James Joyce is generally regarded as this century's greatest prose stylist in English. The basis of this judgment is the extraordinary achievement of but three novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939), and one book of short stories, Dubliners (1914). Had Joyce written nothing other than these four books, his position in English literature would be altered little if any at all. However, Joyce also wrote an interconnected series of elegant love poems loosely modeled after the style of Ben Jonson entitled Chamber Music (1907); another slim volume of poetry, Pomes Penyeach (1927); and a play of great challenge and complexity, Exiles. First produced in 1919, the play never achieved during Joyce's lifetime the success he had hoped for, but its pointed emphasis upon skepticism and uncertainty as inalienable elements in modern consciousness has found a more positive reception in audiences who have absorbed the...