also the mother of Rudy Bloom, who died at the age of 11 days. In Dublin, Molly is an opera singer of some renown. The final, unpunctuated chapter of Ulysses, often called "Molly Bloom's Soliloquy", is a long stream of consciousness passage comprising her thoughts as she lies in bed next to Bloom. Joyce modelled the character upon his wife Nora Barnacle; indeed, the day upon which the novel is set — June 16, 1904, now called Bloomsday — is that of their first date.
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William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary... Revival and, along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and others, founded the Abbey Theatre, where he served as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Irishman so honoured for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower and The Winding Stair and Other Poems . Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult.
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Edmund Spenser was an English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognised as one of the premier craftsmen of Modern English verse in its infancy, and one of the greatest poets in the English language,... although his fame is argued to rest in part due to his unabashed service toward his Queen's high repute. Edmund Spenser was born in East Smithfield, London around the year 1552 though there is some ambiguity as to the exact date of his birth. As a young boy, he was educated in London at the Merchant Taylors' School and matriculated as a sizar at Pembroke College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge he became a friend of Gabriel Harvey, and later consulted him, despite their differing views on poetry. In July 1580 Spenser went to Ireland, in the service of the newly appointed Lord Deputy, Arthur Grey, 14th Baron Grey de Wilton. Then he served with the English forces during the Second Desmond Rebellion. After the defeat of the native Irish he was awarded lands in County Cork that had been confiscated in the Munster Plantation during the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland.
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Giovanni Battista Vico or Vigo was an Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist. A critic of modern rationalism and apologist of classical antiquity, Vico's magnum opus is Scienza Nuova , often published in English as New Science. Vico is as a precursor of systemic and... complexity thinking, as opposed to Cartesian analysis and other kinds of reductionism. He is also well known for noting that verum esse ipsum factum , a proposition that has been read as an early instance of constructivist epistemology. Vico is often claimed to have inaugurated modern philosophy of history, although the term is not found in his text . While Vico was not, strictly speaking, a historicist, interest in him has often been driven by historicists . Born to a bookseller and the daughter of a carriage maker in Naples, Italy, Vico attended a series of grammar schools, but ill-health and dissatisfaction with Jesuit scholasticism led to home schooling.
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Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practiced as a... doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress." Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrous reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Constantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a "theatre of mood" and a "submerged life in the text.
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Born in Trieste to a Jewish family, Svevo wrote the classic novel La Coscienza di Zeno and self-published it in 1923. The work, showing the... author's interest in the theories of Sigmund Freud, is written in the form of the memoirs of one Zeno Cosini, who writes them at the insistence of his psychoanalyst. Schmitz's psychoanalyst was Ottocaro Weiss, who had been trained by Freud in Vienna. Schmitz's novel received almost no attention from Italian readers and critics at the time. The work might have disappeared altogether if it were not for the efforts of James Joyce. Joyce had met Schmitz in 1907, when Joyce tutored him in English while working for Berlitz in Trieste. Joyce read Schmitz's earlier novel Senilità, which had also been largely ignored when published in 1898. Joyce championed Confessions of Zeno, helping to have it translated into French and then published in Paris, where critics praised it extravagantly. That led Italian critics, including Eugenio Montale, to discover it. Zeno Cosini, the book's hero, mirrored Schmitz, being a businessman fascinated by Freudian beliefs. Schmitz was a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of the First World War. He spoke Italian as a second language and, according to some critics, wrote it badly - though some have pointed out that it is not bad Italian, but rather the official Tuscan dialect in a Triestino mouth. Confessions of Zeno never looks outside the narrow confines of Trieste, much like Joyce's work, which never left Dublin in the last years of Ireland's time as part of the United Kingdom. Schmitz brings a keenly sardonic wit to his observations of Trieste and, in particular, to his hero, an indifferent man who cheats on his wife and lies to his psychoanalyst and who is trying to explain himself to his psychoanalyst by revisiting his memories. There is a final connection between Schmitz-Svevo and the character Cosini. Cosini sought psychoanalysis, he said, in order to discover why he was addicted to nicotine. As he reveals in his memoirs, each time he had given up smoking, with the iron resolve that this would be the "ultima sigaretta!!", he experienced the exhilarating feeling that he was now beginning life over without the burden of his old habits and mistakes. That feeling was, however, so strong that he found smoking irresistible, if only so that he could stop smoking again in order to experience that thrill once more. Svevo likewise smoked for all of his life. After being hit by a car while crossing the street, he was brought home, where his health rapidly failed. As death approached he asked one of his visitors for a cigarette, telling everyone that this really would be the last one .
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