SOURCE: Mahaffey, Vicki. “Joyce's Shorter Works.” In The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, edited by Derek Attridge, pp. 185-211. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

In the essay that follows, Mahaffey discusses the defining characteristics of Joyce's shorter works and examines the relationship between his longer and shorter compositions.

At first glance, Joyce's shorter works—his poems and epiphanies, Giacomo Joyce, and Exiles—seem to bear only the most tenuous relationship to the books for which Joyce has become famous. It is only by an exercise of the imagination that the epiphanies and Giacomo Joyce can even be called ‘works’; Joyce published neither in its original form, choosing instead to loot them for the more ambitious undertakings that followed, and neither received the painstaking polish that Joyce lavished on his more ambitious productions. Only forty of at least seventy-one epiphanies are extant and their relationship to one another had to...