LAUSR

comes across as natural extensions of Joyce’s own adroit research. In that sense, this essay collection accomplishes perhaps the two most pertinent outcomes for any work of Joycean criticism: a sense of necessity and the opening up of further avenues for inquiry. Many of these essays emphasise humanistic principles and search for new insights into the way that the materiality of the law asks us to consider what constitutes agency and, indeed, personhood. Given Joyce’s commitment to characters, these questions afford new shades to reading the complex social and legal worlds of his fiction.