SOURCE: Brown, Carole, and Leo Knuth. “James Joyce's Exiles: The Ordeal of Richard Rowan.” James Joyce Quarterly 17, no. 1 (fall 1979): 7–20.

In the following essay, Brown and Knuth attempt to take a fresh view of Exiles as a literary piece.

Exiles and the Critics

This essay is born out of dissatisfaction with what the critics have said about Exiles heretofore. Many evaluators would seem to be in the position of Bertha at the end of the play—barely having a clue as to what Richard Rowan has been trying to say—and, with very few exceptions,¹ the critiques on this drama strike us as singularly unenlightening. Critics on the whole have regarded Exiles as a failure for a variety of reasons great enough to suggest that it is a very intriguing play which has caused different readers to react in different ways.² A fairly large group of negative critics has...