Joyce and Middlebrow Culture: Advertising, Women’s Magazines and Popular Fiction in Ulysses
Joyce and Middlebrow Culture: Advertising, Women’s Magazines and Popular Fiction in Ulysses

Summary/Abstract: The essay will look at examples of popular writing in James Joyce’s Ulysses, with the purpose to show that the relationship between what is seen as high modernist fiction and middlebrow writing is dialogical, in the Bakhtinian sense. The article will also attempt to answer questions regarding the connection between Ulysses and middlebrow culture, in terms of an audience, consumer identity, advertizing practices and modernity. How could one define Bloom’s “advertisal” approach, based on creating visual lure, curiosity and the supposed mystery of female subjectivity? Bloom does not only consider women’s clothing in terms of advertizing, he looks upon many other aspects of life from the same perspective. What kind of a book is Molly reading in “Calypso” when she asks Leopold to explain to her the term metempsychosis, which she has found in Ruby the Pride of the Ring, and what does Bloom buy her in the “Wandering Rocks”? If we know that the first novel finds its inspiration in Ayme Reade’s Ruby. A Novel. Founded on the Life of a Circus Girl, a nineteenth-century sentimental circus story featuring a girl-made-slave as the protagonist, Sweets of Sin, the one bought during his wanderings, remains unidentified as a dime pornographic novel, with a title invented by Joyce or lost among the many of the type in the age. How do these sources contribute to the revisitation of the understanding of reception of popular fiction among women?

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