The Joycean Outlex and the Promise of Feminist Lexicography

Abstract

Abstract: This essay explores Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in light of lexicographic debates in the early twentieth century. As resources such as the Oxford English Dictionary grew in scope and accessibility, the practice and politics of lexicography transformed too. Some of Joyce's contemporaries, including Virginia Woolf, proposed feminist interventions in the making of dictionaries, asking how women might be better and more fully recognized in the widening field of lexicography. This study argues that Joyce's writings also stretched and replotted the parameters of the dictionary and suggests that he was aware of, and likely sympathetic to, its sociopolitical and often gendered constraints. "The Joycean Outlex" contends that Joyce's lexical experiments are consonant with certain shifts in modern lexicography—that he found in the dictionary a singular opportunity to challenge and widen the boundaries of language and literature.